The Bernie or Bust blackmail is not going to work. [View all]

[DanTex]

Well, there's one thing it might accomplish, and that's to throw the presidency over to Trump. And I imagine some people pushing the idea actually want that to happen. But I don't think most of them do, instead they think that maybe something else might be accomplished. Well, it won't.

It's not going to push the party to the left. First, people don't like being blackmailed. If you want to win over more Democrats, the way to do it is with positive persuasion, not with threats and blackmail. Second, this has already been tried, in 2000, by Nader. He did succeed in siphoning off enough Dems to throw the election to W, but that's all he accomplished. Did the Dems make a hard left afterwards? No. If anything, the opposite happened.

Most of them were so disgusted with Nader that they didn't want to have anything to do with him or the far left. Also, W was so destructive that it made the contrast with Gore and Clinton so obvious, and the "both parties are the same" meme lost whatever tiny amount of credence it ever had. Notice that Nader's 2004 run didn't even get off the ground, by then everyone treated him like a tool of the GOP, which is what he effectively was.

America is not an alcoholic that needs to hit "rock bottom." This analogy gets thrown around, but it's completely mistaken. America is a nation of 300M+ people, not a single individual. It's simply absurd to pretend that what we really need is for Trump to burn everything to the ground so that a socialist can rise from the ashes and take us all to salvation. The political reality is that there's a constant push and pull, and all victories, small or large are hard-fought. If Trump or Cruz become president, there will be significant setbacks, especially in the SCOTUS, and when a Dem next gets elected, what they will be doing is fighting a tough trench battle in order to gain back all the ground that we have lost under Trump. Change and progress are difficult, and putting ourselves further behind because the current Dem nominee isn't pure enough is totally counterproductive.

The moral justifications for facilitating a GOP victory are grotesque. The stakes in this (and every) presidential election, are high. The possibility of Trump (or Cruz) make them even higher, as both are significantly worse than Romney, and there's also the fact that the GOP controls congress. It would mean ten million people forcibly deported, tens of millions of people losing the health coverage they gained under Obama, tens of millions of women forced into back alley abortions, and that's just the beginning. There simply is no way to brush that under the rug with some "means justify the ends" moral calculus, whereby all that horrible stuff is just a necessary sacrifice because it might lead to something better down the road. It won't, and this is not a game, there are real people who will be harmed in real ways.