Stop laughing, Democrats! As the GOP goes down in flames, your post-Bernie civil war is almost here [View all]

[Ivan Kaputski]

While the Republicans compare dick sizes and howl at the moon, the fight for the Democratic Party is just starting



<snip>I’m not saying we will see a Democratic debate, in 2016 or 2024 or any other year, when the frontrunner will feel compelled to discuss his or her genital organs. (If Hillary Clinton actually makes a joke about that within the next week, and more or less lands it, I promise not to say anything mean about her for an entire month.) But a more polite version of the Republican knife fight is waiting to happen, and in some ways has already begun. The post-Bernie landscape is fraught with danger for the electoral left, and also with opportunity. You can feel both of those things in the combination of smugness and high anxiety found among Hillary Clinton supporters, who are not content to be victorious but must also seek to prove the unprovable thesis that their Potemkin political party is “progressive” and that their victory points toward the future rather than the past.

To the extent that the Hillary wing of the Democratic Party believes that the war is over and they won and it’s safe to retreat into the ossified institutional politics that have brought them nothing but misery and defeat and have rendered their party nearly irrelevant in most non-coastal states, they are inviting their own version of Trumpian apocalypse. For the insurgents of the Sanders wing, the question now becomes how many of them are willing to turn to the more difficult and less exciting work of rebuilding democracy from the ground up, and taking the Democratic Party back from the lawyers and technology millionaires and Hollywood executives and foreign-policy apparatchiks who have become its principal proprietors. Because presidential campaigns can be great drama, but they also serve to distract us from more important things. They are political theater more than political change.

Since the rich people who bought the Democratic Party from Hillary Clinton’s husband have all but destroyed it, and long ago severed it from any semblance of class-based politics and any coherent ideology beyond “not as mean as the other guys,” the field is wide open. Millions of people of all ages were energized by an oddball candidate who started talking about things no one in American politics has talked about seriously for at least 50 years. “Socialism” suddenly isn’t a bad word anymore, and that’s amazing. But now what? Can those people do what activists on the right did over a period of several decades, electing school board members and county committee members and state legislators on the way toward the Reagan revolution and the Tea Party insurgency? Because those true believers on the right dug in and worked hard and changed political reality. They created the conundrum of the present, when a minority party with a wide range of extreme anti-government and xenophobic views, supported almost exclusively by white people, dominates the political agenda in 39 of the 50 states and holds an unbreakable majority in Congress.

Yeah, I know, let’s back up for a minute. I said “post-Bernie landscape.” Deal with it. I’m not going all “I told you so,” even though I did. There really was an opening after New Hampshire, a moment when we all sensed a potential tipping point that could have happened but didn’t quite. That window slammed shut in Nevada and South Carolina and across the South, and I’m not buying the higher-math hypotheses about how Sanders might make inroads with African-American voters in other regions in a way he spectacularly failed to do in the South, and then might win Michigan or Ohio or Florida and push on toward a big victory in New York that flips the race upside down again. I could certainly be wrong, because wrongness is the order of the day in 2016. But I think the next few weeks are about Bernie’s supporters moving through the stages of the Kübler-Ross model and coming to grips with reality, helped along ever so much by uneasy Clintonite gloating.

more at link

https://www.salon.com/2016/03/05/stop_laughing_democrats_as_the_gop_goes_down_in_flames_your_post_bernie_civil_war_is_almost_here/

Let me say here that I do not agree with this chap's conclusion of the matter but I do recognize the very real certain war in the Dem party which IMO will quickly expand should Hillary win the primary.