Unless, that is, the plutocrats, corporations, bankers, lobbyists, militarists, Zionists, et. al., who actually run the Democratic Party, say: "Over our dead bodies!" (If only.) Which they will. If Hillary is forced out, Bernie will then, for the first time, be a threat, and there will be a response unlike anything we've seen so far. I hope Bernie and his supporters understand that the Democratic Party and the powers behind it will do anything--at least as much as the Republicans did against Trump--to stop Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination.
What's a tragically torn party to do? At this point, Bernie would probably be able to take the nomination if he insisted. He would have a ton of pledged delegates, and a good chance at cobbling together a majority from all the others now floating free. On the other hand, he is still unacceptable.
Bernie and the party will have reached the dog-who-caught-the-car moment I imagined in a previous post, except a lot further down the road, with Bernie wielding a lot more political capital. The party establishment will not be able to frontally attack, or summarily dismiss him, but they can still warn him that he faces the McGovern effect in the general election: listless party support, while the ruling class money and media suddenly realize their lesser evil--Donald Trump--isn't so bad, after all.
If Bernie takes the nomination, it will tear the party apart, Indeed, for him to succeed any further, he will have to accept and embrace that civil war he has created in the party, and seize and thoroughly radicalize the entire party apparatus.
I still do not think Bernie wants to, or can, do that. I also recognize that he has fought harder and longer than I (or he, at the outset) thought, and shows no outward sign that he would shy from taking the nomination if he could get it. At this point, with the enthusiasm he has generated, if he were to accede to anyone else, he would risk destroying his own political credibility, while still tearing the party apart. And he and the party know this.
Unless, perhaps, the party could come up with a ticket that Bernie and a large portion of his followers could persuade themselves embodies his progressive political message. There is, of course, only one other person in the Democratic Party who could make that happen, whose progressive populist cred rivals that of Bernie Sanders--and that is Elizabeth Warren.
If the party establishment lost Hillary Clinton, and wanted to propose an alternative to Bernie Sanders, it would have to include Elizabeth Warren. She hits many of the same buttons as Bernie: the pernicious influence of money in politics, the scandal of student debt, he need to rein in big banks, etc. She would combine a strong dose of educated economic progressivism--highlighted in the present context by her viralized, devastating, critique of Hillary's fealty to Wall Street on Bill Moyers--with the feminist identity-politics appeal that Hillary plays to. A woman who claims to have created "the intellectual foundation" for Occupy Wall Street! What more could Democratic progressives ask for?
Of course, with Warren carrying such credentials a public image--a "fevered Marxist," according to Trump supporter, Jeffrey Lord--the party would have to soothe establishment anxiety by pairing her, as VP, with an establishment-friendly but likeable guy with a stabilizing hand: Biden-Warren, that's the ticket! Joe Biden (Al Gore could be an alternate) is an uninspiring but reliable hand on the tiller, but he's an Obama favorite and loyalist. Position Warren as the passionate Joan of Arc who will help a united party slay the Donald, and as the inevitable, progressive face of the Democratic Party's future, and you've got a package that starts to look saleable.
Still not enough, though. You would have to include a very nice prize before Bernie would buy that box of Cracker Jacks. Bernie has gone a long way, and his accrued political capital demands a real and immediate payoff. There would have to be a firm, public, irreversible promise of something significant--an undeniable concession such as single-payer healthcare for all or forgiveness of student loans, that would allow Bernie and his supporters to say they made a real difference. Now you'd have a package that they might buy.
They would, I'm afraid, be getting a snake in the box. Outside of the fevered minds of the most dull-witted conservatives, Elizabeth Warren is not only no "Marxist," she is no Bernie Sanders. Try Hillary-Lite. Yes, she would push for some substantive reforms, but on an "intellectual foundation" oriented toward rationalizing capitalism. As more perspicacious conservatives like Christopher Caldwell see, she's a "closet conservative." Hillary Clinton broke with the Republicans in college; Elizabeth Warren was a Republican into her forties. Why? Because "It worried me whether or not the government played too activist a role." Indeed, when asked whether she voted for arch-conservative Ronald Reagan, who shared the same worry, she refused to answer. So we know the answer.
Warren still thinks "There should be some Republicans and some Democrats," with Republicans "providing some healthy opposition." The consistent principle of her quest it to look for "people who best supported markets." I'm not sure about Occupy Wall Street, but that's Elizabeth Warren's "intellectual foundation." It's in the Clintonite Democratic Party that she found a home for promoting that, and herself, politically.
Elizabeth Warren's other important qualification is her full-on embrace of imperialism and Zionism. As Dave Swanson says, She's "perfectly fine with the wars but wants the bankers to help pay for them."
Then again, this is consistent with a strain of "left" populism that's OK with ignoring--until they become refugees--those millions of people in societies destroyed by American and its allies and proxies throughout the Middle East--a "progressivism" that doesn't want to think too much about the ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, or about the ongoing aggression and apartheid imposed on millions of Palestinians, or about "kill lists." We don't have to talk about all that nasty, complicated stuff, if shutting up gets us a $15 minimum wage. Progressive Except Imperialism. Not nasty old white-man Republican imperialism, of course; shiny new equal-opportunity, single-payer imperialism.
Wait: Progressive populist domestic policies, rationalizing without overturning capitalism, benign indifference at best to American exceptionalism"maybe a bit like Bernie, after all. Hillary-lite, Bernie-heavy.
Bottom line: Bernie would have achieved, in less than a year, some major reform that had eluded progressive forces for decades. As it did in response to every successful reform effort, the ruling class would have paid a price. It will be a price the plutocracy considered necessary for keeping its deadly grip on the American political process, thereby preserving its options for recovering any loss, and then some, down the road.
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