The Electoral College: Watch Shit Get Real If It Happens To Bernie!

Yesterday on Twitter, I spent a fraction of the day being intrigued by a particular pro-Bernie perspective.

A history grad student wrote, "I think it’s tremendously underrated just how many young Americans will simply reject wholesale the legitimacy of the U.S. constitutional order if a Warren or a Sanders wins the popular vote in a landslide and Trump stays in office."

True enough, I suppose, although many folks like myself who came of age circa Bush v. Gore have been there since 2000. As I've written before, the Supreme Court's effective installation of George W. Bush into the presidency was, even at the time, a recognizable constitutional crisis and erosion of the legitimacy of the US Supreme Court, electoral college, and executive office. The abolition of the electoral college should have been a top progressive priority since at least then, especially as Republicans increasingly began adopting a McConnell-esque "win at any costs" approach to politics.

Two more revelatory statements followed in the Twitter thread, however. 

The first, the grad student continues, "If anything, I suppose this is an argument for Sanders, because he’s the only candidate I can imagine who would help organize mass protests—even a general strike—with his campaign infrastructure in the event of another anti-democratic election."

I... huh.

Interesting. 

Here we see the popular narrative that, unlike other candidates who I suppose are supported by droids or Sim people or something, Bernie has "a movement" behind him.  That is one benefit, it seems, to a politician not being widely told to go knit in a cave for the rest of one's days after losing an election. Nonetheless, while Bernie has a base of support that seems to be neither growing nor shrinking, the reality is that whoever the Democratic nominee ends up being will, in all likelihood, consolidate support from the Democratic base during the general election.

However, the idea that such a protest has to, or should, be led by the "losing" candidate seems more like a pretext for arguing why "Bernie must be the Democratic nominee instead of Warren (or anyone else)."

After all, in 2016, an actual anti-democratic election, it was women - not Bernie Sanders - who organized, led, and participated in the largest single-day protests in US history, largely in response to Donald Trump's electoral college "win" and popular vote loss to Hillary Clinton (in addition to the fact that Trump is a racist, xenophobic admitted sexual predator).

And sure, because I know some people might be thinking it, Bernie was not the Democratic nominee in 2016 and thus some might say he had "no" responsibility to lead such protests, but why not? Why would he not have that moral responsibility now, in fact, when there are kids in concentration camps, when sexual predators are in the White House and on SCOTUS, when climate change poses an existential threat to our planet, or any myriad of issues beyond "I got an election stolen from me so now it's a crisis"?

The other interesting note about this opinion is that we already have historical precedent for how Bernie would react to real and perceived anti-democratic elections. 

In the 2016 primaries, of course, many of his supporters believe he only lost the primary to Hillary Clinton because it was "rigged" against him. Yet, while Bernie did little to put that narrative to rest, he also didn't organize protests against the "unfairness." To me, that suggests he wanted to devote his energies elsewhere, he didn't really believe it was rigged, and/or he correctly ascertained that such protests would be a distraction from the more important goal of defeating Trump.

Thus, to think that Bernie, an almost-80-year-old man who just had a heart attack, by the way, might lose to Trump in 2020 and then lead the nation in revolutionary protests seems like more of the extremely-bizarre leftist magical thinking around "the Bernie movement" in light of the reality that what Bernie Sanders did during the national crisis of the 2016 election aftermath was: went on a book tour, made a lot of money, and never stopped campaigning for president.

But, in light of everything, I'm especially curious what this grad student thinks would be different and, specifically, more effective about a Bernie Sanders-led protest, compared to the Women's March, after his hypothetical electoral college loss to Trump in 2020, other than the fact that this hypothetical mass protest would be led by a white man who some segments of the left have anointed as their savior.

Here, we turn to The Nation's David Klion, who says, in the second revelatory statement of the thread (emphasis added), "It’s like... imagine how 2016 felt, except this time we also like the candidate and they won by an even bigger popular margin. I already think the constitutional order is indefensible! And I’m regularly shocked that not every other thinking person does!"

A-ha! And there it is.

Some Bernie fans simply can't fathom that a large segment of the Women's March protestors were motivated by actually liking Hillary Clinton.  So, a Bernie March in 2020, they believe, would be different and special and effective because people like Bernie, unlike History's Greatest Monster Hillary Clinton, and people would therefore see it as America's Greatest Travesty if Bernie won the popular vote but lost the electoral college to Trump. And, they - The Left - are serious, important political actors in the world, unlike the - from their perspective - vapid wine moms who marched in their ridiculous pink pussy hats hashtag resistance.

To that point, in retrospect, I will just offer my opinion that it was quite possibly the Bernie-adjacent consolidation of leadership over the national Women's March brand that has dampened its reach and effectiveness over the past 3+ years. Regardless of the leadership's motivations, which I do not know, it became hard to trust a movement that appeared to be trying to funnel progressive women's support, not toward general progressive politics and progressive female candidates, but toward a polarizing man's 2020 presidential campaign (Bernie Sanders. I'm talking about Bernie Sanders).

But, from a bigger picture, "Vote for Bernie in the primary, so he can lead mass protests after he loses to Trump" is not actually the ringing endorsement one might think it is.

The electoral college should be abolished. We need an actual plan and path to make that happen, not vague, regressive mumbling among leftists about how an old cranky male politician's likeability will cause the revolution.