Are suburban, college-educated NeverTrumpers cancelling out progressives?

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

No, but the Berniecrats do have five major problems right now:

- 1) they haven't figured out how to make inroads with African-American voters yet in Democratic primaries;

- 2) Many seem to be in denial about the fact - especially if point 1) continues to be the case - that it is impossible for a Berniecratic candidate to win the Democratic nomination until their movement both makes some ideological concessions and starts conducting good-faith outreach to folks like Jewish-Americans, socially liberal suburban voters, etc.  This doesn't mean give away the farm or sellout, but it does mean the Berniecrats are gonna need to compromise enough to build a truly national coalition.  This will require working with some of the groups that many of Bernie's more vocal supporters tended to treat as enemies of the people in the past.  You guys simply don't have the numbers to go around telling folks who don't agree with you on every issue to f*** off and die. 

I mean, 2/3 of the Democratic electorate was so fiercely opposed to the Berniecratic movement that it rallied around friggin Joe Biden in like a week rather than support Sanders.  I've never seen anything quite like that before, but it makes sense in hindsight.  If you show up at someone's house and randomly start screaming that they'd better give you their home or else you'll start smashing their property with a baseball bat, the person will probably burn down their house before they let you have it just on principle.  The Berniecrat movement needs to find a way to disown or calm down the extremely vocal, toxic minority who care more about giving Democrats the finger than implementing actual policies.

- 3) I know the Berniecrats don't wanna hear this, but some of their policies and messaging is simply really unpopular.  Eliminating student debt is a winning issue and from a realpolitik electoral strategy perspective, they should definitely run with that as long as they can.  The anti-wall street stuff Sanders talked about plays really well too as long as they avoid using the word "socialism."  However, eliminating all private health insurance, their foreign policy agenda, branding themselves as "socialists," decriminalizing hard drugs are all things that simply do not play well with most voters.  They need to do a better job of choosing their battles and can't insist on dying on every hill they encounter. 

For example, most Democrats don't hate their party's establishment with a burning passion.  That's a losing battle for you guys.  Hillary?  Yeah, she was exceptionally unpopular.  But folks don't hate the Pelosis, the Schumers, the Obamas, the Bidens, etc of the party.  And no one gives a crap about Tom Perez or even knows who he is, for that matter.

- 4) The Berniecrats have done a terrible job of choosing their friends.  McArthur once posted a political cartoon saying "Not me.  Us." that showed Bernie Sanders surrounded by grifters and bigots like David Sirota, Nina Turner, Katie Halper, Ryan Grimm, Glenn Greenwald, Kyle Kulinski, Briahna Joy, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Nathan Robinson, Krystal Ball, etc, etc, etc.  It really was spot on.  The problem here isn't Bernie, it's that you guys have let all these toxic bad actors leech onto the Berniecrat movement in the loudest way possible. 

Most people obviously do not know who these people are, but I'd be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of non-Berniecrats have heard at least three comments that strongly offended them some combination of the folks in that political cartoon.  At this point, the Berniecrats are being judged by their worst members and until you guys cut the Chapo Trap Houses and Cenk Uygurs of the movement lose, that's gonna continue.  It's like gangrene that was allowed to fester and now you've gotta amputate the whole hand to save the arm. 

- 5) Lastly, the Berniecrat movement seems to want a bomb-thrower.  That's just not something Democrats have any interest in right now.  Most Democrats want a return to the normality of the liberal democratic international political order and miss Obama.  This is not a year for a WWC left-populist revolt.  As far as the average Democrat is concerned, Trump was the WWC populist revolt.  And honestly, I think Bernie was a much better than average candidate for the movement.  AOC will likely do far worse if/when she runs.  What you guys need is a Berniecrat whose rhetorical style and brand is akin to the calm, uplifting, reassuring, idealistic schtick of Buttigieg circa 2020 or Obama circa 2008.  If you can pull that off with a candidate who supports Bernie-style progressivism, then you're halfway to home as far as finding a Berniecrat who can win the Democratic Presidential nomination goes. 

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

- 3) I know the Berniecrats don't wanna hear this, but some of their policies and messaging is simply really unpopular.  Eliminating student debt is a winning issue and from a realpolitik electoral strategy perspective, they should definitely run with that as long as they can.  The anti-wall street stuff Sanders talked about plays really well too as long as they avoid using the word "socialism."  However, eliminating all private health insurance, their foreign policy agenda, branding themselves as "socialists," decriminalizing hard drugs are all things that simply do not play well with most voters.  They need to do a better job of choosing their battles and can't insist on dying on every hill they encounter.

What? To the extent that Americans have foreign policy views other than following the dominant trend in their party at any given time, they seem to prefer non-interventionism. And Sanders doesn't come across as a radical like, say, Corbyn.

The key distinction - and tbh, cognitive dissonance - here is that while most Americans don't want our troops to be fighting in a long-term war overseas, most Americans (certainly most Democrats given the reaction to Trump) recoil at true isolationism and do want the U.S. to be taking a proactive, vocal, leading role in the international political order.  In other words, Americans are pretty interventionist on foreign policy until you get to actually fighting a long-term war.  Once that happens, isolationist sentiment resurges until the war is perceived by the public as being more or less over.

I get the sense that many Berniecrats are pretty hostile to the idea of returning to the liberal democratic international political order as it existed under Obama, that low-info ones tend to be at least somewhat sympathetic to Venezuela/Cuba/other left-authoritarian regimes as well as [for reasons that continue to escape me] Russia of all places, and have a deep hostility to things like NATO, the UN, the proactive and aggressive use of soft power to force other countries to do what the U.S. wants them to, etc, and aren't too crazy about the idea of the U.S. running the international political order.  

That sort of stuff may play well in Burlington or at the University of Berkley, but it plays horribly with most folks outside the Berniecrat base.  There's middle ground between being a neo-conservative and being Bernie Sanders (who wasn't even on the most isolationist end of the Berniecrat movement, not even close).  They need to find that sweet spot where they still hold true to their core values, but also don't scare away everyone who feels nostalgic about the international liberal democratic political order as it existed during the Obama administration.  It'll require some concessions on foreign policy, but it's definitely possible.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

eliminating all private health insurance, their foreign policy agenda, branding themselves as "socialists," decriminalizing hard drugs are all things that simply do not play well with most voters.

Sanders’ foreign policy views are perfectly mainstream (he supported the Kosovo intervention) and he’s never suggested that hard drugs should be decriminalized.

I’m talking about the Berniecrat movement overall.