Don't count on Democratic moderation to protect us from a President Sanders

The average Trumpster neither understands what actually drives the #Never Trump movement, nor wants to. It's enough to know that we are Bad, since we disapprove of the Dear Leader and he disapproves of us. But Christian Schnieder observes in today's Bulwark that there was more to it than that: Donald Trump simply didn't represent the positions Republicans and conservatives believed in.

The #NeverTrump movement that gained strength in 2016 opposed Trump on several grounds. The big one, of course, was simply that Trump was unfit for office: an indecent human being, prone to childish outbursts and embarrassing public statements who could not be trusted as the nation’s chief executive...

But Trump also held many positions that were anathema to the Republican Party of 2015 (for instance, the embrace of tariffs and trade protectionism and the refusal to even consider reforming the entitlement system). As a recent convert to Republicanism, Trump didn’t even pretend to know the GOP talking points: during the campaign, he said that if abortion were outlawed, women would be put in jail for having abortions. (The Republican view has always been that if abortion were to be criminalized, it would be the doctors who performed the procedure, not their patients, who were subject to prosecutio.) He talked about “Two Corinthians” and how his favorite Bible verse was “an eye for an eye.”

The argument from NeverTrumpers was: Why should we hand control of our party to a man who shares none of its values?

But should  Bernie end up as the Democratic nominee (or even somehow as president), Schnieder writes, expect no such opposition from principled Democrats. And it's not simply that Bernie Sanders is a more decent human being than Donald Trump. It's not even that even though Bernie says crazy things, he himself isn't crazy.

It's that the Democrats as a party are crazier in 2020 than the Republicans were in 2016, and that should scare the living daylights out of all of us. Despite the reassuring argument that Bernie's program is so out there that there is no chance that even a Democratic Congress would pass it, the evidence seems to suggest that the Democratic Party is if anything more likely to actually become everything Donald Trump claims it already is if Bernie is elected than the GOP was to become what the Democrats claimed it already was back in 2016, and thanks to Mr. Trump has now actually become.

I highly recommend this article, especially to anyone who actually thinks that voting for Bernie in November would be a safe option.

We had better pray awfully hard that somehow they end up nominating somebody else.