Thinking the unthinkable
Buttigieg? Klochubar? Sane Democrats need to hit on an alternative to Bernie Sanders- and soon. Somehow I'm having visions of the 2016 Republican debacle in my head, as an unacceptable front-runner at the head of a divided field marches steadily toward the nomination while everybody else squabbles about who should unite the reasonable folks to stop him. We all know how the dream ends. Pundits are already beginning to use words like "prohibitive favorite" to describe the unelectable Sanders, the champion of a Trumpian array of unworkable proposals he could never get through Congress and which- the delusions of his followers to the contrary- most Americans oppose.
Donald Trump is licking his chops. I've alluded before to the quote- I forget who it was who said it- to the effect that Bernie Sanders is the only potential opponent President Trump wouldn't even have to lie about to discredit. That's bad.
But if Bernie is the nominee, it ain't gonna be pretty. The Trump slander machine will go into high gear whether it needs to or not. And when you're talking about a former Trotskyite who went to the Soviet Union for his honeymoon, has a record of saying nice things about Russia and Cuba, has little contact with political reality, and trumpets a wildly unpopular program, they'll have a great deal of material to work with.
In fact, think about this for a moment: Donald Trump was never a Trotskyite, and he's in the habit of singing the praises of a somewhat different set of authoritarians and dictators. To my knowledge, he's never singled Cuba out for praise. But otherwise, the description I've just given of Sanders also describes Mr. Trump.
You can't beat crazy with more crazy, and especially with a nicer, more decent, and less ruthless kind of crazy. Donald Trump would eat Bernie Sanders alive with a pickle and coleslaw. Bernie's nomination would be tantamount to Mr. Trump's re-election.
Hell, I'm not even anywhere near sure that I could vote for Bernie Sanders, and a great many people who want Donald Trump out of the White House as badly as I do would say the same. Bernie's nomination- and I'll say it again- would guarantee the re-election of the most dysfunctional administration in our history. It would be the final nail in the coffin of any delusion any of us might harbor that the two-party system as it presently exists can be saved.
With a Republican Party in the hands of the crazy right and a Democratic Party in the hands of the crazy left- and both will remain the case as long as America is as polarized as it is- we will lurch from absurdity to absurdity. Every four years both parties will dance the same dance: a gaggle of moderates will split the sane vote until somebody who is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs has cinched the nomination of each, and once again we'll all be left with Hobson's Choice.
It may already be too late. If it's not, the fatal hour is approaching. All I can do- all any of us can do- is to root for Amy or Mayor Pete to break through somehow, or Joe Biden to wake up, or Michael Bloomberg to take a vow of poverty and undergo an emergency personality makeover. Failing that, as impossible as it seems, we'll be left with even a worse set of alternatives than we had in 2016.
And then what? As I've said over and over again, I don't believe that at this point either party can be saved from the crazies. The Republicans have so completely sold out to Donald Trump that maybe the survival of at least some kind of center among the Democrats and the unlikelihood that a President Sanders could rally even a majority of his own party to his platform would make him the more harmless of our two options. After all, President Trump actually hasn't made much progress toward achieving the goals he spelled out four years ago, the rhetorical sleight-of-hand he and his reporters peddle to the contrary. The damage he's done to the country has been in the area of foreign policy (there, if anything, Bernie would probably be even worse) and the legitimization he's given to hatred and bigotry and militant ignorance. He's divided us, of course. But Bernie wouldn't exactly bring us together.
But by all accounts, Bernie Sanders is a decent man. Donald Trump is simply not. And given that either would be ineffectual, that counts for something. And a Trump who has been re-elected as well as having so completely flummoxed the Republican Party as to render himself invulnerable to the constitutional remedies is close to unthinkable. When it comes to abuse of power, we ain't seen nuthin' yet.
No, he won't become a dictator. But the separation of powers would never be the same. Scary? You bet. But the nomination of Bernie Sanders would make it virtually inevitable.
Bernie's followers, of course, are delusional about that. Even some intelligent and reasonable commentators are saying that unlikely as it might be, maybe Bernie could beat Trump. But would that really be a win or merely a slightly less devastating loss for those of us who love America and remain in some contact with reality?
Yes, Bernie himself is a far better human being than Donald Trump. But many of is supporters are just as crazy and just as full of hate and righteous ignorance as the President's.
No. Somehow, we have to do better than that.
If, as I believe, neither of our two parties can be salvaged, at some point there has to be an alternative. At some point, to be blunt about it, America's moderates are going to have to recognize the futility of even trying to work through either of them, grow a pair, and do what needs to be done.
We need a new, centrist third party. I had hoped that it would happen this year, but the urgency of ridding ourselves of Donald Trump prevented that idea from even taking root. Perhaps now, faced with Hobson's Choice once again, sane America will finally do what has to be done.
Hopefully, this time it won't be another slapdash, cobbled together affair like the Evan McMullin candidacy in 2016. Heaven knows that Evan would have made a far better president than Trump or Clinton or Sanders could ever have made. But his obscurity, together with the lateness of his candidacy's beginning, rendered him pretty much irrelevant. Sadly, I can see the same kind of dithering which deprived Never Trumpers of a reasonable alternative while better-known candidates played Hamlet and finally opted not to make the race last time playing out yet again.
If the polls were any guide, if Mitt Romney had declared as an independent candidate in a timely fashion in 2016, he might actually have won. I see no other potential third option who would have a chance of doing so this time. I was surprised and a little shocked at Sen. Romney's courageous vote to convict the president at the impeachment trial. But while history seems to me clearly to have put him in a unique position to make a difference in this hour when a broken system seems incapable of giving us viable options, his track record makes me fear that he would have a hard time summoning the extra measure of courage it would take to do what needs to be done.
So what? Another lesser-known option? At an hour when even people like Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, hitherto a courageous Republican voice in opposition to Mr. Trump, has apparently been intimidated into silence, I find it hard to imagine our having more luck in 2020 than in 2016 coming up with a well-known option. Maybe somebody obscure, like Evan was, will come forward again. Maybe it will even be Evan himself. Or Gary Johnson. Or Bill Weld. Or Justin Amash.
But while we still have time before such an effort gets underway, we don't have much. Maybe Bernie Sanders can yet be stopped. But the moment it becomes clear that he can't be, the movement to bring forward a rational alternative to Trump or Sanders needs to hit the ground running.
And realistically, it probably won't be. Once again, the words of Yeats come to mind:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are filled with passionate intensity.
Once more, I fear, the good and the sane will fiddle while Rome burns.
Yes, no third party has indeed won a presidential election since 1860. Perhaps such a party would fail this time. But 2020 could be to 2024 what 1856 was to 1860 for the Republicans. Or perhaps a new party could save us in another way, a way in which third parties have served America in the past more than once. Let the great dithering center assert itself just once, and let its power be shown, and maybe one or both of the major parties can be brought back to their right minds.
A third party might, ironically, be the one hope that the two-party system has at this point.
But as I look at our political prospects even this early in 2020, they don't look pretty. Sen. Romney's vote was inspiring but as depressing as the antics of the Trump Republicans and the Sanders Democrats are, it's just as depressing to contemplate the dearth of men and women such as the ones about whom John F. Kennedy wrote in Profiles in Courage, who. to paraphrase America the Beautiful,
...More then selves their country loved,
And mercy more than (political) life...
Pray for America.
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