Dem Civil War Dispatch: Bernie Rallies the Radicals and Fires First Volley

Perhaps the talk of a Democrat civil war had more reality than hyperbole all along. And perhaps it has been a long time coming, too.

Bernie Sanders has long tried to distance himself from the Democrat Party, while simultaneously attempting to seize control of it. Sanders came surprisingly close in both 2016 and 2020, but the party establishment rallied behind Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in response. Both times, the party agenda advanced much close to Sanders’ Academia-drenched progressivism, but Sanders still refused to ally completely with Democrats, retaining his independent status instead.

Now Sanders wants the Bernie Bros to follow suit. The New York Times reports that Sanders has urged progressives to run in elections as independents rather than Democrats, setting up a real split in a party that has already run aground with the electorate:

Mr. Sanders’s admonition came in an interview with The New York Times on the eve of a three-day, five-city swing through Western states alongside Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. He predicted that they would draw tens of thousands of people to rally against President Trump, Elon Musk and the influence of billionaires on the American government.

“One of the aspects of this tour is to try to rally people to get engaged in the political process and run as independents outside of the Democratic Party,” Mr. Sanders said in the interview on Wednesday. “There’s a lot of great leadership all over this country at the grass-roots level. We’ve got to bring that forward. And if we do that, we can defeat Trumpism and we can transform the political situation in America.”

The suggestion that would-be leaders of the left should abandon the Democratic Party picks at a political scab that has never fully healed. Mr. Sanders, 83, a longtime independent, has had a tense yet codependent relationship with the party for decades.

Yikes. John just wrote about the pressure on Chuck Schumer to resign his leadership position in the Senate. Is this a tactic to ramp up that pressure — a threat to split the party? Because that’s exactly what Sanders is threatening here, and not just in name only while still serving as members of the same caucus, as Sanders has done for decades.  

This would go beyond just challenging establishment Democrat incumbents in primaries. If Sanders convinces progressives to run as independents, in most states they would have to do so in general elections. They would then run against Democrats and Republicans, likely splitting voters on the Left while allowing right-leaning voters to unite behind the GOP nominee. That would portend an absolute disaster for Democrats, essentially forcing a party split at a time when they’re already at the nadir of favorability as a consolidated party. 

This is a call to outright civil war in the political-electoral sense. One has to wonder what Sanders envisions as the outcome of such a strategy. Perhaps it’s something like the following, which should be read with a Ken Burns-like soundtrack accompanied by sepia-tinged photos of radical-Left attacks on Teslas:

Dear Diary: It has been several days since General Schumer sounded an ignominious retreat at the Battle of Continuing Resolution and made himself the obstacle to progressive Utopia. We must now rally our forces against his to seize power. We will either prevail over the party or wreck it entirely, but we will pursue this course with righteous zeal to purity. 

One has to wonder just how many progressives Sanders will convince to commit electoral suicide, too. Even those already elected to office still rely on the Democrat Party for assistance at retaining their seats. If they take their ball and stomp off into the Bernie Bro Party, they leave behind a lot of infrastructure necessary to compete. If the party establishment finds less-radical alternatives, they might hold those deep-blue districts even with a split on the ticket — and successfully rid themselves of the toxic influence of the cultural-political Marxists for a while. 

For now, though, the rest of us eagerly await the next dispatches from the front of the Democrat civil war. And worry about the popcorn shortage to come. 

Update: Music added, courtesy of CTIronman!