The chances of Bernie Sanders getting the Democratic nomination are decidedly better than the other declared candidates’, but that is not saying very much, according to the experts, who believe no candidate will win outright on the first ballot at the convention, and then it will be up for grabs and the fix will be in.
It might then come down to a Shakespearian drama, a fight between two former Great Ladies, I mean First Ladies, and the stilettoes will be out and the blood will flow, although they could form a unity ticket.
Then there is the possibility that even so, Sanders gets it, and then he gets trounced by the prez. But although that makes sense to any normal right-thinking American, in politics you never know until you know, and I would advise all complacent Republicans and other normal right-thinking Americans to reread the excellent article by Mr. Scott McKay, who a few days ago in these pages explained how dangerous Sen. Sanders is to the American way of life or what remains of it, which actually is a lot.
Mr. McKay shares with me a love of The American Spectator and East Texas and the lands on both banks of the Red and the Jolie Blon as sung by Harry Choates and the blues of Mississippi John Hurt and Sam Hopkins. But this is not a placement ad; Mr. McKay advertises fine with his own pen.
The implicit point he makes in this excellent piece, which all normal right-thinking Americans should study carefully, is that it is precisely in times of prosperity that radical crazies seize power. Revolutionary socialism never thrived in bad times. In bad times, people go to authority and order; they seek security. They go to radicals — Hitler, Lenin — precisely when things are on the up (Germany getting out of the worst of the world depression, Russia getting out of the slaughters on the eastern front in World War I).
When the world’s your oyster, you get silly.
That is my explanation for the alleged “youth” (or “millennial”) vote going to a Stalino-Trotskyite from Brooklyn who instead of doing the manly thing and working as a union organizer in the anti-communist and democratic ILGWU, the union of Dubinsky and Lovestone, did the wimp thing and fled to Vermont to be a self-indulgent hippie vegetarian maple syrup eater or what-all and a rural Stalino-Trot. They all are. Make no mistake. Trotsky was Stalin with writing talent. In the socialist world, you are either a democrat like Friedrich Ebert (see the excellent American Spectator piece by Doug Bandow, who despite he belongs to the Cato Institute has my respect) and Sam Fishman, or you are a Stalino-Trot. That’s you, Miss Ocasio-Whatever.
The senator from Vermont is alleged to have the youth vote, but the youth vote is what the media think is the youth vote. This is not to render anyone complacent, only to keep the matter in perspective. How many of the young, however you define them, in the late 1960s were radicals? The media thought an entire generation had flipped into the down-with-the-system far Left. In reality, there were more college-agers in the Young Americans for Freedom than in Students for a Democratic Society, and obviously more graduates went to work than “dropped out” or adopted vegetarianism. Far more of that cohort went and served in the services than fled to Canada or sought the available deferrals.
And the point here is that they did not vote for Eugene McCarthy. They did not even vote for Hubert Humphrey. They voted for Richard Nixon, who was subverted by haters notwithstanding he had a sociological as well as political majority in his corner.
And the point here, to continue, is that even as a minority of their generation, the motivated and mobilized “youth” can be a force in politics. Just as any other group can be. For instance, it is alleged that the scowling maple-eater is winning the Hispanic vote. What Hispanic vote? And even if he does well with this made-up voting bloc in the super Tuesday primaries, notably in Texas and California, that only means that organizers working that angle got Democratic primary voters to the polls. It does not tell us that a majority of Hispanics — however you separate them from other normals — are going to the far left.
But, again, this is not to suggest there is any room for complacency. The prez has a fight on his hands, because in times of plenty, a lot of people get lazy. They think plenty will go on forever, even if the state takes over everything, which is what happens under socialism, or at least the “commanding heights” of the economy.
Still, even many Democrats believe Bernie and Co. (Comrades) are unelectable outside certain precincts in Vermont and the Bronx. Authorities such as James Carville and Dick Morris think the prez will crush the insurrectionaries, and many professional Dems feel the same way, which is why they hope Mike Bloomberg can get his act together and start a “centrist” movement to recapture the party from the abnormals.
Moreover, such rock-ribbed conservatives as Clint Eastwood are leaning this way, as he himself tells the WSJ in a recent interview.
This is far more troubling than a media self-delusion about “youth” or “Hispanics.” The director of Gran Torino and The Mule and Richard Jewell — among many other legendary films — is one of the rare Hollywood powers who can be taken seriously these days on political matters. A few others — Chuck Norris, Dwayne Johnson, Robert Duvall — are, like him, thoughtful about public affairs, and surely there are many more.
Clint Eastwood is a libertarian at heart, and for him to suggest a statist micromanager like Bloomberg is a possible alternative to the incumbent means that at least in one respect, the culture war against Donald Trump has succeeded. They have so incessantly assailed him and denounced him as illegitimate that even normal libertarian, totally sensible people are troubled and moved to think maybe we need a restoration to something more orderly.
If this mood spreads, the Union will fare poorly.
