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Magical Thinking is Not Actually Helpful

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It is possible to write a perfectly reasonable argument that people on the left of the Democratic Party should prefer Bernie to Warren. But nobody who writes for the most prominent pro-Bernie outlets seem capable of writing one, so instead they keep churning out these ridiculous hatchet jobs saturated with both ridiculous bad faith arguments about Warren and magical-thinking overstatements about what a Sanders administration could accomplish. Current Affairs has now stepped up to the plate:

One way of distinguishing someone who knows what they’re talking about from the poseur is that the latter is very prone to asserting that the head of the DNC is a major factor in whether transformative legislation passed. We’ve been through this before, but as Eric Levitz observes in this excellent piece the argument about getting legislation passed by threatening primary challenges is no more plausible:

The left’s weakness makes it trivially easy to demonstrate how someone else’s approach to creating radical change will prove inadequate. It is much harder to make a persuasive case for one’s own. Sanders supporters are right that nothing less than a political revolution can make Medicare for All and a Green New Deal realities. But the evidence that Bernie is capable of fomenting such a revolution is limited. On the one hand, Sanders has assembled impressive small-dollar donor armies and volunteer networks. His ascent has undoubtedly abetted DSA’s growth. And he has used his vast email list to recruit reinforcements for various labor actions and protests, thereby demonstrating his commitment to social movements and to non-electoral forms of political contestation.

On the other hand, Sanders has had a national platform for three years now. He has built up an independent organization and traveled the country proselytizing for class struggle. And none of it has been sufficient for his acolytes to dominate Democratic primaries, or to win him a broader base of support for his 2020 run than he had in 2016, or even to keep his approval rating from slipping underwater. Although one can point to some polls showing Sanders with an enviable favorability rating, RealClearPolitics’ polling average shows the public disapproving of the socialist senator by a margin of 46.3 to 43.1 percent. It is possible that Sanders’s popularity and influence will balloon once he attains power. But it’s worth noting that even Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s historic popularity — and the existence of strong labor, socialist, and communist movements — were insufficient to render FDR’s attempted “purge” of anti–New Deal Democrats in the 1938 primaries successful.

Another way of putting it is that if you assume for the sake of argument that Warren doesn’t REALLY support Medicare for All, you’re saying that Bernie can compel the passage of a proposal that currently has zero ex ante supporters in the United States Senate. Only the crudest parody of Green Lanternism could think it could be passed under these circumstances, and when you say this it insults my intelligence.

As Levitz — who I believe is on the Sanders side of the “both Warren and Sanders are fine” camp — concludes, the real issue here is a failure to think through the real obstacles that any progressive president will face:

But too many prominent arguments for Sanders’s superiority consist of easily debunked distinctions between the two left-wing candidates or blithely unsubstantiated assertions that Bernie is uniquely capable of fomenting a political revolution and thus of bending the Democratic Establishment and U.S. Senate to his will. The first mode of argument risks alienating undecided liberals and obscuring Sanders’s genuinely distinctive merits. The second threatens to replace rigorous reflection on the obstacles to radical change in the United States with magical thinking — and a much-needed debate over how to overcome those impediments with the recitation of rival dogmas.

The whole piece is really worth reading.

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