Thursday, June 9, 2016

Dave Hopkins Doubts Bernie Sanders is the Democrats' Future

Like a lot of other people, I have been very impressed by the way Bernie Sanders has energized the left wing of the Democratic Party, and I have assumed that the next Democratic nominee will be someone to the left of Hillary and Obama. Political scientist Dave Hopkins disagrees:
There's a temptation to assume that everything new in politics is a harbinger of the future. But lots of things are dead ends: They rise, and they go away. There's no reason to believe just definitionally that Sanders represents the future of the Democratic Party more than anybody else.
Hopkins points out that Barrack Obama is still much more popular among Democrats than Sanders is, and he thinks the Democrats' future is still with the Obama coalition of minorities and college-educated whites:
I think the key for understanding the future of Democratic politics is still Obama. Obama has shown you can win nationally as a Democrat not as a liberal crusader, but not as someone who takes on the left of the party to prove to the swing voters that you're not a liberal, either.

It seems like Obama will go down in history as the key figure in current Democratic Party politics — he showed how the party's new demographic coalition could come together. If you want to talk about the future of the Democratic Party, that's where it is.
I have previously noted that when you poll them about the issues, Sanders' supporters are not measurably more liberal than Hillary's. Sanders' supporters seem motivated at least as much by anger at the status quo, and an allied sense that Hillary is a crook, as they are by socialism. After all, Sanders consistently polled better among independents who vote in Democratic primaries than among registered Democrats. Right now his supporters seem more focused on the alleged "rigging" of the nomination process than on any policy issue.

I guess my feeling now is that the course of the Democratic Party over the next decade is still very much up in the air. I feel certain that tough regulation of Wall Street will remain a key Democratic issue, and I expect more moves toward alleviating the problem of student debt. But it may be that Sanders' rise over the past ten months has had more to do with Hillary's particular weaknesses than with the issues Sanders is championing.

3 comments:

G. Verloren said...

"But it may be that Sanders' rise over the past ten months has had more to do with Hillary's particular weaknesses than with the issues Sanders is championing."

I dunno. I tend to think Sander's rise had much more to do with his vehement rhetoric appealing to angry, disaffected young people who simply respond better to emotional appeals than to nuanced logic and compromise.

Hilary seems to be the choice of the more jaded democrats, while Sanders wins support from the naively idealistic ones. Hilary seems to appeal to women, minorities, and the college educated because they've all been around the block, so to speak, and their experiences have taught them that pie-in-the-sky promises are always far too good to be true, causing them to distrust Sanders utterly.

Meanwhile, Bernie seems to attract chiefly young, inexperienced white people with a lot of naively idealistic principles they don't really know how to articulate, much less put into any real sort of effect. They seem to think all that matters is holding the right opinions, even if you don't actually ascribe to them for the right reasons, or have any real clue what to do with them.

And Sanders reflects this mindset - he's quite happy to get very vocally upset about key issues, but ultimately he lacks any sort of real answers for those problems, largely because he doesn't really fundmentally understand them. And so all he has to offer is strong, poorly founded opinions and vague, poorly thought out non-solutions. He's nowhere near as bad as Trump idiotically boasting he can solve the California drought by simply "turning the water back on", but he's certainly full of a lot of hot air and not much else.

pootrsox said...

I'm with G. Verloren: "I dunno. I tend to think Sander's rise had much more to do with his vehement rhetoric appealing to angry, disaffected young people who simply respond better to emotional appeals than to nuanced logic and compromise."

Especially given the vituperative responses of those supporters toward everything Hillary.

Anyone who supported Sanders' agenda and policies who can vote for Trump clearly didn't really care about what Sanders advocated, only about his call for "revolution."

I also agree w/ Mr/Ms V's assessement in the final paragraph above.

Karin K said...

After Hillary Clinton as president I hope it's time for Michelle Obama to be elected! That could bring change and hope for a very tired nation.