"Magic Grandpa"

As Bernie Sanders ascends as the dominant front-runner for the Democratic party, the party itself has no one to blame but itself. For years, it has bowed to the dictates of its increasingly left-wing base. It has allowed political correctness to morph into an extreme form of mind control; encouraged "cancel culture" to silence not only opposition voices, but also voices from within the party that are not radical enough; embraced Trump Derangement Syndrome to such an extent that the party proposes or accomplishes nothing of substance for the American people, and worshipped at the alter of intersectionality to such an extent that it has rejected its long-time middle-class, working-people base. It's in serious trouble, even if many within the party don't yet realize it.

Dominic Green provides an extremely harsh, but nonetheless accurate assessment of the Democratic front-runner. He writes:

The Democrats are now being unraveled by what [Bernie] Sanders might call the ‘contradictions of capitalism’. While the Democratic leadership was soaking Wall Street and Silicon Valley and pandering to the public sector unions, it outsourced the maintenance of its coalition to the radicals, and indulged them as they built their Potemkin villages of intersectionality. Now, as the party structure hollows out and the party leadership fails convincingly to answer Donald Trump, the radicals have the ground game and the ideology to remake the party from the bottom up. The result is a radically depraved version of the rainbow coalition, with Sanders as its Corbyn-style ‘Magic Grandpa’, a deceptively cuddly fellow traveler determined to ride their youthful exuberance into office.

When Magic Grandpa shakes the money tree, it’s not just that other people’s money falls out. A tangle of poisonous roots is also exposed. A coalition of coalitions has mobilized for Sanders: acrimonious initials like the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) and CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), Jew-baiting proxies like Ilhan Omar and Linda Sarsour, woke warriors like IfNotNow and the Justice Dems, and bongwater conspiracists like the Chapo Trap House chaps and the campus wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Phew!

His supporters think that Bernie can win in a general election, but unless there is a black swan event that pulls our country into turmoil (e.g., a significant coronavirus outbreak requiring draconian measures by the Trump administration to stop its spread—I can just hear the Dems shouting "totalitarianism" already), I suspect that if Bernie wins the nomination, he will be crushed in the general election—not because Trump is a great guy, but because his administration has accomplished many things that have tangibly benefited the American people.

That's reassuring, but it would be far more encouraging if the Democrats learned from all of this and changed their path. That, unfortunately, is highly unlikely.

UPDATE:
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Scott Johnson writes:

Has Bernie Sanders ever lavished the kind of praise on the United States that he has heaped on the old regime of the Soviet Union, the dictators of Venezuela, or the Communist masters of Cuba? Has he ever praised the United States, period? When it comes to the United States versus its enemies, the guy is on the other side. It’s probably past time to take Sanders seriously and take a look at the kind of foreign policy he is most likely to pursue. It is certainly past time to get a clue about the deep meaning of Bernie Sanders.

The "deep meaning" of Sanders is that like all socialist demagogues, he's a master at class warfare. He understands the politics of envy and recognizes that demonizing the rich (actually, demonizing success) resonates with a non-trivial percentage of the voting public. He assumes that a significant minority of the public has never learned that utopian promises are too good to be true, and offers "bribes" to his voters—lots and lots of free stuff (latest is free child care) that is neither free nor attainable. He cares little for economics, and cynically suggests that "the rich" can pay for it all when he knows that's a mathematical impossibility. Unlike Trump, who at his core projects optimism for the USA, Bernie presents a dark picture of a racist, greedy nation that can only be saved by reducing the freedoms its inhabitants have coveted for 250 years. He's hardly a magic grandpa—he is a bad guy.