It's worth bringing up now because Bernie Sanders is now only down two points to Hillary Clinton in Iowa in the Des Moines Register's most recent polls. He's also up big on her in New Hampshire. There's a reasonable chance that Sanders could win some big victories early in the primary and have a chance to make the Democratic primary battle a prolonged fight, which is absolutely to the disadvantage of both Hillary and the Democratic party.
The major issue at play here is that Bernie Sanders is largely the choice of white liberal Americans and that demographic is losing control of the future of the country without even realizing it.
Take a look at the demographic breakdowns of the 2012 election, a major victory for Barack Obama that has helped infused liberal democrats around the country with confidence in their ascension and control of the country:
Obama's winning coalition was dependent on two major additions to the white liberal camp to bring victory. First, heavy turnout from black voters almost all of whom voted for him. Secondly, other minority groups whom he also carried with major percentages. He lost white voters to Romney 59-39 because white liberals are a rather small part of the electorate, even though they are currently guiding the direction of the nation.
What white liberals are aiming the country at right now is to become more like other Western nations such as Canada, Germany, England, or the oft-cited socialist states of Scandinavia. This is also an attractive outcome for America's various minority groups, but there are two considerable problems with trying to bring this kind of state and system to the U.S.
The first is that there are many electoral land mines to getting these kinds of policies put into law and second that a Western-style socialist system won't work in America.
America is not designed, as a system of government, to allow even a majority to quickly and easily push through major, comprehensive changes at the Federal level and there is also a lot of leeway for the individual states to impose their own preferences for their own population groups, which is really what the Constitution is facilitate as it was established by individualistic Anglo-Saxon values, not cooperative German ones.
However, because socialism is a centralized system for administering government, Democrats are not content to simply turn states like Vermont into liberal bastions but are consistently trying to gain access to the Federal branches of power and the U.S. treasury from which they can do much more.
As Ezra Klein recently outlined, Hillary understands the problem of bringing socialism to America after she failed to bring a single-payer healthcare system to the country back in the 90's. America is increasingly diverse, and although Obama worked that to his advantage in 2008 and 2012, some of what he did is going to make similar practices increasingly difficult for future Democrats.
By playing into identity politics and playing a game of divide and conquer whereby conservative and traditional white Americans were outnumbered by a coalition of virtually every other group in the state the result is that conservative and traditional white Americans are now starting to fight back. They've seized control of congress through the Republican party and are now working to transform the GOP into a party that enacts their own vision rather than that of the powerful interests which have traditionally guided the party.
Whether they will be successful or not in seizing control over the direction of the country from white liberals is unclear, I think the prognosis is grim, but they can sure make it harder for the liberal agenda to get pushed through.
Another aspect of the electoral problem is the fact that white liberals depend on heavy minority turnout to drive election victories. They're starting to discover that this doesn't work well in mid-term and local elections, where minority voters simply aren't as invested, as in presidential elections where the candidates and power at stake is clearly recognizable.
That means that Democrats are now living on the edge of the knife, dependent on holding the presidency since they aren't likely to hold majorities in both houses of congress and dependent on finding presidential candidates who will draw minority voters to the polls.
While Sanders' policies of universal healthcare, free college education, and greater access to debt are obviously attractive to minority voters, Sanders himself is not attractive. While Obama was cool and had a personality cult that attracted the attention of minority voters that don't necessarily follow cable news cycles, listening to a bald, old white man with a Northeastern accent drone on about specific policies hasn't been able to garner the same support.
Clinton is killing Sanders amongst black voters and also amongst hispanic voters. That means that when it comes to states like Texas, California, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida, the majority of democratic primary voters are not going to be the white liberals that Sanders is winning with in Iowa and New Hampshire. Even if he wins the first two primaries it'll be a smokescreen, masking his ultimate inability to win the nomination when non-whites are given a voice.
What's more, when it comes time to win a general election, if Sanders doesn't get fantastic turnout from black and hispanic voters in Florida, Ohio, or Virginia he's going down in flames in any attempt to match Obama's electoral path to victory.
So, Sanders may get some momentum early but his fate is sealed. The only thing he can likely accomplish by prolonging the battle is forcing Hillary to compromise some of her moderate policy proposals and move to the left to capture the white liberal voters needed to put him down. That will not serve her well in the general election in winning moderate, white suburban voters or lower middle class white voters, the former whom Rubio is likely to be strong with and the latter whom Trump and Cruz are courting.
The next problem is that while democratic socialism has actually worked well in Europe, it won't work in America, it's actually already been tried.
Conservatives grit their teeth and hiss when liberals point to the success of healthcare programs in Canada, Scandinavia, Germany, and other locations and tend to stutter through explanations of why they are actually evil or secretly ineffective.
They really aren't. When you have a homogenous population of successful, hard-working people then democratic socialism basically becomes a massive co-op. Everyone agrees to pay into the system and they understand and generally accept the fact that some will get out more than others, that doesn't matter so long as the system is efficient and effective so that the bottom line for everyone is good.
When you have a diverse population of people with massive disparities in values and tremendous distrust between groups, a massive co-op doesn't work. The groups that feel they are being taken advantage of (namely, white Americans) become resentful and do all they can to block the system from being enacted. Then there's the other problem that people don't want to talk about, disparate work values and productivity amongst different ethnicities.
Let's start with something more palatable to modern sensibilities: Scandinavians and Germans tend to be more amenable to working in a socialist/co-op kind of system than other Europeans. Their societies are defined by being orderly and communal whereas Anglo-Saxon or Scots-Irish folk are often more individualistic. This is particularly true in America, which was built by pioneers that set out to conquer the west in family units and still isn't as urban as Europe has become.
Take Wisconsin, or far west Germany as it could also be known, which is an American farming state filled with white people that you would normally expect to be pretty conservative but instead it's historically been a liberal state that pushes for expansion of social services.
The problem came from the fact that there's free movement of labor within the country and the state became less white after enacting many of their more generous welfare programs.
Here's the key point from the linked article:
"before the increase in welfare payments in the 1960s and 1970s, northern cities attracted those Southern blacks who wanted to better themselves by getting factory jobs. But during the big liberalization of welfare in the 1960s-1970s, northern cities attracted those down South who heard it was easy to get welfare."
The result was the collapse of Milwaukee and the abandonment of the city by it's white population who fled in massive numbers to the suburbs.
You are now seeing the same thing happen in Germany and Scandinavia as Middle-Eastern and African immigrants are utilizing the refugee crises to flood into these generous Western states and take advantage of their fantastic social programs. The result is an utter catastrophe and growing crises. Even the most generous and liberal Scandinavian states are starting to close their borders as they realize that their systems won't work when they go from being a national co-op to becoming a pure system of redistributing European wealth to African and Middle-Eastern populations.
You'll notice that Bernie, who hails from the the ultra-liberal but also ultra-European state of Vermont (98.6% of the population is white European in ancestry), is opposed to open borders within the U.S.
No one in America wants to have a frank discussion of the relative strengths and weaknesses of different ethnic groups out of fear of being labeled racist, but it's unquestionably true that the secret to Western success is Western people.
Moving people from a different culture with different values and different strengths and weaknesses from one land region to another will not change any of those underlying traits.
You see an understanding and resentment of this fact in American through things like "white flight" wherein successful, middle-class white Americans withdraw from regions and areas where they are asked to be a part of co-op/socialist programs with people from other ethnic groups. You also see it in re-gentrification where successful, middle-class white Americans use higher prices to force "minority flight."
White liberals don't talk and discuss these things though, because it flies powerfully in the face of the narrative they push (the end of conservative white values and their oppression!) and the result they are trying to achieve (an egalitarian, socialist state). For that reason, they are currently pushing for Bernie Sanders without realizing that
A) He can't win because Obama rebuilt the Democratic party around minority voters and they aren't interested in his candidacy
B) He can't pass his policies because of white push back
C) His policies can't work because of white push back and a cultural weakness amongst many minority groups for sustaining Western-style socialism.
I'm curious to see when white liberals start to grasp these points and how they'll respond when they do. This primary season sure is interesting, isn't it?
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