Day: February 4, 2016

1 in 150 employees who say their organization does not have a set of values are "Fully Engaged." Okay.  That's a survey of employees. Just imagine what the ratio must…

So Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders got into a little bit of a Twitter war yesterday, over Progressivism. If there is a war as to who is the MOST progressive, Bernie wins. But Bernie does what every Purist Progressive does, in that they think they can define for all who and who is not Progressive, with the answer always being that only Purists can be called Progressive. Purist Progressives are horrible, HORRIBLE, at building coalitions for this very reason. Because any deviation from dogma is a sin and the sinner must be cast out and burned at the stake. Hillary is who she says she is, a pragmatic progressive who likes to get things done. To Bernie, getting things done is a heresy that must be condemned. And Brian Beutler says Bernie better quit it soon or else he will be unelectable.

One of the questions at the heart of the fight between Clinton and Sanders is whether Sanders’s promise to lead a political revolution that brings the United States closer to social democracy is credible or fantastic. The argument frequently pits cynics and pragmatists, who see Barack Obama’s high-minded-candidacy-turned-difficult-presidency as an object lesson in the unloveliness of governing, against idealists and counterfactualists, who say Obama never attempted to turn the promise of his campaign into progressive action. Even if you side with Team Sanders on this question, the insight that gave rise to that tweet (that pitting progressives against moderates is an effective tactic in a two-person Democratic primary) is incompatible with the goal of uniting the existing Democratic base with the unattached voters and Republicans of the white working class. It may even be incompatible with building a majority coalition in a general election. The list of reasons to worry Sanders is unelectable is unusually long. To paraphrase Vox’s David Roberts: Sanders would be far and away the oldest president to take office; he has self-identified as a socialist for most of his career, undeterred by the media’s inability to distinguish between social democrats (what he is) and Leninists (what Republicans will say he is); he supports a higher tax on middle-class labor, which is politically and substantively the worst way to finance a welfare state expansion. On top of all that, he is unabashed about his disinterest in party coalition building. He’s happy to represent one wing of it, but not inclusively enough to pick up endorsements from influential party actors. This is all exacerbated by the fact that he’s spent his congressional career as an independent who caucuses with Democrats, and has never plied his popularity into helping Democratic colleagues get elected. This increases the likelihood that down-ballot Democrats would run away from him in a tough race, rather than rally to unite the party. But you can set all that aside, too, and just consider the ramifications of Sanders’s defeating Clinton by boxing her out of the progressive movement, and using the term “moderate” as an epithet to describe deviations from his agenda.

Progressives should welcome Clinton's embrace of progressivism, for that means that Progressivism has control of the party. At this rate, if Bernie Sanders wins the nomination, he will lose in such spectacular fashion that he will destroy Progressivism for 50 years.