After Bernie, Does the Left Need a Rethink?

For as long as I can remember, there’s been a deeply held belief on the American left that if a Democrat would only stop pandering to the mushy middle and run an unapologetically liberal, unabashedly populist campaign, he or she would win in a laugher. For too long, the Dems have offered nothing more than Republican-lite candidates, according to this view — and why vote for the “lite” version when you can have the real thing?

Call it the “What’s the matter with Kansas?” theory of politics. In his 2004 bestseller of that name, liberal writer and political analyst Thomas Frank argued Democrats‘ embrace of neoliberalism and disastrous trade deals and their coziness with Wall Street left a huge opening for the right. Conservatives had swooped in with a bait-and-switch: They promised to clean up our “depraved” culture and lead the fight on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, but as soon as they were in office, they turned around and gave those Americans cheap public services and a bunch of tax cuts they were too poor to use.

The answer seemed simple: Give low- and middle-income folks — i.e., the majority of the country — an opportunity to vote in a way that would better serve their economic interests. This would bring “Reagan Democrats” and socially conservative blue-collar types back into the fold, giving them reason to stop bitterly clinging to their God and their guns.

This was also seen as an answer to the midterm drop-off effect — the tendency of key Democratic constituencies to only vote in presidential years — that’s long bedeviled the party and, in recent years, delivered unified Republican control of 30 statehouses and both chambers of Congress. After the 2014 midterms that Barack Obama called a “shellacking” for the left, Frank told Salon we were seeing Democrats demonstrate “a logic that’s very familiar here in Washington, D.C. You move to the center, you always move to the center. But it’s a logic that’s just going to lead to more and more disasters down the road.” He warned that “if they do enough of this triangulation, they’ll become a party that has become so similar to Republicans, then why bother with them?”

I’m a big fan of Frank, and I’ve always believed this story. People don’t give up their deeply held beliefs easily. In fact, they tend to construct elaborate defenses when those beliefs are threatened. But we just had a natural experiment with this theory in America: Bernie Sanders ran the campaign left-leaning Democrats have been dreaming of for years. He wasn’t a one-trick pony, as some characterized him; he talked about climate change and criminal justice reform. But he focused relentlessly — and accurately — on how the 1 percent had made out like bandits and left the rest of us sucking their exhaust fumes.

Sanders did better than anyone expected. He’s poised to end his campaign with the highest favorability ratings of any candidate this cycle. According to a recent survey, he’s the most popular senator on Capitol Hill. His policy provisions poll well. But Sanders lost. He ran the campaign we dreamed about but couldn’t make it through the Democratic primaries. He lost to a candidate whose own supporters acknowledge she has deep flaws. And it was closer to a curb-stomping than a squeaker — with only D.C.’s contest left to go, Clinton has won 57 percent of the popular vote, and races in 16 of the 20 most populous states. She never led by fewer than 7.5 percentage points in FiveThirtyEight’s weighted average of national polls.