Typecasting Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders carries a burden. Americans have a mental category for him, and he looks the part, sounds the part, and his biography confirms the part.

Engaging, but ultimately abandoned.

Social critic.

We need social critics.  

Shakespeare's fools are truth tellers to kings. But they aren't kings. Cassandra was right, but not believed. Jeremiah heard directly from God, and his reward was to be thrown into a cistern to starve. 

Hollywood knows the character, the network news anchor who was mad as hell and not going to take it anymore! (Network, 1976)

Comedy has a version of the role: the gruff, grumbly old men characters of the Muppets. 

We saw his appeal to voters, and it persists. Bernie Sanders and his message reached its apogee in 2016, as the social and political critic warning that Hillary was a mistake. He was right. He--like Trump--understood the unrest among voters in both parties against a self-satisfied status quo establishment. He warned us. We should have listened.

Grumpy old men

The trouble with Jeremiah, Cassandra, Shakespeare fools, and Bernie Sanders goes beyond the fact that they aren't listened to. It is that they read as social critics, not leaders. 

Sanders will get a significant block of votes, perhaps enough to win a Democratic primary. That is the risk for Democrats. He might get cast in the wrong role: Party leader.  Bernie succeeds as policy critic and visionary, but would be vulnerable as a leader.  He is the wrong person for the part.

He would be the easiest candidate for Trump to call extreme. 

1. He is leading under a banner and label that frightens people.  Voters will support a Jew (93%), voters will support a candidate over 70 (63%), and voters are generally open most other identity categories of people including now a gay person (76%) and atheist (60%), but voters are very uncomfortable with a "socialist." Click: Gallup

 Bernie Sanders calls himself, proudly, a "Democratic Socialist." 

He gets credit for this within the political left. See his courage! See his steadfastness over time! This is why he will get votes, maybe even a plurality. But it is a crushing burden in the general election. Only 47% of voters in 2019 say they would support a "well qualified candidate in their party who called himself a 'socialist'". More ominous is that this number has not changed since 2015. Sanders had four years to re-teach Americans the meaning of "socialist" and assure people it just means FDR and Social Security, and it hasn't worked.

2. He is leading on health care in a direction that frightens people. Americans overwhelmingly want changes in the health care system, but a great many people are personally satisfied with their own situation and don't want to lose it. People who have Medicare are set. Also, people who work for large organizations with employer-supplied health care have something good they don't want to lose. 

These older, secure  people turn out to vote. These are the people with "family wage" situations, those educated people in the new sweet spot for Democrats. They are comfortable, educated people OK with diversity, rainbows, and the Democratic message on immigration.

But they don't want their health care screwed up.

Click: The Hill poll

Sanders' position is the least popular position, when voters are given options of how they would like America's health care to be arranged. Only 13% of voters want universal single payer Medicare for All.  

Some 26% of voters prefer the government offering a government plan but with people being able to keep private insurance if they want to. And 32% favor a government program with individuals being allowed to buy supplemental private insurance on their own.

Unfortunately for Democrats, the most active people within the party are the young people who are in a different mental universe from older people who associate "socialist" with the USSR and the DMV, and people getting and enjoying their current health care. Many are intolerant of anything but Bernie "socialism" and "Medicare for All."

Why do I say that Bernie Sanders is a social critic and not a leader? Hasn't he led Democrats to the left?

Yes, he has, on policy. But not personally.

In the US Senate he has not been a team leader, and indeed he has kept himself off the team. He isn't a Democrat; he just caucuses with the Democrats, and he makes that point with pride. 

He plays the role of point of the spear, not the team captain. 

Rembrandt's Jeremiah: He warned them.

Trump and the GOP are already locking that bit of type-casting into place: "Crazy Bernie," the wild-eyed visionary, with his lamentations and dangerous policies, the guy out there on the extreme. The guy who cannot even get Democrats to join him.

The socialist who wants to take away your health care.

Bernie's supporters who are sharp critics of the non-Bernie Democrats are part of the problem for Sanders. 

His supporters won't let him lead a coalition. It is Bernie or nothing, and he is one of a kind. So he stands alone.