Summary: It has finally happened. Bernard Sanders endorsed Joe Biden’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States yesterday. It did not take Bernie as long as many had expected it to take to get with the program, so to speak. Metaphorically speaking this was like the journey Japanese Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru and chief of the Imperial General Staff Umezu Yoshijiro had to make to the battleship Missouri on September 2, 1945, the day the Japanese Empire surrendered to the Allied powers. The task will now be to integrate as many supporters of Bernard Sanders as possible into a unified campaign to defeat Donald Trump in November. Equally important, however, will be deterring the intransigent holdouts whose animus toward Joe Biden will lead them to do everything possible to sabotage his campaign.
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Cathedral City, April 13, 2020 –- Bernard Sanders made it official yesterday. That morning, the Independent Vermont Senator endorsed Joe Biden’s candidacy for President of the United States. Sanders’s endorsement comes far earlier in the campaign than did his endorsement of Hillary Clinton in 2016. In that year, Sanders continued the fight all the way to the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, where a large number of his diehard, intransigent supporters staged a theatrical walkout and demonstration outside the convention center.
Hopefully, Sanders’s endorsement, coming just after Easter, will enable the Democrats to field a far more unified, far more disciplined campaign against Donald Trump then was the case four years ago.
It is probably safe to say that for a great many supporters of Bernard Sanders, the last few days have recapitulated the five Elisabeth Kübler-Ross stages of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Polling data suggest that fully eighty percent of Sanders supporters have seen, or will be able to see, their way clear to supporting Joe Biden as the campaign now pivots to the general election.
In so doing, these former Sanders supporters will have recapitulated the experience of many activists involved in an unsuccessful primary campaign. Former Texas agriculture Commissioner and Sanders supporter Jim Hightower described the experience as being something like taking the "Midnight Train."
Late on election night, as the returns come in, and becomes mathematically impossible for your candidate to win the primary, you take that metaphorical "Midnight Train" over to the headquarters of the victor. Once there, you grit your teeth, mend fences, have a couple of helpings of humble pie, and then put your name on the volunteer list for the victorious candidate's general election campaign.
Jim Hightower’s Midnight Train metaphor resonates with most of us because most of us have supported at least one unsuccessful candidate’s primary campaign. However, I expect that the metaphor that hits most powerfully home for a lot of disappointed Sanders supporters right now will be the “journey to the Missouri” metaphor that finds its source in the surrender of Japan to the Allied powers, which took place aboard the battleship Missouri (BB-63) on September 2, 1945.
The surrender proceedings, carried out under the auspices and at the direction of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, went off with a kind of grace and dignity by which the irresistible power of the United States and her allies was showcased while at the same time saving the face (Ch. bao mianzi) of the Japanese participants in them.
As I suggested in this blog a couple weeks ago, the critical issue for the Biden campaign would be enlarging the traditional big Democratic tent and inserting leaves into the table to accommodate those Sanders supporters who were willing to take the Midnight Train and enter the Biden fold.
Unfortunately, not every Sanders supporter will be willing to make that midnight journey. There will be those self identified followers of Bernard Sanders who will eagerly live down to the stereotype of the intransigent, bitter-ender, Japanese-holdout-on-Pacific-island, and defiant resisters for whom the mantra “#never Biden” is one by which they will live and die.
These intransigents fall into three broad categories.
The first of these are the Trump/Kremlin trolls and moles. These are the people who infiltrate the Democratic Party in order to cause enmity and division within it. Their motivations are not motivations of support for Bernard Sanders as much as they are expressions of hatred toward Joe Biden, injected into the Democratic primary structure for the ultimate and ulterior purpose of aiding and abetting Donald Trump’s reelection effort.
The second group of self-identified Sanders intransigents have no real dog in the political hunt; they are simply anarchists and bomb throwers who delight in raising little hell and making people crazy.
The third, and most dangerous, category of bitter-end intransigents are those who do in fact have an ideological dog in the hunt. These, frequently identifiable by a large number of social media “likes” of Marxist or socialist memes, themes, and groups, tend to see the presidency of Donald Trump as a catalyst for a repetition, in the United States, of the October Revolution of 1917. In their Weltanschauung, Bernard Sanders is nothing but the instrumentality by which this October Revolution is to be accomplished.
This third group of intransigents seeks, in Leninist fashion, to “heighten the contradictions” in American society with a view toward fomenting that October Revolution. Sanders, whom they had relied upon to be their vehicle for the accomplishment of their sought-after October Revolution will be derided as a “sellout” before this day is over.
We may expect, within the next twelve to twenty-four hours, to hear all, or at least a substantial number of, the cargo shorts communists who had loudly professed their fealty to Bernard Sanders to trot out every thought-terminating cliché available to them to express their anger at his endorsement of Joe Biden. “Centrist,” “sellout,” “corporatist,” “corporate whore,” and probably a few anti-Semitic broadsides will form the underpinning of the intransigent polemic against Bernie Sanders.
Feeling betrayed by Senator Sanders, the intransigents will include both him and Joe Biden in their polemic. Many of them will probably gravitate toward a third-party candidate, such as Putin’s pal Jill Stein, the perennial presidential hopeful of the Green Party. In the end, however, many of them will pledge their "fealty" to Donald Trump in the hopes that a second Trump term will sufficiently heighten the contradictions to the point where an "October Revolution" becomes inevitable.
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