Jon Chait on the impact of the soi-disant democratic socialist on the Democratic Party.
Bernie Sanders Is the Future of the Democratic Party, Right? Not So Fast.
As the competitive phase of the Democratic presidential primary has wound down, the action now moves to the nebulous contest to define the terms of Hillary Clinton’s victory and what, if anything, she owes to Bernie Sanders.
It is a little strange, as Ed Kilgore points out, that the coverage of this question treats Sanders as the victor and Clinton as the vanquished.
The discussion hinges on the premise that Sanders, even while losing the fight for delegates, has won the war of ideas within the party.
The premise is shared by such disparate figures as economically moderate Matthew Yglesias (“Sanders's basic vision of a party with a more sharply ideological message on economic issues is very likely to dominate in the future”) and ecstatic radical Corey Robin, who sees in Sanders’s success the rise of socialism that will sweep liberalism into the dustbin of history.
But this assumes that Sanders’s appeal was mostly or even entirely ideological.
That is probably wrong.
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