Democratic Primaries

Your honey-glaze nostalgia reveals nothing recognizable to me. My memories go back quite a while, and are fortified by a fondness for history. At any point I am aware, liberals found themselves in conflict with moderates and even conservatives, and at no time held the upper hand for long. This idea there was some ancestral liberal state from which we have fallen away is nonesense.

When Sanders trains these naifs you speak of to assail the 'Democratic Establishment', and to insult minority voters as dupes of the 'Democratic Establishment', and to call women who stand against Sanders snakes and pawns of the 'Democratic Establishment', and proclaims to them that the hidden hand of the 'Democratic Establishment' can be detected behind any development not to the advantage of Sanders, and tells them elections are rigged and everyone but himself is corrupt and unprincipled, he is hardly bringing them into any recognizable political process, but rather into the hot-house culture of a cult. He certainly is not moving them towards the Democratic Party.

And so long as you express yourself with such a lack of rigor and clarity and project such an air of confused contradiction, you will need to get used to people telling you what you have said, once they have managed to wring some meaning at least out of your words. There is no surer sign of sloppy thinking than sloppy prose.





From Bernie’s perspective, dropping out of a race once you have no chance of winning is peculiar behavior that can only be explained by the work of a hidden hand. For most politicians, though, it is actually standard operating procedure. Only Sanders seems to think the normal thing to do once voters have made clear they don’t want to nominate you is to continue campaigning anyway."





"When things are not called by their right names, what is said cannot make sense. When what is said does not make sense, what is planned cannot succeed. When plans do not succeed, people become uneasy. When people are uneasy, punishments do not fit crimes. When punishments do not fit crimes, people cannot know where to put hand or foot."