"Bernie or Bust" Means Bernie Sanders Has Failed To "Move The Discussion To The Left" And The Ivy League Class Of BoBers

The Nation magazine recently had a piece in which four Bernie Sanders supporters said what they would do if their guy didn't get the nomination.   Two said that they would never vote for Hillary Clinton, despite both of them acknowledging that a Republican presidency would almost certainly be worse than what they assume a Clinton administration would be like.

Rania Khalek cited Hillary Clinton's record in the middle East, which is certainly mixed as has been that of even the best American presidents all along.   No one who is going to be an American president is going to do anything but make some bad decisions in the Middle East, it is certain that Barack Obama who has done some horrible things as president did fewer of those than a president McCain (or Palin, lest that possible and horrific present be forgotten) or Romney.  Face it, the Middle East is an ongoing disaster in which the chances of getting it wrong are enormously high.  It is a virtual guarantee that someone will take advantage of any action taken by the American president and do evil with it, the most that can be hoped for is a president who is going to make an effort to do less harm.

The other Bernie or Buster was Doug Henwood, a contributing editor.  His case was as a professional Hillary Hater.  That's not my description, it's his.

I’ve spent much of the last year and a half as a professional anti-Hillaryite for the left. My days are filled with predictable attacks from Clinton supporters, most of whom don’t seem to have read a word I’ve written on the contender from Chappaqua. The attacks broadly fall into two categories. The first involve charges of anti-feminism and misogyny. The mere act of criticizing Hillary Clinton’s political history, her duplicity and penchant for secrecy, and her habit of creating scandals (the inevitable consequence of her duplicity and penchant for secrecy), is an affront to the aspirations of women.

His whine about how he's being persecuted by women and other supporters of Hillary Clinton goes on longer than that.   Here is how he builds up to his lofty declaration of principled stupidity.

Another way of phrasing the Ted Cruz question generally goes like this: “Okay, if you think Hillary is so horrible, whom are you going to vote for?” You can answer by listing all the annoying historical and structural constraints that got us here: our constitutionally mandated form of divided and unrepresentative government, consciously designed to frustrate popular power; the semi-official status of the two-party system; the ever-more-dominant role of money in politics; the gatekeeping function of the media, etc. But that will never satisfy the questioner, who wants a firm answer. The exchange often has the feeling (to paraphrase Theodor Adorno) of a cop asking for your papers. So, officer, here’s my answer: I can, in fact, imagine myself voting for Hillary Clinton—but only if David Brock, her nemesis turned promoter, were holding a gun to my head.

Such are the tergiversations of the professional Bernie or Buster to avoid answering the reality that if it's not going to be Bernie Sanders - as it almost certainly is not going to be - the alternative to Hillary Clinton is almost certainly going to be Trump or Cruz or someone who has slightly more palatable table manners but whose policies will be entirely worse than those which Hillary Clinton will put forward.

Apparently the Bernie or Bust crowd believe that their hero has failed in his quest to "move the discussion to the left" if they don't believe that his, grantedly, impressive caucus victories have had that effect which had been the announced intention.  If they don't believe that they will have an effect on a President Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party then the excuse for mounting these stunt candidacies is a fraud.   I don't think Hillary Clinton is foolish enough to not have learned something about how she would have to govern as president to do better than Barack Obama who didn't learn that lesson.   I suspect, if she's lucky enough to get Democratic control of the House and Senate, Hillary Clinton would understand that to do anything she would have to retain that control by supporting candidates for those bodies in a way that Bernie Sanders, and more so, his campaign managers don't seem to understand at all.

In looking into Henwood's background that allows him to ignore what a Republican president will mean for the country and world so he can preen in his pose of Sandersmanian purity,  he's a product of Yale, I suspect a child of affluence, though I wasn't able to confirm that.   While at Yale he was a conservative, a member of the Yalie "Party of the Right" who went on to work on Wall Street for a while  Eventually he went over to the left.   He is married to another professional Hillary Hater, Liza Featherstone, (a Columbia product) both of them have authored recent Hillary bashing books, his,  My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency;  hers, False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Both have lurid images of Hillary Clinton on the cover.   Henwood's has a hideous drawing of her pointing a gun at you, things like you used to see on right-wing hit pieces in the 1990s, like something that David Brock wrote before he left the Republican-fascist right for where he is attacked by such play-leftists as Henwood.   Obviously, Henwood lacked the practical educational opportunity that a deluded young gay man could face in forcing that conversion.  I don't know why he changed but, given his present position, I doubt it was based in a practical consideration of what could be done in the reality we face.   Featherstone may have always been leftish, I wasn't able to find as much detail on her.

I don't know what the combined income of the Henwood-Featherstone household is but I am skeptical that it falls far into the middle-class range.  I would like to know how much they would be impacted by a Cruz presidency, since that's the possibility that Henwood thinks is worth enduring so he can maintain his pose of leftish purity.    I don't know many people who fall into that wealth bracket.  I can say that anyone who would want to risk it on behalf of poor folk here, the working poor, the destitute from a relatively affluent life is a jerk.