Bernie's In

Trump is calling for Bern to run as an independent.

Little Bernie is out...But where is all the money the man received from the public?

From a great distance, the news that volunteers associated with Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign are turning their attentions to the herculean task of organizing progressives for midterm elections would seem to be exciting news for all Democrats. Without question, the close alignment of the two parties with groups of voters who do (older white people) and don't (younger and minority people) participate in non-presidential elections has been a big part — along with the normal backlash against the party controlling the White House — of the massive Republican gains of 2010 and 2014. The prospect of heightened midterm turnout from under-30 voters alone could be a big and important deal for the Donkey Party.

But the closer you get to the Sandernistas' Brand New Congress initiative — the new project by recently laid-off Bernie staffers to create a revolution in Congress beginning with the 2018 elections — the less it looks like the instrument for a difficult but achievable task and the more it looks like the product of a very strange set of beliefs about American politics. It's not focused on boosting progressive turnout in general elections, but on recruiting and running candidates in Republican as well as Democratic primaries who meet a rigid set of policy litmus tests. The idea is very explicitly that people alive with the Bern can literally elect a "brand-new Congress" in one election cycle to turn public policy 180 degrees.

Yes, that was what I feared: The discredited notion that lefties and the tea party can make common cause in something other than hating on the Clintons and Barack Obama is back with a vengeance. And worse yet, Donald Trump — Donald Trump — is being touted as an example of a Republican capable of progressive impulses because he shares the old right-wing mercantilist hostility to free trade and has enough money to scorn lobbyists. Does your average Trump supporter really "believe climate change is real" and disbelieve that "all Muslims are terrorists"? Do Obamacare-hating tea-partiers secretly favor single-payer health care? Do the people in tricorn hats who favor elimination of labor unions deep down want a national $15-an-hour minimum wage? And do the very activists who brought the Citizens United case and think it's central to the preservation of the First Amendment actually want to overturn it?

It's this last delusion that's the most remarkable. If there is any one belief held most vociferously by tea-party activists, it's that anything vaguely approaching campaign-finance reform is a socialist, perhaps even a satanic, conspiracy. These are the people who don't think donors to their political activities should be disclosed because Lois Lerner will use that information to launch income-tax audits and persecute Christians. The tea folk are much closer to the Koch brothers in their basic attitudes toward politics than they are to conventional Republicans.

Sanders may be correct that the burdens of the tax fall disproportionately on people of modest means, but as Margot Sanger-Katz has pointed out, there is some evidence that this very feature can make the tax more equitable. By raising the price of sugary drinks, poor consumers can be encouraged to drink less of it, reaping the caloric rewards, while more affluent consumers pay the tax. What’s more, the proceeds of the soda tax finance a vital liberal social goal (in this case, early education). Sanders has no rationale to oppose the Philadelphia plan based on analyzing how only half of the program would work.

Indeed, it is very hard to understand how Sanders’s opposition to it can be reconciled with his own platform, which — both in its specifics and its general theme — rests upon higher taxes on the non-rich. To oppose a new tax-and-transfer plan based solely on the regressive character of the financing source, without any consideration of the benefits of the spending, would rule out his own plans as well. Not incidentally, Sanders has won plaudits from right-wing pundits at places like the Daily Caller and Reason, and a fake grassroots organization financed by the soda industry.

The Sanders campaign began as a message vehicle for his ideas. The final stages of the candidacy have brought him to a very strange intellectual place.

Let me share one we saw today

He is just another Ralph Nader who might get Trump elected to office and than disappear from the political scene just like Nader