The Problem With Liberalism

(This is, by the by, NOT an April Fools prank. Sorry about the timing, I've been working on this for a month...)

(also wik, this is my 2,500th blog post. It's a question if any of us will be here for the 3000th...)

With all of the current chaos in the United States - with trump and his Far Right MAGA brownshirts rampaging through our federal government - there's discernable alarm among the Democratic faithful wondering why the hell their own party leadership - who ought to be opposing trump's smash-and-grabs more forcefully - is publicly playing nice with a conservative Republican party that keeps punching Dems in the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) face.

There's a number of theories why the modern Democratic Party seems so apprehensive in the face of historic destruction by Far Right Wingnuts. I'll throw this one hypothesis out here to give me the excuse to discuss yet another political philosophy (those -isms) of how Liberalism - as a core foundation of modern Democratic Party world-view - is the source of this seeming inaction and timidity.

Liberalism I would argue started as the American world-view, back when it wasn't confined to just one political party. If you look up the term in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (3rd ed, 2009), liberalism "is the belief that it is the aim of politics to preserve individual rights and to maximize freedom of choice." (p. 306) As a philosophical response to the shifts in the United Kingdom from absolute monarchism - the Divine Right of Kings argument that had led to Charles I's execution and then the end of Stuart rule with James II's expulsion in 1688 - the emerging Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and John Stuart Mill developed ideologies justifying the actions against the British kings that didn't want to play nice with others.

Locke in particular had a major influence on American political (liberal) thinking. In Locke's First Treatise of Government, he directly countered the Divine Right of Kings - posited in Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha - as a form of slavery (from York University's PDF archive):

To make way for this doctrine, they have denied mankind a right to natural freedom; whereby they have not only, as much as in them lies, exposed all subjects to the utmost misery of tyranny and oppression, but have also unsettled the titles and shaken the thrones of princes... However we must believe them upon their own bare words, when they tell us, “We are all born slaves, and we must continue so;” there is no remedy for it; life and thraldom we entered into together, and can never be quit of the one till we part with the other... (p.8)

Locke made this point, against the ill intents of absolute rulers:

The great question which in all ages has disturbed mankind, and brought on them the greatest part of those mischiefs which have ruined cities, depopulated countries, and disordered the peace of the world, has been, not whether there be power in the world, nor whence it came, but who should have it. The settling of this point being, of no smaller moment than the security of princes, and the peace and welfare of their estates and kingdoms, a reformer of politics, one would think, should lay this sure, and be very clear in it: for if this remain disputable, all the rest will be to very little purpose; and the skill used in dressing up power with all the splendor and temptation absoluteness can add to it, without showing who has a right to have it, will serve only to give a greater edge to man’s natural ambition, which of itself is but too keen. What can this do but set men on the more eagerly to scramble, and so lay a sure and lasting foundation of endless contention and disorder, instead of that peace and tranquility, which is the blurriness of government, and the end of human society? (p.69)

Having argued against Divine Right in the First part, Locke dug into the Second Treatise (same PDF source):

To this purpose, I think it may not be amiss to set down what I take to be political power. That the power of a magistrate over a subject may be distinguished from that of a father over his children, a master over his servant, a husband over his wife, and a lord over his slave. All which distinct powers happening sometimes together in the same man, if he be considered under these different relations, it may help us to distinguish these powers one from another, and show the difference betwixt a ruler of a commonwealth, a father of a family, and a captain of a galley... Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws, with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the commonwealth from foreign injury, and all this only for the public good... (p.106)

To understand political power aright, and derive it from its original, we must consider what estate all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man. A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty... (p.106)

That is where the basic element of classical liberalism - the rights of an individual compared to the power of the state - takes root. Locke does care to set limits:

But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence; though man in that state have an uncontrollable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it. The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions... (p.107)

There's arguably a lot more I can quote from Locke, but I'll stop here because this is the point where we can see Locke's influence on Thomas Jefferson, whose work on the Declaration of Independence is the keystone of American political philosophy: From which we derived the belief "that all men are created Equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

You might notice Jefferson switches out "possessions" or "property" for "happiness", because that created back in 1776 a rather sticky moral conflict with America's UN-Equal system of chattel slavery on Blacks. Which does point to a more subtle yet still potent problem with liberalism as a political -ism that refers to the main problem overall.

What Locke - and Jefferson, and the rest of the liberal movement of the late 18th Century - aimed for was the establishment and reinforcement of the idea of The Social Contract (edited/cited by Alex Tuckness at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): 

Locke used the claim that men are naturally free and equal as part of the justification for understanding legitimate political government as the result of a social contract where people in the state of nature conditionally transfer some of their rights to the government in order to better ensure the stable, comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberty, and property. Since governments exist by the consent of the people in order to protect the rights of the people and promote the public good, governments that fail to do so can be resisted and replaced with new governments...

The most direct reading of Locke’s political philosophy finds the concept of consent playing a central role. His analysis begins with individuals in a state of nature where they are not subject to a common legitimate authority with the power to legislate or adjudicate disputes. From this natural state of freedom and independence, Locke stresses individual consent as the mechanism by which political societies are created and individuals join those societies...

Into all of this Locke and other liberals built up the the concept of "The Rule Of Law": 

The Rule of Law comprises a number of principles of a formal and procedural character, addressing the way in which a community is governed. The formal principles concern the generality, clarity, publicity, stability, and prospectivity of the norms that govern a society. The procedural principles concern the processes by which these norms are administered, and the institutions—like courts and an independent judiciary that their administration requires...

In this, Liberalism subsists on a structured, procedural form of governance where the people as is their right elect leaders, the leaders create laws and enforce them, and the courts balance things out by defining the laws. If that system breaks down in any way, liberals - if any were in charge - would make changes to the laws and realign the administration and argue for judicial decisions to keep the system going.

This is how the Founding Fathers - balanced between more "conservative" world-views of business and class culture, with the "liberal" world-views of democratic/republic principles and legal stability - worked themselves from makeshift state-level confederations into a "strong" federal Constitutional system designed to provide the individual freedoms promised by their liberalism while guaranteeing that chaos/anarchy and the threat of European monarchism (the Absolutism of the day) did not threaten the American way of life. 

This is why when arguing about the nature (well, the sins) of Conservatism I disagreed with Frank Wilhoit's contention that Conservatism was the only American -ism. Wilhoit believed Conservatism - the modern, twisted version of it - had driven all other -isms out of the political landscape. My contention is that Conservatism - obsessed with seizing and maintaining political/economic/social control for the elite few - exists today as a counterpoint to Liberalism - the guarantees of individual rights within a shared community - which persists as a primary American ideology because the institutions it built - our entire Constitutional system of checks and balances - remain standing.

The problem with our modern Liberalism is how it has blinded itself to the perpetuation of that constitutional system, even as it is collapsing on itself from Far Right conservative misrule.

That Rule of Law that liberals insist on - believe still functions normally - is under attack as trump and his underlings both in the Executive and Legislative branches work to undo all of it: Either through attacking civil liberties of Americans and legal residents, or dismantling/shutting down federal agencies without following procedure or getting legislative consent as Locke intended. I've said this before: A lot of our constitutional federal system relied a lot on Good Faith, that all parties involved were acting for a common purpose or at least with genuine conviction to do the right thing. Without that, without the "unwritten rules" of governance that our nation's relied on for centuries to make things work within both the letter and the spirit of the law, the system's falling apart.

And yet, our current Democratic liberal leadership - that should be in active opposition to the damage trump and the radical Conservative Far Right are inflicting on that system - are still acting - almost deluding themselves - as though the political norms can still be upheld. They're so beholden to the Liberal ideology of the Social Contract that they're opening themselves to manipulation by their Conservative opponents to accelerate the constitutional system's collapse.

The likes of Minority Leader Schumer, and half the state governors planning to run for the Presidency in 2028 - as though a corrupt trump won't shut down elections altogether to seize power permanently - are going through the motions like the political norms they're used to will still be there after trump and the wingnut conservatives have burned it all down. They don't see the urgency or dangers of the moment, because they want to believe the liberal foundations of our nation will somehow survive even without action or defense on their part. They don't want to act in ways that would upset their understanding of that Social Contract: those unspoken norms, those natural rights.

The other problem with adhering to those norms of The Social Contract - that individual rights are upheld through the law, and with justice for all - is how uneven how unequal the enforcement of that Social Contract can be. Even as liberalism as an ideology demands equality for all as a right, in practice our liberal systems have a hard time enforcing or even defining those equal rights because even liberalism desires stability - a status quo - over change. 

You have to remember, even the liberal Founding Fathers compromised on the American system of Black slave labor to get the Declaration approved and the Constitution enacted. The liberalism of early American politics, business, and culture allowed slavery to thrive and spread to where it threatened our nation's well-being by the 1850s, and did little to stop the steady march towards Civil War when the spiritual and political harm of slavery could no longer be tolerated. It became the breaking point of the Social Contract, one that required a full Reconstruction and amendment reforms to repair... and which was left unfinished by the 1870s once the Social Contract (between White leaderships) was reimposed, leading to a century of Jim Crow inequality requiring another round of Civil Rights reforms by the 1960s to achieve even a modicum of justice under the Rule of Law. (All now threatened by a very anti-liberal trump regime undoing every Civil Rights act and social shift of the last 60 years)

Even as that Civil War allowed more left-leaning progressives among the liberal powers to enact major reforms involving education, agriculture, business, and law, and even as the Civil Rights movement attempted even further reforms, those reforms were not equally enforced to ensure the liberal system lived up to its own ideals. This is Liberalism's darkest flaw: It relies on a shared agreed-upon social order that bends too much to the corrupt world-view of more conservative, self-serving ideologues.

This is why there's a power struggle between traditional (classical) Liberals and more progressive (socialist) elements of the Democratic Party pushing for radical reforms and stronger equality for all to undo the damages of conservative elites eager to bring back Divine Right of trumps Kings to dominate us all: Liberals are wary of even incremental changes to the political system if it throws their understanding of the Social Contract into chaos.

There are other elements of Liberalism - such as the early adoption of Capitalism as an economic reform against the authoritarian corruption of mercantilism, without realizing how greed undermined Capitalism like any other economic -ism - that would require more discussion, but I've spent too long trying to hammer this essay out and I need to refocus on other outrages and observations of the current train wreck(s) we're enduring.

In short: Liberalism's problem isn't that it's weak, or vacillating when confronted by conservative or even fascist opposition. It's a genuinely well-informed, well-founded -ism compared to the other more destructive political beliefs that rise and fall with the cycles of history. Liberalism's problem is that it holds too much faith in a Social Contract that's too easily shredded and requires the same repatching over and over. At some point, our modern system of liberalism (neoliberal, I think) has to reposition itself on the chessboard and realize a more profound, truly just system of equality and opportunity has to be forged.

A Statement On Core Principles

So, when it comes down to it, what are the issues I care about the most? On what hills will I stand and fight to ensure those beliefs remain core components of the United States I believe in?

My core principles on key political issues:

1. The rich, and large corporate entities, should be taxed at a higher rate than middle-income and low-income Americans to ensure fairness in the tax burden. This includes rigorous enforcement of upper incomes and large corporations to stop tax evasion.
2. Businesses must be regulated to ensure workplace safety, clean environments, fair access to products and services, high pay and benefits equal to the work performed, and consumer / community protection from any form of fraud.
3. All Americans 18 and older have the right to vote and shall not be blocked, suppressed, or denied their right to vote. Registration must be free and universal to all citizens. If imprisoned, Americans shall immediately regain their right to vote once their sentences are served or are on parole.
4. All Americans provided affordable healthcare across the board as a human right.
5. All Americans provided free public education for children, and affordable public education for all those of college age, as a human right
6. All Americans given personal control of their bodies and health with regards to reproductive rights, meaning affordable and unhindered access to birth control, women’s healthcare services, and abortion as a medical right.
7. All Americans have the right to know that the federal, state, and local governments that represent them are not committing crimes and human rights abuses, and that any agent, official or elected representative committing such crimes be punished (meaning no statute of limitations on those persons).
8. Americans have the right to be protected from active, violent, and spiteful racism / sexism, where haters do NOT have the right to attack someone because of their skin color, their ethnic origin, their gender, their gender preference, or their religion. As much as this means everyone SHOULD be protected, in practice this means protecting the rights and safety of Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Muslims, Jews, Hindi, Sikhs, Women, Gays, Trans, and other minorities from the hate groups that are predominately White Protestant (mostly Male) Assholes.
9. No radio personality or disk jockey shall speak over the opening, middle, or ending of a song. The next SOB who talks just as Pat Benatar starts whistling towards the end of “Love Is a Battlefield” will be executed with extreme prejudice. I don’t care if there’s just 30 seconds of the song left, I WANNA HEAR THE SONG NOT YOU.
10. No more lying in politics. All elected officials, candidates for office, and personnel hired to work for them or our government agencies shall be held to an ethical standard that will punish them for false, hypocritical, and misleading public statements. If you can’t speak truthfully and factually on a matter you can always say “No comment.”

This is what I want to see. This is what I hope for.

Does this make me liberal? Perhaps. But I look at Europe where liberalism and conservatism both agree roughly on public welfare matters like healthcare and education, so I don't think that is what's at issue here. I've seen some self-declared conservatives speak in favor of public schools and affordable healthcare, as well as speak for protecting the rights of minorities. It's not the issues themselves requiring extremism to defend or oppose.

What does matter is HOW such plans are enacted. To what degree can we support the public welfare? What's most sensible about regulating businesses for safe practices? THIS is where the ideological fights SHOULD be, where being a Big Letter Liberal and Big Letter Conservative and Big Letter Moderate would matter. This is where being the Liberal would seek massive support and broad freedoms, where the Conservative would be the skeptic honestly concerned about the costs, where the Moderate would find a pragmatic middle ground that would make the thing work as well and as long as possible. This is where I find myself as a Moderate: I want solutions that work and work well for the long term.

But this is where I split hard against Republicans. Where the Democrats - actively engaged among their own ranks between Centrist and Progressive stances - are amenable and solutions-oriented about the issues that matter to me (and hopefully most of you), the Republicans have gone Full Metal Dogmatic. 

The modern GOP -  reflecting not Conservative values but Reactionary values - does not want debate on ANY of those issues. The modern GOP is absolutely opposed to reasonable tax hikes on upper incomes, they want to slash-and-burn. They WANT to cut the social safety net to nothing. In practice at the state level I've seen Republicans gut funding for schools and teachers, and blocked improved funding for healthcare out of sheer spite. The Far Right wants to eliminate abortion (AND women's healthcare) as a safe practice, and oppose sensible affordable access to birth control not because they're pro-Life (they're not even that) but because they're pro-Judgment (they want to demean/control/depower women).

And dear GOD: The way the Republican Party acts towards Blacks and Latinos (and Muslims) should make any honest citizen sick to their stomachs.

The modern Republican Party wants to deny the rights - the right to vote, the right to learn, the right to LIVE - of every person who's NOT White, or Rich, or Male, or over the age of 50. That's all I see of that party anymore.

That's why I keep screaming FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT VOTE REPUBLICAN.

Because I have principles. And the Republican Party does not.

What If: Bernie Wins The Democratic Nomination?

Before I get into the meat of the title, I just want to note for the Republican Dead Pool that Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie are now out of the race. This leaves the list of victims to:

Trump
Cruz
Rubio
Jeb?
Kasich
Carson
Gilmore

I never viewed Carly as a viable candidate - she was a failed Senate campaigner and her CEO history was a disaster as well - so I'm not surprised she parted after New Hampshire. Christie is a slight disappointment: after punching Rubio into submission - and likely tanking Rubio's chances - he still didn't have enough left to campaign on and was facing harder chances the rest of the primary. Christie's departure is welcome news for the Jeb and Kasich campaigns, as whatever slim numbers were backing the Joisey governor now need another candidate to follow among the "Establishment" names (I doubt Rubio could appeal to them).

Now, that said, let's look at the "What If" question I'm posing tonight. Bernie Sanders won big in New Hampshire, far better than the pundits were expecting and with polling numbers - he's cornering the college/young professional vote and doing better among women than expected - that trend towards positives that can't be ignored.

This is a legitimate question now: What if Bernie Sanders won the Democratic nomination?

If he does so, he becomes the most liberal, Left-leaning candidate put up by the party since Dukakis. In some respects - but not all - he skews far more Left as a self-proclaimed Socialist than Dukakis, Mondale, or McGovern... which are candidates for the Presidency you don't hear the Democratic leadership talk much about because they kinda flamed out (there's are reasons why centrist-leaning candidates like Carter, Clinton and even Obama - who was more pragmatic than progressive in 2008 - won since the New Deal Era).

It will happen because of something that's also happening to the Republican Party much to their chagrin: A level of anger among the voting base that stirs rebellion against "establishment" candidates. There's been a slew of articles about it, but I'll go with this one from Salon.com by Jack Mirkinson:

If you look at basically any other Western democracy, you shouldn’t be too surprised that Hillary Clinton and the unappetizing mush that is Kasich/Bush/Rubio are having such a rough ride. The world is reeling from tectonic demographic and technological changes, along with the rot of oligarchical rule and continual warfare, all of which have driven the politics of country after country into great upheaval. America is no different...

Clinton is hoping that she doesn’t meet the same fate, and she probably won’t, but the scale of her defeat in New Hampshire was quite a thing to behold. This is where the particulars of who is running begins to matter very much. She lost to Sanders in virtually every demographic category, including women—and the mix of voters who powered her 2008 victories deserted her as well. Young voters went for Sanders by a crushing 84-15 margin. Most damning, 91 percent of Democrats who told pollsters that their top concern was honesty and trustworthiness voted for Sanders. Those are bruising, brutal numbers.

Clinton’s biggest hurdle—beyond the specific hurdle that comes with being a woman and carrying around 25 years of toxic political baggage—is that the very world she occupies is suddenly a deep liability for her. The Clinton who casually took reams of money to shower Goldman Sachs with praise was a woman who likely never assumed that any candidate or voter would hold that against her so vehemently. But that’s what’s happening...

For all the strengths Hillary has - years of elected and administrative experience -she still has the weakness of having played too close to business and financial institutions that gave her money and access. Those deep-pocket forces may help her pay for campaigning, but those forces are hated among the Occupy Wall Street crowds that now make up the Democratic voting base.

Sanders may have some links to these deep-pockets as well, but he's not as recognized for it and so has more room to dodge the implications. It helps him that he's been more vocal about going after the big banks than Hillary has.

Despite her front-runner status... Hillary is still Hillary. She does have Unfavorable numbers that can hurt her during another long, bruising campaign. And she doesn't tolerate failure very well.

So... what if Bernie gets all the Enthusiasm?

First off, he'd have to keep campaigning well through a series of states that are more Moderate-Centrist (read: Deep South and Appalachin) than the Northeast states. As Harry Enten from FiveThirtyEight points out:

...Sanders has yet to demonstrate strength in a state whose electorate isn’t more than 90 percent white. Nevada and South Carolina, the next contests, don’t look anything like Iowa or New Hampshire. Only 65 percent of voters were white in the 2008 Democratic caucus in Nevada, and only 43 percent were in South Carolina.

Polling has indicated that Sanders trails among nonwhite voters by nearly 40 percentage points nationally. Although no reliable recent polling is available in Nevada, Clinton leads by 30 percentage points in both of our South Carolina forecasts. In the latest Marist College poll, she’s buoyed by a 74 percent to 17 percent lead among black voters. Sanders must cut into that margin if he wants to have any chance in South Carolina or anywhere in the South.

You could already see how Sanders might have problems in Nevada and South Carolina even as he was crushing Clinton in New Hampshire. Despite winning the state by more than 20 percentage points, the best Sanders could manage among registered Democrats was a tie. His large margin came from registered independents who voted in the Democratic primary. You must be a registered Democrat to vote in the Nevada caucuses, though you can register as one the day of the election. In 2008, 81 percent of Nevada caucus-goers self-identified as Democrats. Just 58 percent of New Hampshire voters on Tuesday thought of themselves as Democrats...

There are still opportunities for Hillary to rebound: the primary system still favors her over Sanders.

Second, there is still the fear among Democrats about going too far Left on the spectrum to where they could scare away the non-Party Moderate voters. I noted earlier that Left-leaning candidates got clobbered over the years, especially after the Civil Rights and Great Society years of LBJ. The DNC leadership has to be terrified of a Sanders campaign - already pushing for a universal health care platform with trillions of dollars tied into it - wrecking them much in the way Trump's anti-immigrant campaign is making the Republicans headdesk in frustration.

In Bernie's defense, the younger generation that is making up his greatest support are skewing that far Left in response to a Far Right domestic agenda that has alienated them. In another FiveThirtyEight article, the polling is showing greater numbers of 20-something and college-age voters having a favorable view of socialism. While they don't outright support socialism in practice - income redistribution isn't that popular among the young - they're not terrified of it.

I actually predicted this bit, years ago. That the Republican Insult of Choice for anyone Far Left - Socialism - was losing its effectiveness due to its abuse, and that history was making it obsolete as a new generation grew up:

We are getting, right now (2009) with this year's set of 18-year-olds, the first generation of college students and the first generation of voting age that DOES NOT KNOW THE COLD WAR on any personal level. When they were born, Gorbachev was on his way out. The United States was the sole superpower on the planet with any conceivable military, economic, political, and cultural mojo. Cuba was this island off of Florida with a constant supply of decent baseball players swimming over, with a graying old man in charge who could be viewed more as a run-of-the-mill dictator than a Communist propangandist. Okay? We're talking about the first generation ever who learned about Communism (and its cousin Socialism) IN THE PAST TENSE. Trust me, from my memories of high school history studies: Anything older than ten years in the history books is ANCIENT HISTORY. This is a generation of 18-year-olds who grew up learning how COMMUNISM FAILED. To them, it's not a threat. It's not even a joke. It just... is. Like feudalism, or mercantilism, it's just things to study. How can you terrify a generation with the boogeyman specter of "Socialism" when they've never even experienced it?

If Sanders wins the nom, it is going to be on the backing of a large group of young voters deciding as a bloc in a way few previous generations have. Even Boomers - a massive generational bump - were arguably more divided. This generation - Millennials - are coming of age with the bleakest future of low-paying jobs and massive college debts any young voting group have ever faced, with little sign that the leadership of either party - including the Democratic party that at least speaks to their social activism on gay rights and gender equality - is going to do anything about their key issues any time soon. They can't trust Hillary: her coziness to the financial leviathans that wiped out the economy in 2007-08 makes them wary.

But what would this all mean in the part of the election that matters: the General election where all voters of all ages come into play?

Whereas the Republicans are facing the great risk of alienating a vast majority of non-Party voters if Trump becomes their nominee, the Democrats are facing a lesser risk. As Peter Beinart noted in The Atlantic last month, the nation - despite all the Far Right noise screaming that claims otherwise - is noticeably shifting Left on the political spectrum. After 40-plus years of a Right shift - started by Goldwater, achieved by Reagan, destroyed by Dubya - the country is reacting to the failures of the Republican Far Right insisting on tax cuts that don't work and a foreign policy that pisses off our allies.

Where the Republicans risk the likelihood of Trump alienating half their own party with his reactionary Nihilism, the Democrats are facing the likelihood of Sanders making Far Left Progressivism - maybe not as far as Socialism in the purest sense - palatable. It helps that Sanders could position himself in ways the moderate non-Party voters would accept: as an experienced, competent leader in opposition to Trump's bullying celebrity persona.

As for the fears that a Sanders Presidency would fail to achieve any goals or promises, as John Cole points out at Balloon Juice if Congress remains under Republican control - the House remains likely - that's a moot argument:

A lot of people surprised by the youth vote for Bernie and then dismissing his policies as unattainable seem to be missing a few things. First is that with a Republican House and Senate, everything Clinton and Sanders propose is pie in the sky. Fer fuck’s sake, the House broke tradition this year and isn’t even going to pretend that Obama is offering a budget... 

So dismissing the Sanders proposals as uniquely optimistic or unattainable makes me think that the harsh realists uttering said statements don’t have as harsh a grip on reality as they think they do. They won’t work with Obama, so I have no idea why some of you think they’re going to work with “Hitlery”- you know, the person they have been savaging for what? Four decades? How could Sanders be worse?...

Basically, the Democratic voters are realizing that there won't be any real difference between Hillary in the White House or Bernie: the Republicans will still play a game of obstruction and ruin because that's how the Far Right rolls, son.

Bernie winning the nomination can only be a problem if - and only if - the Republicans are able to run a nominee who can truly appeal to Moderate-Centrist voters who matter in the General Election... or if the Republicans can repress voter turnout through cheating... or depress voter turnout through massive negative campaigning.

The first option is unlikely as a Browns Super Bowl appearance right about now. The "Moderate" candidates like Jeb (ha) or Rubio (HA!) or Kasich (meh) are failing with no sign of improvement. The odds are favoring either Trump (AUGH) or Cruz (AUGH) as the nominee. The second option is likely as the GOP has been pushing the excuse of voter fraud - that they can't prove - to shut down likely Democratic voters, and the third option of mudslinging has honestly alienated enough voters to shy away from elections to where turnout can barely break 50 percent of the population.

In that scenario, a Bernie Sanders nomination means the Democratic Party has to - HAS TO - push ever harder for Get-Out-The-Vote efforts. They kind of have to do that with Hillary as well - her burden is an Unfavorable polling number that could scare away potential voters - but in Bernie's case it is going to be a brutal necessity.

They'd also have to pray like hell that the Republican nominee is Trump or Cruz: the stark difference between the candidates would be a positive to the Democrats.

Personally, I'm still undecided between Hillary or Bernie. I am set on voting Democrat regardless of candidate, because my apostasy against the wingnut-mad Republican Party makes it impossible to back ANY of them - even Kasich, the one-eyed king among weak/insane Republicans - in the General Election.

I just want the Democrats to nominate their candidate for all the right reasons: practical, thoughtful, with an eye towards social justice and better wages with better jobs.

We'll see.