Democrats have Bernie Sanders, a Senator from Vermont who chooses to call himself a democratic socialist. He wants to be President, too. On a lesser important level, just the fact that he calls himself a democratic socialist is a problem because very many Americans have an almost knee jerk antipathy to the term, "socialist". It is just a way of saying that Sanders believes that a democratically elected government has a very important role to play in establishing a military, a school system, parks, health care, a highway system, and so on. What kind of a national parks would we have if we depended on oil companies, or coal companies, to provide open space for us? I live just up the road from enormous open pit mines, and the mining companies assure us that mines and forests and drinking water can live in harmony. Yes, sir!
Bernie Sanders is a problem for Democrats far different from that represented by Donald Trump. Trump is firing up the rabid right wing with anti-immigrant, racist, Know-Nothing, masculine blowhard rhetoric, and wants to make the Republican electorate what he is. Sanders is awakening a liberal wing of the Democratic Party that has been in a coma for decades. Sanders might have a better chance of being nominated than Trump does, but no one with less money than Trump or the Koch brothers ought to bet on either one of them.
Hillary Clinton is the most likely Democratic nominee for the Presidency. She, like her husband, and like the Democratic Party generally, have edged right. There is nothing dramatically different about her candidacy except that she is the most likely candidate to actually become the first female President. And then Bernie Sanders pops up to awaken the Rumpelstiltskin liberal wing of the party! What seemed to be inevitable is suddenly scary: Sanders is drawing impressive crowds everywhere, suggesting that the mudslide movement of the Party over toward what used to be Republican territory might be irritating voters.
What Trump and Sanders both are doing is to shake up the political party system. Both the Republican and the Democratic Parties have slid off to the right, politically and, in sliding, have begun to resemble each other. Ever since the 1960s, when we recognized that our own government, our own elected officials, were lying to us about the war in Vietnam, and were manipulating not only our own institutions, but subverting other governments, too--consider Latin America, and Iran--we have fostered a culture of distrust of our own democratic institutions. One of the most effective ways to run for public office is to maintain that government is corrupt, useless, and a hindrance, and then say you want to be elected to office in that system. A lot of people hate government, mindlessly, without explanation. They scorn government, and praise banks and corporate executives.
If Trump causes the Republican Party to be perceived as something like Donald Trump, sensible people might not be able to swallow the lump in their throats. If Sanders causes Democrats to see their classical liberal decency awaken, Democrats might put great pressure on Hillary Clinton, who already has to bear a load of deserved Clinton antipathy.
Our two-party system is almost a bad joke, without meaning. Congress is pathetic, rarely able to give the impression that they are adults. Our infrastructure--highways, rail transportation, electrical grid, city utilities, bridges--our response to global warming, educational systems, inattention to income inequity, hungry children, and almost everything that makes great societies great, are not just inadequate: they are almost criminal. Decent societies do not allow children to go hungry, or to remain uneducated. Decent societies do not imprison as many people as we do.
And on the other side, democratic societies do allow people to express their ignorance, their prejudices, their racism and their sexist attitudes. In a free society, a vocal population can pretend that evolution is a myth, and that myth is science.
Who knows what might happen if Donald Trump continues to champion the new Know-Nothing Party, and if Bernie Sanders actually awakens the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party?
We are overdue for a redefinition of both political parties. Perhaps we ought to have more than two parties. Maybe it is time for the Civil War to come to an end, finally. Maybe Rumpelstiltskin will sit up.
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