On power and powerlessness and the future of course - Benjamin Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker:

'It’s common to describe the present split within the Democratic Party as pitting its left against its center. A different way to put it is that the Party is split between its likely future and its current reality. An Emerson poll of Iowa this week found that forty-four per cent of Democrats under fifty support Sanders; ten per cent favor Elizabeth Warren, and no other candidate reached double digits. You’d think that a growing coalition of this size would be enticing to other Democrats, but Sanders has been endorsed by just one of his Senate colleagues, Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, and by seven members of the House. On Friday, he had the support of only one Iowa state legislator, while Amy Klobuchar had been endorsed by eighteen. “Nobody likes him,” Hillary Clinton says, of Sanders, in a new documentary just shown at Sundance, which seems true in a certain sense but beside the point. His voters no longer look quite so much like outsiders to the Party. They are beginning to seem like the future base. The former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has been talking up an analysis that he and some associates conducted, which found that Sanders’s proposals would add sixty trillion dollars in new spending programs, about twenty per cent of G.D.P. That is more than fifty times the new spending proposed by Klobuchar, ten times that proposed by Joe Biden, and nearly twice that proposed by Warren. According to Summers, Sanders’s program is nearly three times the size of the New Deal. Sanders might quibble with the numbers, but the vast gap between the scale of his own programs and those of his rivals suggests something about why his supporters have been so hard for other Democrats to pull away. “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders’s most prominent surrogate, told New York magazine last month. At stake in Sanders’s primary campaign is whether the transformation of the Democrats has already begun.

Last Saturday, at Ames City Auditorium, Sanders, travelling with Ocasio-Cortez and the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, drew a crowd of more than a thousand people, which meant that two hundred of them had to watch the rally from a gym out back. Moore went out to address them. “You’re like me, this is the slacker crowd!” Moore said. “We don’t show up two hours early for anything!” But, whatever the Sanders campaign is, it isn’t for slackers. Sanders knew from the outset of the race that he was likely to raise more money than any of his rivals, and he has—more than ninety-six million dollars so far, according to the campaign. His campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, is a former Harvard baseball player who trained in Harry Reid’s Senate office. His role in the Sanders operation is something like the one that Rahm Emanuel once played in the young Barack Obama’s: the figure in an idealistic campaign who understands something about power. Sanders’s campaign has a sharp slogan—“Not Me. Us.”—and branding that keeps pivoting, deftly, to match the news. In Iowa this past weekend, volunteers were wearing the latest buttons, which respond to questions about Sanders’s electability. They read, “Bernie Beats Trump.” Sanders’s platform is no less radical than it was in 2016, and his supporters’ siege mentality is undiminished. On Friday night, Rashida Tlaib, one of Sanders’s most outspoken surrogates, made headlines for booing a mention of Hillary Clinton at a campaign event. (Tlaib later apologized.) But Sanders’s movement, with all its bristling emotions, is also beginning to look like a winning one. At every level, there is an interesting tension, between powerlessness and power.'

Read the article here.

Who knows, the future might be a 78-old Jewish man, who is mainly right in speaking highly of the advantages of European-style social security.
On the other hand, after having watched one of the debates in the early summer or late spring of 2019 I was pretty sure that Joe Biden would disappear soon off the radar screen, not to speak of the sudden prominence to which his son rose, he is still there, Mr. Biden.

The future might well be a return to the past. If not, we wouldn't have gotten Brexit for example.

But history of course has a knack for irony, maybe it will turn out to be Mr. Trump who paved the way for European-style social security in America. And Americans might be finally ready for what the German welfare state used to be. A bit of capitalism but the state sends its workers every summer to a decent spa town, preventing is better than healing. It's by no means communism, I would rather say it's a kind of economic romanticism.
The rough edges of capitalism can be left to Moscow and Putin.
"Not. Me. Us," is the slogan of Mr. Sanders, which sounds awkwardly like an Apple advertisement of twenty years ago. ('Here's to the crazy ones.")
I propose this slogan: "Americans, you all deserve a German spa town and some decent strudel." The government will take care of the spa town, the free market will provide you with the best strudel outside Germany and Austria.