Bernie or Bust

The speech given by Michelle Obama at the Democratic convention was much praised and rightly so.  But the three most on-point words spoken during the first day of the event were these:  “You’re being ridiculous.”  As is now well known, they were said by comedian/actor Sarah Silverman to Bernie Sanders obsessives who were being, in fact, ridiculous – and, as is their wont, childish, boorish, and self-indulgent.  Their threat – in keeping with their insufferable self-righteousness and moral superiority -- to hand over their vote to the ignoramus Donald Trump in order to indulge their irrational, over-the-top hatred of Hillary Clinton, is truly astonishing.  A few points for them to consider:

1.Hillary Clinton is the nominee, not Bernie Sanders. That’s over with, and no amount of acting out will change it.

2. The overwhelming majority of Democratic voters – and for that matter, the overwhelming majority of the American people – do not know what the Democratic National Committee is or what it does or why it exists or if it exists, and are not influenced in any way by its internal machinations, including snarky email traffic among its functionaries about Bernie Sanders.  Sanders lost by millions of votes and that had nothing to do with the DNC or any election shenanigans of any kind by anyone else.  It had to do with the will of the voters. Period.  The nomination was not stolen from Sanders.  It was lost by him.

3. The jeering and the booing and the weeping and the long-suffering eyes-to-the-sky gazes betray a remarkably juvenile understanding of how the electoral process is supposed to work in a democracy, and how the two-party system is supposed to work within that process. The idea here is to  select a person whose view of the world is most like ours to run for office against the person whose view of the world is least like ours.   It’s not a team sport where we root-root-root for our side in the service of an uncritical emotional attachment to it and fall desperately in love with its star player.

4. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are politically much more alike than they are different, and they are both vastly different from Trump.  That’s what this election is about.  What it’s not about: Your failure to get every single thing you want, exactly as you want it, or you will stomp out of the room in a fit of pique.  The big picture here is that the Sanders-Clinton side is about inclusiveness and a reverence for the democratic process, and the Trump side is about divisiveness and authoritarianism, even fascism.  Get over yourselves and your petty disappointments and your haughtily judgmental verdicts regarding the sins of Hillary Clinton and get some perspective about who and what she is and is not.

Here is what the history books will say about fascist America: It came about because a group of disgruntled Democrats swung the election to Donald Trump by voting for him to show their anger over the failure of their candidate, Bernie Sanders, to win their party’s nomination.