No Democrat Deserves a Free Pass Just Because They're Not Trump

As much as you may not want it to happen, the 2020 primaries have begun. The field of contenders for the Democrats right now is both completely theoretical and ridiculously crowded. Essentially, any Democrat whose name has come up in the last two years is possibly in the mix, and that includes both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. But pundits are more interested in a new showdown in the primaries: the alleged war between Bernie Sanders and Beto O'Rourke.

First of all, it's important to get the actual backstory out of the way. There's no evidence that Sanders is directing or supporting, tacitly or otherwise, a shadow war against a Beto O'Rourke presidential run. That whole idea started because of a tweet from the director of the biggest liberal think tank in the country, the Center for American Progress, which has a spotty track record of actually supporting progressive goals or candidates. When journalist David Sirota shared O'Rourke's record of accepting oil and gas donations, CAP director and Hillary crusader Neera Tanden took it to 11, calling on Bernie Sanders to repudiate such "attacks" by his "supporters."

She followed up by saying, "I have no candidate in 2020. We can’t destroy whoever the nominee is."

This is extremely backwards framing, but it's not uncommon. Democrats are all on the same "team," the argument goes, and shouldn't they close ranks to defeat Donald Trump? But it's akin to saying that no one is allowed to critique any Democrat ever in case they may eventually run for president. It's based on a flawed argument about Trump's victory, that Sanders insufficiently backed Hillary Clinton after the primaries despite a bigger portion of his supporters voting for her than hers did for Barack Obama in 2008. It also ignores the fact that the Republican Party is very ideologically fractured, keeps lurching further from the center, and went through a vicious primary in 2016 only to emerge with total control of the federal government.

On one level, the need to whip up support seems to make sense, if for no other reason than the Democrats don't have nearly as deep a bench as the Republicans of prominent, party-line-towing suits ready to swap in whenever an old one falls. But it's also important to keep in mind that if there's anything we should be able to judge politicians on, it's their policy and their beliefs. Is it an attack on Joe Biden, for example, to bring up his history of working against school integration? Or that time he said he has "no empathy" for young people struggling to get by because his generation "decided that we were going to change the world and we did?"

Defeating Donald Trump in 2020 can't be the ultimate goal for the party because Trump isn't going to just go away. Even if he does lose, there's almost no chance he'll give up Twitter or the campaign rallies, even with no campaign to run. And even if he decides to never run for office again, his influence and all the factors that put him in the White House in the first place aren't going to go away after just one election. Democrats need to do more to justify their leadership than just putting up candidates whose top qualities are charm and not being Ted Cruz or they risk letting Trump or someone even worse eventually step into the vacuum that they leave open.

Even when the pragmatic, centrist choice defeats the hardline right-winger, that's not necessarily a long term win. Look at Emmanuel Macron in France: his victory over the racist Marine Le Pen of the borderline fascist Front National party was seen as a huge stumble for a string of far right victories in Europe. But Macron's policies have only exacerbated deep problems in France, and national protests have rocked the country since his administration decided, among other things, to cut taxes on the wealthy and raise them for everyone else by implementing a new gas tax. Macron is now so unpopular that many in France are calling for him to resign instead of finish his term.

If the Democratic establishment insists on trying to crown another favorite candidate, like it did Clinton in 2016, then no one should be surprised if we see a repeat of 2016 on Election Day. And as embarrassing as that will be for the Party, it'll be much worse for the rest of us.