The Democratic debates will start in about two weeks. Then the attacks on each other will ramp up. They are already starting to go after the current front runner, former Vice President Joe Biden. I just heard this morning that Biden is going to appear in his first debate alongside Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). That should be interesting. If the 2016 primary debates are any indication, Bernie will go after Joe with everything he has. Then again, maybe, just maybe he has learned something from what happened in 2016, when he set up former Secretary Hillary Clinton to be knocked over by Donald Trump. He really did. I doubt that it was deliberate, but Trump and Sanders became a tag team, going after Clinton. But I doubt that Sanders has the level of self-awareness, nor the humility to admit that he did anything wrong in 2016, other than losing.
But I want to talk more specifically about the voters, not those who will be voted on. This online platform, Medium, is a virtual hotbed of leftists and Bernie Sanders supporters. I have read some of their posts, as well as their profiles. One is an Australian, a young woman, who is fiercely, viciously left wing. I’m not even sure if she identifies as a Democrat (even though, as a foreigner, she is ineligible to be in an American political party) but she has vowed to do everything in her power to bring down any Democratic nominee who doesn’t meet her requirements for being sufficiently leftist. I have some advice for her, not that she would take it. It goes: Why don’t you stay out of American politics and I will stay out of Australian politics? Fair dinkum? See, it isn’t so much the politicians (other than Sanders) who I worry about. They all (except for Sanders) seem to me to be possessed of enough decency and seem to have sufficient understanding of the stakes involved in this election, that they won’t savage each other.
I have written several anti-Bernie posts for Medium. None of them generated any significant traffic. But my Aussie political foe has quite a large following, both here and on other social media platforms. And I venture to guess that most of them are American. I doubt if there are very many Australians as invested in American politics as she is. I say this even though I know that Trump is an existential threat to the entire world. I just don’t see the likelihood of many Australians putting the level of fire and verbal rage into print regarding American politics as she.
Which leads me to my point: What are all these die-hard supporters of this far-left blogger going to do if, say, Joe Biden is the nominee? Will they swallow their pride, realize what’s at stake, and vote for the candidate that will save America and the rest of the world from the damage that a second Trump administration is likely to do?
I doubt if most of them will do that, and that is what worries me.
