Mr. Divine leaves aside his usual political hysteria, in favor of an invidious comparison of Sanders with Jeremy Corbyn. Eliding from his narrative that Corbyn lost that election by not supporting Brexit, to engage in reductivism. Such was Corbyn’s political miscalculation. Mr. Divine resorts to an utterly weak sarcasm, that loses its rhetorical force, the further the reader goes in the body of his polemic.

Headline: Bernie Sanders the American Version of Jeremy Corbyn? Gulp.

With Bernie Sanders’s relentless rise, the specter of Jeremy Corbyn now hangs over the Democratic race. At times, it’s uncanny how similar the two left-populist leaders are. An outlier long at odds with his party’s establishment? Check. A legislator with decades of voting who has almost no legislation to call his own? Yep. A 70-something beloved by 20-somethings? Check. An insurgent movement with cultish overtones that took over the party from more moderate figures? Yes. A more left-wing platform than any in his party’s history? Uh-huh. A man with many, many embarrassing connections in the past with hard-left figures across the globe? Oh yeah. Someone who hasn’t changed his mind on almost anything since the 1970s? Pretty much. Some highly unsavory hangers-on and followers? To put it mildly.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/is-bernie-sanders-the-american-version-of-jeremy-corbyn.html

A bit further in his essay Mr. Divine offers this observation on Sanders:

And yet I worry. Watching Sanders in the South Carolina debate, he became aggressive, shouty, and angry. His visceral hatred of actual billionaires like Mike Bloomberg — and not just the system that creates billionaires — was striking to me. He’s all but incapable of nuance. I remember my own interaction with him on the Bill Maher show, where I begged him to consider at least that there might be a middle ground between clobbering the pharmaceutical companies’ profits and encouraging research and development in the private sector. He wouldn’t. The profit motive in health care was evil, even if it had saved and extended countless lives.

To conclude his essay, the reader is grateful of reaching its end, Mr. Divine further describes his ‘worry’. His annoying paternalism is ever-present:

So yes, I worry, given the huge stakes in November. I much prefer Bernie to Corbyn, but the closer you look, the more parallels you can see. What has happened to the Labour Party these past few years has a striking resemblance to what has happened to the Democrats. And in Britain, even when left populism really did strike a chord, as it did in 2017, and even when it faced a far less impressive politician than Trump in Theresa May, it was never enough to actually, you know, win.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/is-bernie-sanders-the-american-version-of-jeremy-corbyn.html

Compare Mr. Divine’s hectoring with what Sarah Jones offers in her insightful essay about Sanders and the Democratic Party:

Headline: Who’s Afraid of Bernie Sanders?

Senator Bernie Sanders has a long road to travel before he becomes the Democratic Party’s nominee for president. But he’s inching closer with each primary result, and most polls predict a strong showing for the Vermont senator on March 3 (a.k.a. Super Tuesday), when a large number of states hold their primaries. Some people, predictably, are freaking out about the prospect of momentum for Sanders. The primary is so crowded that top candidates, including Sanders, have been unable to open up a gap between them and the rest of the field. Even if he does well on Super Tuesday, it’s possible that Sanders could reach the convention with a plurality of delegates, rather than an outright majority. In this scenario, Sanders would not be able to claim the nomination on the first ballot, for which voting is restricted to delegates won during the primaries and caucuses. And in this scenario, some centrists see an opportunity.

On the second ballot, Democratic superdelegates — party members who are permanent delegates and thus not assigned by primaries or caucuses — will be allowed to cast a vote, and dozens of them told the New York Times that they are prepared to try to deny Sanders the nomination if convention voting goes to a second round. The tactic carries with it the stench of desperation, and if carried out, superdelegates could mortally wound a party they claim to want to save. The gap between the average Sanders voter and the average party official looks as wide as it’s ever been.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/bernie-sanders-superdelegates-and-the-contested-convention.html?utm_source=tw&utm_campaign=nym&utm_medium=s1

To quash the Sanders Insurgency the ‘Super Delegates’ will be used, after the first ballot, to deny the nomination to Sanders. A ‘deadlocked convention’ is the pretext that will enable the Clinton Coterie, to quash that insurgency by undemocratic/extra-democratic  means. Mr. Divine pursues his invidious comparison of Corbyn/Sanders, while missing, or more pointedly eliding that potential political melodrama, from his and his readers conceptual grasp. The Corbyn comparison offers a potential reason why Mr. Divine would make the rhetorical thrust of the Corbyn comparison the primary propaganda choice.

Old Socialist