Heartache With Hard Work

The White Queen, from Through the Looking-Glass:

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Donald Trump:

In his first 100 days, Trump said he would cut taxes, “renegotiate trade deals and renegotiate military deals,” including altering the U.S. role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
He insisted that he would be able to get rid of the nation’s more than $19 trillion national debt “over a period of eight years.”
Most economists would consider this impossible because it could require taking more than $2 trillion a year out of the annual $4 trillion budget to pay off holders of the debt.

It’s hard to find a defender of superdelegates these days. They’re undemocratic, elitist, and stacked up against against a candidate who is running on themes of participation and populism. And I sympathize with the frustration people feel. In fact, for all that I’m making ‘the case for superdelegates’ here, at the end of the day, I’d be fine with scrapping the system.  If only because the appearance of impropriety that they create is a problem.

But I do think it’s worth making clear why I find the attacks on the system to be significantly overstated. Put simply: I don’t think that superdelegates are particularly problematic, and I especially don’t think they pose any meaningful practical threat to democracy.

That’s true for the obvious reason that is already much-discussed: at the end of the day, even if one candidate (Sanders in ’16, Obama in ’08) trails badly on the superdelegate front early, that tells us almost nothing about how those delegates will actually align themselves once the convention rolls around. It’s difficult to envision a scenario where a Sanders-like candidate won the majority of pledged delegates only to have the result overturned by the superdelegates. Which means the gnashing of teeth about stolen results is almost certainly unnecessary.

“But,” you might reasonably respond, “if the superdelegates will invariably side with the eventual pledged delegate winner, then they serve no purpose at all and should still be scrapped.”

But this is where things get more complicated. Because I said it’s ‘difficult’ to envision a world where the superdelegates tipped an election. But difficult is not impossible. Those cases where this might take place are exceptional, and those exceptions are very much the issue. To explain:

The temporal rescue

Consider the following scenario: Candidate A wins 55% of the delegates, but accumulates that lead entirely in the first half of the campaign. In early April a scandal emerges that causes her popular support to drop like a stone. A previously weak challenger (Candidate B) suddenly starts winning huge margins, but doesn’t have enough time to make up the gap.

The superdelegates could tip the balance and nominate Candidate B, if they so choose. And it seems to me that they absolutely should do so. The primary calendar is long, and there’s a reason for that. But the temporal gap does matter in some cases. In this scenario, it’s almost certainly the case that many of the people who voted for Candidate A now wish they hadn’t. And they will likely appreciate the superdelegates rescuing them from the choice they made in the fog of uncertainty.

The Trump problem

Another exceptional case doesn’t require any fanciful imagination. You only have to look at the current Republican race, where Trump is wrecking havoc with a system that lacks any strong mechanisms for reasserting control.

If the Republicans had superdelegates, blocking Trump’s nomination would be far easier. And that would be a much better world. Both for the country, who escapes the danger of his election, and for the party, who escapes the shattering of their internal mechanisms for stability.

Primaries are about parties, not ‘democracy’ as such

This brings me to another point, one which I’m sure will be more contentious, but which I think people really ought to take a little more seriously. And that is: the purpose of the primary system is for the party to select its nominee. It’s very likely that they will want to do so using democratic mechanisms, but this isn’t an absolute requirement. Parties aren’t governmental institutions themselves; they are private organizations with motives, goals, ideological commitments, and institutional relationships. And they need all of those things to preserve their internal coherence and therefore achieve the objectives they’re promising to pursue.

It is of course true that a party might grow so corrupt that shattering its hold on its institutions becomes necessary. But this is definitely a case where people should be careful what they wish for. Unless we undertake massive constitutional reform, parties are an inevitable feature of our electoral structure. You might shatter one, but a new one will quickly emerge to fill the void. And it will employ almost all the same mechanisms to establish internal control on its agenda and power apparatuses. I completely understand why these things make people angry, but blaming the parties themselves misses the origin of the problem. These incentives are part of our constitutional order.

The point here is: parties use devices like superdelegates to maintain some degree of control on potentially unruly actors (the Trumps of the world), and this is both natural and (often) necessary.

It’s also important to remember that parties aren’t simply the elites. Parties are broad coalitions that involve millions of people, the actual rank and file. Which means they can be given new marching orders and new motivations. And it is often the case that this sort of internal reform works better than a Trumpian coup, where a bare majority, in the heat of the moment, blows apart all of the restraining structures that held things together.

I want to be clear here. I’m not arguing that primaries shouldn’t be democratic. I think they should! I’m just arguing that ‘democracy’ shouldn’t serve as an absolute decision rule. There will come circumstances where the decisions of millions of independent actors will be less optimal than the decision of a unified party apparatus. This is true for precisely the same reason that unregulated free markets can produce horrible inequalities. Markets are efficient in many respects, but sometimes centralized control is a good thing.

As with all things, balance is the watchword. It may well be that the superdelegate system errs by moving too far in the direction of centralization. And perhaps less coercive means can be found to permit the will of the people to find its best expression in selecting a nominee. But for the reasons I stated at the top of this piece, I don’t think that’s the case. Superdelegates are party actors and elected officials. They are enormously sensitive to the people, and accountable in quite a few other ways. If they ever did choose to put their finger on the scale of an election, it seems likely that it would be for very good reasons.

The actual convention matters, in ways that have nothing to do with the identity of the nominee

On a related note, it’s worth remembering that superdelegates exist for reasons that have nothing to do with picking the nominee.

Their ‘super’ status means that they’re unconnected to specific electoral results. And that’s the case partly because this system is simply a way to ensure that key actors in the party have a role to play at the convention. That is: the key thing is just to make sure that they’re delegates. Because the delegates at the convention have lots of other tasks beyond signing off on the nominee. They help write the platform. They shape the agenda of the party. And it seems quite reasonable to me that governors, members of the National Committee (who spend their whole lives working to promote the interests of the party), prominent mayors, leaders of important party interest groups, etc. have a reasonable role to play in that process.

Final point: the problem of pluralities

I’ve saved the simples argument for last. This one involves much less convoluted discussion about the nature of democracy and political parties, and doesn’t require that you buy into any premises about the proper function of elite mediators.

The simplest case for superdelegates is that they provide a device for producing a majority candidate in a system that might otherwise only give us a plurality winner.

To illustrate:

• Candidate A wins 45% of the pledged delegates (while coming in first in most of the states)
• Candidate B wins 20%
• Candidate C wins 20%
• Candidate D wins 10%
• Candidates E-G combine to take the final 5%

In this hypothetical, we started with a very divided field. The normal process of winnowing took longer than usual to exert itself, and quite a few candidates stuck around through Super Tuesday. In a proportional system (the right way to run a primary, I think), they can easily gather quite a few delegates without necessarily winning many (or any) contests.

I think it’s quite clear that Candidate A is the ‘winner’ of this contest. But absent superdelegates, they have no way to guarantee the nomination. Which means you might end up with a series of arguments over the summer and a contested convention, in which a bunch of factional candidates squabble amongst themselves, and do serious damage to the party in the process.

Conclusion

I started out by saying that I’d probably support efforts to eliminate the superdelegate system. I completely understand the reasons why it bothers people, and I’m not insensitive to the concern that it threatens the spirit of democratic selection.I’d also add that there are other ways to achieve most of the benefits I’ve talked about here. I’m not positive those workarounds would ultimately be any more ‘democratic’ in nature, but there are probably ways to manage the system with a little bit more sensitivity to the frustration of those who on the outside of the ‘room where it happens.’

But in a world filled with things deserving our genuine outrage, this ought to be on the extreme low end of our priorities.  I understand why this system feels aggravating, but I implore my Sanders-supporting friends out there to find more significant targets for their opprobrium. There is a lot that’s genuinely wrong with our system, and which is far more worthy of the polemic that’s currently being wasted on this subject.

The writing has been on the wall for quite some time, but tonight we received final confirmation: Hillary Clinton is going to be the Democratic nominee. But the Democratic Party that she’s going to represent is a very different entity from the one that existed when she started this campaign.

Put simply: Clinton is the nominee, but it’s Bernie’s party that she’ll be leading.

I’m sure that will taste bittersweet to Sanders and his supporters, who have found an extraordinary fight over the last nine months. But it’s a real and important victory.

First things first: the bad news. It was already exceedingly unlikely that he could make up the delegate deficit, but if there was any chance of it happening, he needed to at least hold serve tonight. And that, most definitely, didn’t happen. As I’m writing this, only about half of the 800 delegates at stake tonight have been allocated. But if my back of the envelope calculations are reasonable, it looks like Clinton will finish the night having expanded her lead by another 150 delegates. With half the delegates already allocated, that means Sanders would likely need to win the remaining votes by something close to an 18 point margin. And there’s just no plausible way that can happen. He already only had a couple outs left, and those are officially gone now.

That said, this is only the end of one part of the campaign. And it’s worth noting that the next month or so is very favorable to Sanders. So not only do I think he can reasonably continue on, I absolutely think he should. This campaign has been all about giving voice to those who aren’t being heard, and that absolutely can continue – and will get a boost from the range of ‘Sanders back on the upswing’ stories that will inevitably emerge. That’s a real opportunity. But it’s one that needs to be seized for a broader effect than simply pursuing a nomination. So I hope that Sanders and his team are putting some real thought into what their going to do with all this support.

For one thing, there are lot of downticket races that could really use some excitement and mobilization by the left. But beyond that, there’s the simple fact that although Clinton is now the presumptive nominee, she remains vulnerable to the concerns that Sanders has raised this whole cycle. While she will have to (and should) tack back somewhat for the general election, it’s worth noting just how far to the left she’s been dragged by this primary campaign. And it’s very much within the power of Sanders and his supporters to hold the line on all those promises.

As of right now, there are three leaders of the Democratic Party: Clinton, Obama, and Sanders. And while the other two are far closer to the office of the presidency, in some ways he’s just as powerful as they. Put simply: they’re in charge of running the party, holding the constituencies together, wrangling the votes, managing the operations. But Sanders has staked out a genuine claim as the conscience of the party. And as the fire that keeps the whole engine running. That’s an important power, and one that I hope is used well.

‘Hillary Clinton is racking up delegates in states that will never vote for a Democrat in the general election.’ It’s a good talking point, and I understand the frustration from Sanders supporters who feel like their candidate is being written off based on the votes of a bunch of deep red states in the south. But I want to push back on the narrative here a little bit, and encourage those who care about democratic choice and liberal values to appreciate why this system is a good one.

One of the key things here: the Democratic primary (with all of its delegates being assigned proportionally) isn’t really about ‘states’ in any significant way. What state you live in determines when you get to vote, but broadly speaking (not 100% given caucuses and some small deviations in allocation rules, but broadly speaking) votes mostly count the same regardless of where you live.

And this is actually one of the best features of the primary system: that it allows all members of the Democratic Party to select their standard-bearer, regardless of where they live. The folks who live in the south, who have been voting in overwhelming numbers for Clinton, have been expressing their wishes for the future of the Democratic Party and for the person who might be president. And they aren’t just whistling in the wind; the system is actually responding to them.

That’s a good thing. And it’s good in precisely the sort of way that the Sanders campaign is good. His message is that we need to stand up for those who are disempowered, the people who are constrained by the institutions of their local political orders, who are denied real representative capacity by the circumstances that surround them. That their value as people with opinions and perspectives and wishes and desires should be respected and heeded. And that’s just as true for those who live in red states as it does for those who have been left behind economically.

The primary isn’t (and shouldn’t) be a purely tactical game about assembling a coalition of states. It should be about the people debating and considering with themselves: who do we want to represent us? That’s something that I hope most Sanders supporters would agree with.

I also want to slightly challenge one other aspect of this. While it is true, so far, that Clinton has picked up most of her delegate advantage in red states, she’s also won Virginia (a very purple state) by huge margins, and also won Nevada (purple), Iowa, Massachusetts, etc.

And all of this is partly a fluke of the calendar. Clinton is winning red states in the south because a ton of Democrats in those states aren’t white. It has little to do with how conservative they are (generally speaking, the Democratic electorate in the south is every bit as liberal as it is in blue states – which is different from the GOP, where Republicans in blue states really do tend to be quite a bit more liberal than those in red states). And there’s every reason to expect that the same demographic choices will produce more Clinton wins in big blue states like New York, California, etc.

In fact, we’ll get a good test of this in Michigan later today. If Sanders wins there, it will be worth revisiting this question. But for now, the key determining factor of the race is demographic, not geographic.

And I hope we can all agree that non-white voters are an important and valuable part of the Democratic coalition, whose opinions deserve every bit as much respect as anyone else, regardless of whether they’re surrounded by a sea of conservatives.

Momentum – Aimee Mann

Nate Silver has called momentum ‘the most overrated concept in elections analysis.’ Perhaps that’s a slight overbid, but only a slight one.

And yet, it’s so tempting!  Especially since there actually is some research to suggest that momentum is real and important, particularly in presidential primaries.  After all, the whole point of the drawn-out primary process is to allow small shifts in the early stages to guide and inform later events. You cull down the field through momentum effects, where a couple good results causes future undecideds to break in your direction. Or, perhaps more importantly, by encouraging tepid support for second and third tier candidates to melt away.

That said, I wanted to address the question of ‘momentum’ as it relates to Clinton and Sanders. My general bearishness on the Sanders candidacy has incited some pushback from Sanders supporters, with one key point being the trend of the election being in his favor.

The (perfectly fair) argument goes like this: Sanders remains behind by seven-ish points in the Pollster average, which is a big margin, but is a heck of a lot closer than it used to be (it’s worth noting that he’s down by a full 10 points in the 538 poll aggregate, which I think is slightly better than the strict Pollster one). And the trend is clear. Clinton is holding firm, but Sanders is gaining, steadily and emphatically.

Which all means that, to some extent, this is just a battle of expectations. Sanders needs a narrative of growing insurgency, which is building and ready to overwhelm the establishment. If his loss in Nevada is read as a genuine setback, it might risk quelling that spirit and becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So I absolutely get why Sanders supporters want to push back on the narrative of Clinton inevitability.

But from the perspective of an analyst, there’s a big problem with all this: we just haven’t seen any real evidence of voters leaving Clinton. Sanders hasn’t cut into her support in any real way; he’s simply acquired the excess capacity. Yes, there have been ups and downs for her, but her support is right around where it was back in September. It’s possible that Sanders-excitement has inspired new people to join the voting pool, but if that’s happening, then Clinton is picking up additional support to weigh against them.

So, for all that Sanders is doing amazingly well, nothing we’ve seen yet actually suggests that Clinton lacks the voting base necessary to win her the nomination. That is: Sanders’ momentum is currently about hoovering up the half of the electorate that isn’t yet settled on Clinton, and there’s a clear ceiling on that. Of course it’s possible that he’ll change things even more, and really tip the race on its side. But we just haven’t seen anything like that yet.

This particular kind of momentum, where a candidate who appeals more directly to the base gathers up all the disaffected folks who would be willing to settle for the mainstream candidate but aren’t quite ready to get there yet, is pretty well understood. You only have to look back four years to see a perfect example.

Look at this chart and tell me that Candidate B isn’t in great shape. Look at all the momentum!

Except if we go just a couple weeks further down the road, reality sets in quite firmly, and we get this picture:

This is, of course, Romney vs. Santorum. And it’s not hard to see that scenario playing out again.

Is the race completely over? Absolutely not. And it’s a testament to the Sanders campaign and his supporters that it still remains in doubt. But it’s nevertheless true that Clinton remains the prohibitive favorite. The betting markets have her around an 85% chance, and I’d buy at that price. Absent a major shock in the next few weeks, the outcome is pretty settled.

Let It Burn – The Orwells

The following two statements both seem true to me:

1) The success of Bernie Sanders as a presidential candidate means that if Hillary Clinton becomes president, she will be more likely to pursue a left-friendly agenda.

2) The success of Bernie Sanders as a presidential candidate is directly correlated with significant increases in left-wing distaste for the idea of a Hillary Clinton presidency.

#2 is anecdotal, so maybe I’m wrong there. But it sure feels correct.

The argument for #1 is pretty simple.  Basically, the success of Sanders means that Clinton-as-president would be obliged to govern in a more left-leaning direction than would otherwise have been the case. His campaign is mobilizing and solidifying commitments to a left-driven agenda, and she will therefore be obliged to do more to appease those interests and reflect the commitments of her base.

So, the better Bernie does, the better a Clinton presidency will be – at least for those who value the same things as Sanders.

But, of course, as he is seen as more viable, the differences between them take on far more meaning for people. And the power of affective political affiliation kicks into gear. Meaning: she becomes far less tolerable, because her positions now have to be judged against a new benchmark of political possibility.

And, at least judging by my social media landscape, that produces a lot of visceral anger about the idea of a Clinton presidency.

To be as clear as possible: my point isn’t that people can’t possibly hold a legitimate anti-Clinton position. Of course they can. It’s just worth remembering that politicians exist within context. And the context of 2016 means that a second Clinton presidency would look a heck of a lot different from the first one. And the better that Sanders does, the more true that becomes.

The crucial point here is pretty simple: if you’re ‘feeling the Bern,’ then you’re winning, and that will remain true even if your candidate doesn’t win the nomination (which I continue to believe is not all that likely).

Yes, yes, I know. He actually finished third.  And I get why it frustrates people to call the guy who finished third the winner. But it’s only frustrating if you insist on ignoring what the contest is actually about.

First things first, Rubio only ‘finished third’ by one metric: raw number of votes cast. But that’s not how delegates are assigned. In fact, Rubio was tied for second, since he and Trump were allocated the same number of delegates. What’s more, they each received a grand total of one (1) delegate less than Cruz. It’s now 8-7-7.  And that’s out of almost 2500 total delegates.

The point is: talking about who ‘won’ Iowa requires working from pointless fictions no matter how you describe it. Because in a proportional system, ‘winning’ just isn’t that important.

But the broader point is even more important. I’ll put it in bold to make it as clear as possible: the point is not to ‘win’ Iowa. The point is to win the nomination.

That’s why people keep saying Iowa was huge for Rubio. Because it was. It has nothing to do with ‘winning the night’ or any such nonsense. The point is that Iowa showed us several important things, many of which point toward an eventual Rubio victory.

1. Trump underperformed his polls. That’s huge, because the whole case for Trump, Juggernaut has been built entirely on polling. But if those numbers are soft, then Trump is far weaker than people have been insisting.
2. Further: if Trump can only pull 25% when people actually get to the polls and face the fact of decision, it suggests that the dynamics of the race haven’t really changed in fundamental ways. Has Trump affected the race? Of course he has. But (at least in Iowa), it doesn’t look like he’s upended the cart completely.  As Nate Silver notes, Iowa wasn’t just another little data point; it was the first time that actual voters voted.
3. Cruz won Iowa, but Iowa is a great place for Cruz-like candidates. This is a state that picked Santorum and Huckabee in the past two cycles–at levels of support similar to what Cruz earned. If Cruz is just another variation on those guys, he’s very unlikely to win. Of course, he might be stronger than they were. But on the evidence of the night, it looks like he might simply be replicating the ‘evangelical-backed’ candidate model.
4. Rubio picked up more votes alone than the entire rest of the ‘establishment’ candidates combined. That’s huge because it makes it far more likely that ‘the party’ (of the ‘party decides’ model) will start to settle on him as their best bet.

I mean, look: the case for Rubio has always been simple: he’s the candidate with the broadest appeal in the party. Once the party elites accept that fact, support will condense behind him and he’ll push everyone else aside.  Iowa provided a data point in support of that theory.

And, conversely, the case against Rubio has always been equally simple: things are different this time. The party doesn’t decide anymore. And Iowa provided a data point against that theory.

Would Rubio have preferred to win Iowa? Of course. But the goal isn’t to win Iowa. The goal is to win the nomination. And in that race, Rubio ‘won’ on Monday night, because he’s now closer to the nomination than anyone else.

Details of the War – Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!

Seth Ackerman has a blistering piece in Jacobin, which goes on the warpath against Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias at Vox regarding their recent comments on Bernie Sanders. Ackerman’s thesis: the Vox folks are marshalling a cynical attack against Bernie, grounded in a growing fear emerging from the center of the Democratic Party about the genuinely radical possibilities embodied in the Sanders campaign. In the face of threats by their base to actually pursue single payer health care, he thinks, the establishment is striking back.

This argument isn’t entirely wrong. In fact, I’m generally sympathetic to the premise. Vox clearly stands for a certain portion of the center-left intellectual establishment. And Sanders clearly represents an oppositional force in left-wing politics.

But while Ackerman does a fine job of characterizing the dispute in general terms, man alive does he take a terrible route to get there.  It’s almost to the point that I can’t help but wonder if it’s a piece of elaborate performance art, in which literally every accusation hurled outwards is then mirrored by the accuser.

Because otherwise, I find it hard to understand how someone could write a piece with the basic thesis of: be more generous in your interpretation, which itself is so utterly without generosity or fairness.

One example: Ackerman is very unhappy with Klein “inexplicably dismissing the possibility of administrative savings,” and then cheekily references Klein’s work from 2007, noting that that back then he saw administrative savings as awesome. The implication being: Klein has been bought off, and no longer is interested in facts.

It’s a nice bit of rhetoric, but it’s totally unfair. It levels an accusation based on tone, and then hides the ball while purporting to reveal the facts. Because look: Administrative costs for health insurance in the US are approximately $1000 per capita vs. $300 or so for Canada. So let’s assume that Sanders’ plan brings those costs down to Canadian levels. That’s great! That’s $700 savings per capita, by Sanders’ numbers.

Okay, let’s check on the overall savings he promises. Oh, it’s $5000.

So why is it unfair for Klein to point out that Sanders still needs the vast majority of his cost savings to come from other sources??

A second example: the entire broadside against Yglesias is hypocrisy-based. Basically: He used to say vagueness was okay back when his boy Obama was the vague one, but now that Bernie isn’t spilling the details, he’s hyper-critical. And there is a certain rhetorical force to that point, but A) people are surely allowed to change their minds over the course of eight years and B) it’s not like it’s impossible to identify a gap between ‘vagueness is okay’ and ‘details are totally unnecessary.’

But those two objections aren’t even my real issue here. What really bugs me is that this charge of hypocrisy so fundamentally misses the point of the Yglesias argument. Which isn’t ‘moar details!!!!’, but is a far more specific critique that Sanders seems fundamentally uninterested in filling in the details. Which is very different.

Ackerman seems at least vaguely aware of this fact:

Warming to his theme, Yglesias spends a paragraph dilating on the complexities of administering Britain’s National Health Service (a different system than the one Sanders is proposing), and then after reviewing those intricate issues, complains that “Sanders’s ‘plan’ doesn’t cover any of this ground.” Worse, he says, Sanders’s “worldview” is unable even to “accommodate the questions”; for the Senator, “the only relevant issue is ‘whether we have the guts to stand up to the private insurance companies and all of their money.’”

But there’s something missing from this paragraph.  Namely: any actual answer to these charges.  Apparently, for Ackerman, these statements are so obviously foolish that simply giving them voice reveals their vacuousness.  But these aren’t rude asides from Yglesias, or evidence of some irrational disdain for Sanders. This the core of his argument.

His criticism is that Sanders has an overly simplistic worldview, which considers passion and commitment sufficient, which actively eschews the sort of nitty-gritty work that comes from having to build complex policy instruments, under less than perfect conditions. Sanders, that is, seems to believe that if we just care enough about an issue, that’s enough.

I think that concern is probably overstated (though I do have some sympathy for it). But it’s an argument that is specific to Sanders, and which Yglesias makes repeatedly in the linked piece.  It’s certainly not an unfair issue to raise.

So it’s bizarre to write a 6000 word screed, and still not find time to actually answer it.

One final example. Ackerman writes:

How could Klein have felt such warmth back then for the single-payer systems of Canada or France (let alone Britain, with its socialized NHS!), while being so hostile to Bernie Sanders’s plan now, when the latter claims to draw its inspiration specifically from the former?

If true, that would be damning. But…it’s pretty clearly not true. I went back and scoured the Klein piece, and I found no evidence of hostility to single-payer systems. Quite the opposite. His piece reads like a general endorsement of such systems, combined with a political argument that Sanders isn’t going to win many converts unless he provides details.

The point being: single payer is broadly popular (it polls right around 50%, sometimes a fair bit higher depending on how the question is asked), but that popularity is pretty thin. Basically: it’s got lots of tepid supporters, but they tend to evaporate when the rubber meets the road.

So if Sanders really wants to move that needle, he’s going to have to take that problem on directly, not push it to the side.

In all of this, it’s absolutely fair to say (as Ackerman does) that ‘most other countries in the West have better health care systems than us, and we should be more like them.’ But it’s also fair to point out that the American public, on the whole, is extremely allergic to change in health care policy, and isn’t going to be knocked off their perch by ‘it works in lots of other places.’  Remember how much flak Obama got for ‘if you like your plan, you can keep it’? The single payer debates multiples that times 10,000. And that’s a genuine problem, one that a candidate who really cares about making this policy probably should engage with.

As someone who likes Sanders a lot, I wish he’d do more to fill in those gaps. Because right now, as much as I like him in theory, I have a hard time actually believing in his political revolution, precisely because it’s grounded in the faith that being right is sufficient, and that all our failures are simply due to the folks in charge not being steadfast enough.

And on this point, it doesn’t strike me as entirely coincidental that the blistering attack on the Vox folks comes from Jacobin magazine.

Because this primary campaign really is fundamentally a debate about whether to consolidate existing gains, or to continue pressing forward in service of revolutionary ideals.

More thoughts on that analogy forthcoming, if I can find the time.

In the meantime, let me just close by saying: I like single payer. I think the US should have single payer. I’m glad it’s part of the conversation in this campaign. I wish it were a bigger part, and I don’t think the Vox position is unfair on that point. I think they also wish it were a bigger part. And they’re looking for evidence that Sanders wants to make it a bigger part. I’m looking for that, too. I hope to find it.