With Bernie Sanders, the Democrats must chart a course between Scylla and Charybdis
For my sins, I spent most of my early adulthood in some sort of library. Of all the topics I have had the pleasure of really studying, one stands out: Classics.
Paradoxically, an understanding of Classics tells you more about how westerners behave and are today than any other discipline. The ancient Greeks seem to have comprehended everything.
Following the startling results of America’s Super Tuesday this week — where seemingly somnambulant Joe Biden came out of nowhere to knock Bernie Sanders off his perch as frontrunner — the Homeric story of the Scylla and the Charybdis came immediately to mind.
As Odysseus was slowly making his way back to Ithaca over the 10 long years after the Trojan War, no greater danger confronted him.
Perched at either end of the Strait of Messina (it has been a thrill of my life to actually stand at the exact place in Sicily), the Scylla was a six-headed sea monster set to devour the noble Greek.
But if Odysseus managed to get round the Scylla, he would immediately run into the Charybdis, a giant whirlpool, which would sink his ship and his men.
Manoeuvring between these twin dangers was almost impossible — and was entirely essential if Odysseus was to survive and prevail.
This is the horns of the dilemma that the Democrats now find themselves facing.
The good news is that — unlike the Republican establishment in 2016 — the Democratic elite are decisively falling in line behind a single candidate to defeat a disruptive outsider. After Biden’s overwhelming win in the South Carolina primary, moderates Pete Buttigieg of Indiana and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota saw the writing on the wall and left the race, quickly endorsing the former vice president.
His moderate lane largely freed (with the exception of the colossal failure of Michael Bloomberg), Biden went on to surprise the American political world, decisively winning the southern primaries on Super Tuesday (vital Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Alabama, and North Carolina), as well as Massachusetts and Minnesota.
While Sanders captured the biggest single prize in California, given the proportional allocation of delegates, it was Biden who stood to be (by a nose) the new frontrunner at day’s end.
Enter the Scylla and the Charybdis. Given the likely 55–45 split of the party in favour of Biden over the long haul, two distinct and equally terrible dangers confront the Democrats.
The Scylla is that Biden moves too far to the left to accommodate Sanders, championing and being co-opted by an agenda that goes the full Trotsky: Medicare for all (damn the costs), reparations for slavery, yielding to every demand of the progressive PC brigade, folding on illegal immigration, and supporting free college (one imagines by shaking the money tree in the back yard).
While such a leftwards strategy might assuage some Sanders fans (who will no doubt feel they have been cheated by the establishment out of the nomination twice now), it would surely entirely alienate the moderate voters in swing Midwestern states, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The US, unlike Bernie’s rabid supporters, remains a centre-right country.
But the Charybdis is equally frightful. If Biden hews to his moderate course and narrowly wins the nomination — or worse, clinches it at the convention itself and not out on the campaign trail — Sanders supporters will just go bonkers.
Bernie and his following are only nominal Democrats at the best of times: their loyalty is to his left-wing agenda, and not the party.
After causing mayhem at the convention (think of the chaos of the Democrats in Chicago in 1968), in this scenario Sanders and his supporters will either bolt the party for an independent run at the White House, or will be so disillusioned that many chose not to vote in the presidential election against Donald Trump in November.
Given the likelihood of a close race, such an outcome would doom the Democrats to a second defeat at the hands of their hated nemesis.
The big story of Super Tuesday is that, surprisingly, Biden is back from the dead. As a moderate Democrat (unlike Sanders, who would have been decimated by the Republicans), he matches up well with Trump in the key battleground states, and has a real chance to best him.
But the bigger story of Super Tuesday is the Scylla and Charybdis dilemma that Biden faces in terms of Sanders. Shifting leftwards towards him endangers winning over the country, and disdaining him signals sure defeat as well.
For Biden to win, he must quickly (as Odysseus did) and deftly thread the needle between these two overwhelming and equal dangers.
Main image credit: Getty