Passing the debacle of Iowa as a convenient Republican example of why the Democrats can’t run the country, the big danger to Democrats is first, Bernie Sanders and second, the political longevity of the other candidates.
Sanders ran in 2016 and got close to the nomination but for the Clinton juggernaut. This after an undistinguished decades-long career as a congressman and senator: he did nothing.
His appeal to voters is very similar to Trump’s: they are both disrupters. He’s a socialist disrupter while Trump is a capitalist disrupter. Their adherents have an emotional attachment to first slamming and then terminating or reconstituting our government and business institutions because they think that these do not work for them.
This public attitude of the Sanders and Trump supporters has a home in the economic theory of Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter who became an American citizen and taught at Harvard. His theory of “creative destruction” refers to the process and product innovation mechanisms by which new production units replace established ones. If a company expires because under attack by new and more effective companies doing the same thing but better, that’s good and that’s the way it is, says Schumpeter. Let those older business units die.
It’s not too distant from Ebenezer Scrooge’s retort to a Christmas appeal for funds for the poor who would rather die than go to the workhouses in “A Christmas Carol” : “If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.” Let the poor die.
So,too, outmoded or ineffectual institutions in government or in the economy have to bite the dust, according to Sanders and Trump, because they have been rendered “surplus” compared to what these politicians espouse. Let them die.
For example, Trump would dump the American tradition and practice of immigration as a whole and refugee assistance in part in favor of letting only those who would currently add to the American economy. Further, he would transform the rich into the super-rich through “tax reform.”
Sanders would inhibit incentive by levying confiscatory taxes on wealth and income and would destroy private health insurance.
Each justifies his excessive manipulation of government, business and the economy by claiming each is just disrupting the old and broken with the new and functional. And their more extreme adherents are scary: they will not denounce violent means to achieve their goals.
There is one big difference between the Bernie Bros and the Trumpistas: the Sanders adherents support human rights such as the freedom of speech, at least as they see it. Trump’s folks smell “fake news” in every lede and demand legal control and discipline of the media.
The problem for the Democrats is that Sanders cannot win as a socialist because Trump is basking in a strong economy, has more campaign money and is an incumbent.
I am convinced that most Americans are moderates and are turned off by the extremes of both Trump and Sanders. For a moderate to emerge as the Democratic candidate, some of the current aspirants have to drop out. At the moment, not a chance!