Holly Baxter: These results mean Bernie Sanders needs to step aside. It's painful but it's true
We thought 2020 would
be Bernie
Sanders’ year. It was owed to him, we reasoned. He deserved it. It was his
time. The nomination was denied him in 2016, when Democrats decided to put a
“safe pair of hands” from the establishment up against the preposterous,
unelectable Donald Trump and the strategy backfired enormously. Surely now we
could right a wrong by giving him the chance he should have had four years
prior.
But Democratic voters
don’t want that - or at least, most of them don’t. They told us that in South
Carolina. A fair amount of them doubled down on Super Tuesday. And tonight,
March 10, they sealed the deal, as Joe Biden walked
away victorious following a slew of endorsements from his former rivals in the
race for presidential nominee. Missouri, Mississippi and, most
devastatingly of all, Michigan went for Uncle Joe. Because we are where
we are now. It’s not 2016. The appetite for a shouty maverick is not what it
was. The “burn it all down” style of politics doesn’t inspire so much as it
provokes fear. America feels much less secure and much less confident after
four years of Donald Trump. A healthy subset of its population just wants to
retreat to its place of security and appoint someone to clean up the damage the
hurricane did to the house.
Perhaps, if Bernie had
been allowed to go toe-to-toe with Trump four years ago, he really could have
won. The landscape was different then. And it's not fair, not
remotely.
Sanders had a slew of excellent policies and they are policies that
most people outside of the extremely conservative confines of America would
agree with: a free-at-the-point-of-use universal healthcare system; a
commitment to slowly moving toward 100 per cent renewable energy; forcing
businesses to have an actual reason if they fire someone; a
proper minimum wage for everyone; free childcare for pre-schoolers; banning
assault weapons; working to eliminate medical debt that drives families into
bankruptcy. Democratic socialism is not a scary term to most people in western
Europe, where I’m from, and where we have public healthcare, a minimum wage, no
guns and stronger employment laws. It’s a shame that America fails its citizens
in this regard. It is sad (not Donald-Trump-on-Twitter “SAD” but actually sad)
that women struggle back to work days after giving birth; that some people drop
dead on the job because they can’t afford not to turn up; that people have
become so disconnected from their government and the rest of the world that
they profess not to believe in climate change and think the coronavirus might
be a Democrat hoax.
Nevertheless, the
nonconformers and the progressives have been defeated one by one in this
race....
