Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

The Democratic establishment has officially shifted into panic mode. In 2016, they watched a bold political outsider shred a divided field of establishment Republican candidates on his way to winning the White House. Now they have one and only one shot of denying Donald Trump a second term, and the same thing that happened to the Republicans in 2016 is now happening to them. So far, Bernie Sanders is trouncing a divided field of establishment Democratic candidates, and that is a huge problem for party leadership for a number of reasons. For one thing, most top establishment Democrats absolutely detest Sanders. Secondly, most of them don’t believe that he has a prayer of actually beating Trump in November. So they are desperate to find a way to deny Sanders the nomination, but with each Sanders victory that is going to become increasingly difficult to do.

At this point, an all-out civil war has just about erupted on the left. Establishment Democrats are all in a tizzy about potentially nominating a “socialist”, but of course the truth is that America has been drifting toward socialism ever since FDR first entered the White House. Yes, there have been a few times when we have attempted to change course (the Reagan administration for example), but in general the federal government has just gotten bigger and bigger over the decades. Today we have the biggest government in the entire history of the planet, and the Democrats are primarily to blame.

Ultimately, what this conflict is about is power. Bernie Sanders may have won the hearts of the voters, but he isn’t supposed to actually win the nomination, and the Democratic establishment will pull out all the stops in order to keep that from happening.

All of a sudden, operatives on the left can’t stop talking about how the Russians want Bernie Sanders to win. This is coming from the same people that spent years trying to find evidence that President Trump colluded with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 election and that accused Tulsi Gabbard of being a “Russian operative” in order to derail her quest for the Democratic nomination.

Are there people out there that actually believe this stuff?

Apparently there must be, because establishment Democrats just keep going back to the same playbook over and over again.

In the weeks ahead, we should expect the attacks on Sanders to continue to escalate. The following are 11 of the most outrageous things that establishment Democrats have said about Bernie Sanders so far, but this is probably just the beginning…

#1 Rahm Emanuel: “Putin and Trump are picking their opponent.”

#2 Joe Biden: “The Russians don’t want me to be the nominee,” Biden said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” later adding, “they like Bernie.”

#3 James Carville: “Right now, it’s about 1:15 Moscow time. This thing is going very well for Vladimir Putin. I promise you. He’s probably staying up watching this right now. How you doing, Vlad?”

#4 MSNBC’s Joy Reid regarding the tremendous enthusiasm of Bernie’s voters: “Democrats need to sober up, and figure out what the hell they’re going to do about that.”

#5 Democratic House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn: “If you know how well we did the last time and look at the congressional districts, these are not liberal or progressive districts. These are moderate and conservative districts that we did well in. And in those districts it’s going to be tough to hold on to these jobs if you have to make the case for accepting a self-proclaimed democratic socialist.”

#6 NPR’s Maria Hinojosa: “As somebody who has been around for a while…I want receipts. What has he done in all his time to actually deliver for Latino/a voters?”

#7 Pete Buttigieg: “Before we rush to nominate Senator Sanders in our one shot to take on this president, let us take a sober look at what is at stake for our party, for our values and for those with the most to lose.”

#8 Joe Lockhart: “In any political campaign, candidates need to know what they stand for, and who — or what — they’re up against. At this stage in the game for Bloomberg, that enemy is not Trump. It’s Sen. Bernie Sanders and the election calendar.”

#9 James Carville: “If you’re voting for him because you think he’ll win the election, because he’ll galvanize heretofore sleepy parts of an electorate, then politically, you’re a fool.”

#10 Hillary Clinton: “Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done,” Clinton said of Sanders in a documentary about the campaign, released this year. “He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.”

#11 MSNBC’s Chris Matthews: No pundit on the left has been more critical of Sanders than MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. In the aftermath of the vote in Nevada, Matthews actually compared the Sanders campaign “to the Nazi invasion of France in 1940″…

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews is under fire after comparing Sen. Bernie Sanders‘s (I-Vt.) decisive win in the Nevada caucuses to the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, with some on social media calling for the “Hardball” host to resign. “I was reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940,” Matthews said during MSNBC’s live coverage of the caucuses on Saturday. “And the general, Reynaud, calls up Churchill and says, ‘It’s over.’ And Churchill says, ‘How can that be? You’ve got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?’ He said, ‘It’s over.'”

Needless to say, that comment sparked a tremendous backlash.

In addition, Matthews suggested that the Democrats might be better off waiting four years and then putting in “a Democrat that they like”…

“I’m wondering whether the Democratic moderates want Bernie Sanders to be president. That’s maybe too exciting a question to raise. They don’t like Trump at all. Do they want Bernie Sanders to take over the Democratic Party in perpetuity?” he said. “I mean, he takes it over, he sets the direction of the future of the party — maybe they’d rather wait four years and put in a Democrat that they like.”

Matthews must not understand that the only reason he has a job is because the radical left has embraced MSNBC over the years. Now Matthews and the other commentators on MSNBC are greatly alienating their core viewers, and that could potentially be absolutely disastrous for the network.

But Matthews is not likely to back down. Earlier this month, he explained why he detests socialists so much…

“You know, I have my own views of the word ‘socialist,’” Matthews said earlier this month. “They go back to the early 1950s. I have an attitude about them. I remember the Cold War. I have an attitude towards Castro. I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War, there would have been executions in Central Park, and I might have been one of the ones getting executed, and certain other people would be there cheering, OK? So, I have a problem with people who took the other side.”

This is coming from the same guy who was so giddy about the candidacy of Barack Obama in 2008.

Very strange.

In any event, I think that President Trump did a great job of summarizing the current state of the race for the Democratic nomination when he tweeted the following…

Looks like Crazy Bernie is doing well in the Great State of Nevada. Biden & the rest look weak, & no way Mini Mike can restart his campaign after the worst debate performance in the history of Presidential Debates. Congratulations Bernie, & don’t let them take it away from you!

None of the establishment candidates currently in the race has a prayer of winning enough delegates to secure the nomination before the convention.

So at this point the Democratic establishment has two options if they want to prevent Sanders from becoming the nominee.

Firstly, they can encourage everyone to stay in the race and try to divide the delegates enough ways so that Sanders cannot clinch the nomination prior to the convention. Then once the convention rolls around, they could try to put forward a “compromise candidate” as an alternative to Sanders.

Secondly, they could try to convince the one person that could actually beat Sanders during this process to enter the race. But Michelle Obama has said over and over again that she will absolutely not run for president. Unfortunately for the Democrats, she is probably the only one that could pull off such a miracle at this point.

Assuming that Michelle Obama is out of the picture, the Democratic establishment’s only hope of stopping Sanders is probably at the convention.

Usually the conventions are rather sleepy affairs, but this year might be an exception.

So you might want to stock up on popcorn, because a contested Democratic convention would be very strange, but it would also likely be very entertaining.