You don’t have to be Nostradamus to watch the frenzied raving of the Berniecrats over the past three days and not see clearly a warm summer’s day in Milwaukee on which a massive tantrum inevitably monkey-wrenches the Democratic National Convention. Not long ago, I got in touch with someone who is a Bernie fan who also was part of the party's deliberations after the 2016 election. These discussions were designed to address complaints by a number of people regarding the nominating process, including the role of the superdelegates, which never were a great idea, but which, in the fevered brains of the most devout Berniecrats, play a role somewhere between the Daley machine and the Bavarian Illuminati.

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Anyway, this person got back to me with the following text.

“The Bernie folks in the unity and reform commission did get some good frameworks thru (bringing on board some Clinton folks). We pushed for head count and transparency in caucus votes so any candidate could audit [the] count. We wanted but failed on the no-realignment. For primaries and caucuses, we got the push to allow Indys to change voter reg[istration] [to the] day of, if the party controlled the primary and caucus...We had nothing to do with debate rules and process. No DNC member did, actually. That all comes from (DNC chairman Tom) Perez, not even [from] other officers,



“Superdelegates were obviously important and we had three options and the rules committee...wrote the final rule on that -- we don’t get to vote until the second ballot. We only got that passed by forming a coalition within the DNC...the reformers, the establishment etc. The same thing is going to have to happen in the primary and this is my fear -- that, right now, no candidate will have the majority of delegates needed and that the attitude of ‘whoever has the most, should get it’ is not what our rules say.”



This person also expressed a fervent wish that the progressives in the field get together and work something out before the convention gets crazy and nominates Michael Bloomberg. The problem, of course, is that one of those candidates, Bernie Sanders, has surrounded himself with people so utterly pure in their own opinion of themselves that they object to compromises that they themselves made. Consider that over the past couple of days—or ever since a CNN town hall in which Elizabeth Warren pretty much pantsed a Bernie bro on the very topic—that Sandersland completely lost its mind on this issue. These are the facts on the ground.

Sanders is in a strong position, but his camp is engaged in premature triumphalism. Drew Angerer Getty Images

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1) Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat. He is an independent who quadrennially cosplays as a Democrat because he wants to run for president. For this, he should be eternally grateful that a) nobody makes the point that at least Ralph Nader had the stones to be an independent and run as an independent; and b) that he is running now and not back in the days when there really was a Democratic establishment that would have been able to crush him like a bug.

2) Bernie Sanders and his campaign are running in the Democratic nominating process at the sufferance of the Democratic Party. Not only that, but the campaign is running for the Democratic nomination under a system of rules that they themselves had a hand in drafting, and under compromises into which they freely entered. (Believe me, after 2016, there are Democrats who believe that nobody in that party owes Bernie Sanders a bean with which to bless himself.) That system was the product of vigorous and healthy debate. Those compromises were hard-won and not unreasonable. They—and the work that produced them—deserve the most basic respect of agreeing to adhere to them.

3) That’s the way it goes.

Bernie Sanders has surrounded himself with people so utterly pure in their own opinion of themselves that they object to compromises that they themselves made.

For the Sanders people to throw around accusations that The Man is keeping Bernie down again is to fail to recognize that Bernie is The Man this time around. And the prospect they could disrupt the convention if they don’t get what they want, in violation of the rules that they helped write, is the height of hubris, and you can ask Sophocles how that works out.

If you ask me what is the biggest stumbling block in the way of a Sanders nomination, I will tell you that it is a severe case of premature triumphalism among the members of his national staff and, god knows, among the angry children of the Intertoobz. Nobody owes Bernie Sanders anything. Nobody owes his campaign any more deference than they owe to the campaigns of any of the other surviving candidates. Only one campaign has people who disrupted the national convention in 2016. Only one campaign has people threatening to primary other progressive Democrats. And that campaign is the one pushing a candidate who isn’t really a Democrat anyway.



Some Sanders fans have attempted to start a movement to primary Elizabeth Warren. Win McNamee Getty Images

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For example, there is a lot of loose talk out there about primarying Senator Professor Warren. Please. The only person remotely capable of mounting that kind of challenge in Massachusetts is Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who is currently one of Warren’s primary surrogates. And that’s not even to mention the kind of presumption it takes for various juicebox revolutionaries to make the threat in the first place. Because she told the truth about the fait accompli scam that the Sanders campaign is trying to run based on a fraction of a smidgen of the actual vote, she’s a neolib corporate sellout who wants to be Bloomberg’s vice president?

(Among the centrists, who can’t get their act sufficiently together to develop an effective opposition to Sanders, she’s being accused of campaigning to be Sanders's vice president because she hasn’t yet been the progressive suicide bomber they need. Can’t win with folks.)

It turns out that many of the Bernie stans can be more insufferable in victory than they were in defeat. I say this in all love and Christian fellowship: Bernie Sanders and his more fervent followers and the many sanctimonious ratfckers who run his campaign can fck right off.

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