Back in 2016, I was convinced that, had Bernie Sanders won the Democratic presidential nomination, he would have beaten Donald Trump because he would have taken some of Trump’s White working-class voters. So here’s my fantasy for election 2028 — you know, the one in which Trump (the man who once threatened to be a dictator for a day) is now threatening to run again either as vice-president (and then have President Vance step aside to give him a third term) or in some other unknown but similarly unconstitutional fashion: I happen to think that, in 2028, Bernie Sanders should indeed run again, facing JD Vance or (for all we know) Donald Trump. Of course, he would be 87 years old, which, as an 80-year-old, I’m all too aware would be daunting indeed. And that’s why I think his ticket should include the then-39-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as his vice-presidential candidate.
After all, the two of them have been traveling the country on a “fighting oligarchy” tour and, unlike other Democrats right now, at every stop, they’re attracting “monster crowds,” thousands, even tens of thousands of people. As Sanders told a crowd estimated at 36,000 in Los Angeles recently, “We are living in a moment of extraordinary danger, and how we respond to this moment will not only impact our lives but it will affect the lives of our kids and future generations. We are living in a moment where a handful of billionaires control the economic and political life of our country.” And, he added, the Trump administration “is moving us rapidly toward an authoritarian form of society — and Mr. Trump, we ain’t going there.”
Remind me, which other Democrats are either speaking like that or capable of calling out crowds and enthusiasm of that sort? And once victorious, given his age, he could serve perhaps a year or so in office and then turn the post over to Ocasio-Cortez, and we would be in a different country from any that Donald J. Trump and crew now imagine.
If only, of course! Yes, I’m all too aware that, given his age, that’s undoubtedly a hopeless fantasy of mine. Still, let TomDispatch regular Norman Solomon, founder of the group RootsAction (dedicated to “economic fairness, equal rights for all, civil liberties, environmental protection — and defunding endless wars”), focus on how to face an ever more dangerous Donald Trump and crew in the political years to come. Tom
Original article posted at Tom Dispatch: https://tomdispatch.com/whats-preventing-a-united-front-against-the-trum...