Matt Taibbi gives me some assurance that I’m not crazy.

This was no ordinary primary race, not a contest between warring factions within the party establishment, á la Obama-Clinton in ’08 or even Gore-Bradley in ’00. This was a barely quelled revolt that ought to have sent shock waves up and down the party, especially since the Vote of No Confidence overwhelmingly came from the next generation of voters.

Taibbi goes on to quote various pundits who are still reading from the standard post-nomination script.

The classic example was James Hohmann’s piece in the Washington Post, titled, “Primary wins show Hillary Clinton needs the left less than pro-Sanders liberals think.”

Hohmann’s thesis was that the “scope and scale” of Clinton’s wins Tuesday night meant mainstream Democrats could now safely return to their traditional We won, screw you posture of “minor concessions” toward the “liberal base.”

I wrote yesterday that Clinton supporters are angry and frustrated with Sanders for not following the proper script. He’s supposed to drop out now and endorse Clinton! She won!

In short, they’re like people enjoying a dinner party in a burning house, or maybe the Titanic.

If they had any brains, Beltway Dems and their clucky sycophants like Capeheart would not be celebrating this week. They ought to be horrified to their marrow that the all-powerful Democratic Party ended up having to dig in for a furious rally to stave off a quirky Vermont socialist almost completely lacking big-dollar donors or institutional support.

They should be freaked out, cowed and relieved, like the Golden State Warriors would be if they needed a big fourth quarter to pull out a win against Valdosta State.

But to read the papers in the last two days is to imagine that we didn’t just spend a year witnessing the growth of a massive grassroots movement fueled by loathing of the party establishment, with some correspondingly severe numerical contractions in the turnout department (though she won, for instance, Clinton received 30 percent fewer votes in California this year versus 2008, and 13 percent fewer in New Jersey).

I’ve said this before, too.

People are sick of being thought of as faraway annoyances who only get whatever policy scraps are left over after pols have finished servicing the donors they hang out with at Redskins games.

Democratic voters tried to express these frustrations through the Sanders campaign, but the party leaders have been and probably will continue to be too dense to listen. Instead, they’ll convince themselves that, as Hohmann’s Post article put it, Hillary’s latest victories mean any “pressure” they might have felt to change has now been “ameliorated.”

And this:

The maddening thing about the Democrats is that they refuse to see how easy they could have it. If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world, they would win every election season in a landslide.

This is especially the case now that the Republican Party has collapsed under the weight of its own nativist lunacy. It’s exactly the moment when the Democrats should feel free to become a real party of ordinary working people.

But they won’t do that, because they don’t see what just happened this year as a message rising up from millions of voters.

I’ve been saying all along that the Dems need Sanders and his supporters more than Sanders and his supporters need the Democrats. I’m not talking about winning the November election here, although that might be part of it. I’m talking about the even more fundamental question of why a person should be loyal to a political party, support it, and vote for its candidates even when you’re not crazy about them.  As I also keep saying, the percentage of Americans who self-identify with one party or another is at an all-time low. Although I understand a lot of people have registered as Democrats this year, are those people who are going to stay Democrats? Or are they people who wanted to vote for Sanders in a primary, or who want to vote against Trump in November? Do they have any real interest in the Democratic Party, as a party?

See above about Clinton getting 30 percent fewer votes in California this year than in 2008.  See also Dear Democrats: Please Face Reality.

Instead of offering a competing vision for the future or debating policy ideas, Clinton ran against Sanders by dismissing him. But perhaps that’s the only way she could beat him, with “loyal Democrat” dog whistles and painting her opposition as racist and sexist white guys, which was never true.

One constant narrative throughout the primaries has been that Sanders just can’t gain the support of women or people of color, and that his supporters are overwhelmingly white males who back him for the simple reason that he is a man (e.g. Walsh’s “angry white male cult”). But again, this is complete hogwash. Sanders has actually done better with young women than young men — a USA Today poll taken in the midst of the primaries found that Millennial women backed “Sanders by a jaw-dropping 61%-30% while the divide among Millennial men is much closer, 48%-44%.” Similarly, while Clinton has dominated with African American voters overall, young black and Hispanic voters have a more favorable opinion of Sanders than Clinton, according to a Gallup survey from May. Indeed, Sanders is viewed even more favorably among black millennials than white millennials. The survey also found that Sanders is viewed more favorably among millennial women than millennial men, and that millennials were the most left-leaning generation.

It’s one thing to smear your opponent, but when you smear your opponent by smearing his supporters, don’t expect those supporters to not notice, or to forgive you. Still quoting Conor Lynch at Salon,

Roughly a year after launching her campaign, Hillary Clinton has now locked up the Democratic nomination. But her campaign and the DNC establishment have also done a great job at alienating young people and the left.

Partisans have been reluctant to acknowledge that a formidable progressive movement fueled by millennials could challenge the neoliberal status quo in the coming years, and have instead tried to tarnish the reputation of the entire Sanders movement. But Sanders isn’t going to fight until the convention because of “sexism,” as Clintonites have started postulating, but because of politics and ideas; his entire campaign has been about combating “establishment politics” and “establishment economics,” which, unfortunately, Clinton epitomizes. Of course, partisans don’t want to debate ideas or address inconvenient truths, like the party’s close ties to Wall Street and corporate America. It’s much easier to make generalizations and accuse everyone who disagrees with you of trolling or harassment.

Like the guy I quoted yesterday said, “Hillary people seem to have become (and maybe always were) more about keeping Bernie people off the boat than they are about rowing past Trump.” So, yeah, the Dems just shoved a whole generation of people off the boat. It remains to be seen how many of those young people will continue to try to reform the party, or how many just quit in disgust.

IMO the Dems will have a fight on their hands, but probably not so much from Donald Trump. Donald Trump is nothing but an ego with bad hair. His “business success” reminds me of an old saying — the easiest way to make a small fortune is to inherit a large fortune.  I keep reading articles about how shrewd he is and that he knows what he’s doing, but I don’t think so. I think he’s gotten into something that’s way over his bizarrely coifed head.  Especially once we get past the conventions I think his campaign will be a train wreck.  We’ll see. He’ll probably get more electoral college votes than he ought to based on his total unsuitability to be POTUS, but I still think she’s going to win.

I think the real fight will come later, and it will be a fight the Democrats, apparently, do not expect. It will be a fight to win back the generation of voters they just kicked off the boat.

Just as one more example of how oblivious they are, I was reading this morning that the Democrats want very much to get their hands on Sanders’s email list.

Bernie Sanders has built more than just a following. He’s amassed the mother of all email lists. Some estimate it contains more than 5 million contacts, which is big, even by presidential standards. That database has allowed Sanders to raise thousands of dollars at the click of a button. …

…The Sanders campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment about the future of the supporter list. Speculation abounds. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reidreportedly asked the campaign last month to deploy the list to assist Democrats in Senate races, but was rebuffed by Jeff Weaver, Sanders’s campaign manager. Liberal groups have said they’d love to take a peek at the Vermont senator’s data.

People affiliated with the campaign have pushed back. On Monday, a fundraiser manager for Revolution Messaging, the D.C.-based firm Sanders has employed to manage his campaign data, tweeted that the senator’s list was like King Arthur’s Excalibur: “Lots of people might think they can use it, but it takes someone special for it to work.”

I think all the Dem establishment could raise from that list are a bunch of FUs. If they don’t know that, they’re not smelling the smoke or seeing the iceberg or whatever metaphor works for you.

Andrew O’Hehir (emphasis added):

For many Sanders supporters, and not just the younger generation for whom his campaign was a political awakening, deferring the dream of “political revolution” — or at least major reform, which is really what the Vermont senator has proposed — will be exquisitely painful. But Hillary Clinton herself is not the problem, although she clearly stands for and stands with the Democratic establishment Sanders sought to overthrow. …

… Clinton is correct that the primary race between her and Obama in 2008 was closer than this one, and that she trailed by fewer pledged delegates (about half her current margin over Sanders) when she threw in the towel in June of that year. She pronounced it “perplexing” that Sanders might push on to the convention in the face of obvious defeat, and that he might yet attempt to sway superdelegates to defy the decision of a clear majority of the Democratic electorate. “That’s never happened before,” she said, “and it’s not going to happen this year.” All that is true, but what it tells me is that Clinton fails to understand the point of the Sanders campaign or, more likely, is deliberately choosing to ignore it….

… Bernie Sanders, who came closer to pulling off an internal coup within the Democratic Party than anyone would have believed possible a year ago, needs to push on just a little longer, in order to bring his own bargain with his supporters to a conclusion.

Sanders needs to assure his followers that this race was not like the 2008 race, or any other in recent memory, and that if it ends with an inevitable defeat and an inevitable truce, it does not end in capitulation. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 victory is not the victory of Clintonism. If the fight for the future of the Democratic Party is suspended for the moment, at least at the presidential level, it is not over. Indeed, it has barely begun. The final stage of the Hillary Clinton bargain lies not in surrender, or in accepting a return to politics as usual. It lies in the resolution to stop fighting now, in order to fight on another day.

Clinton supporters want very much to believe that this race really is like the 2008 race, except that Clinton won this time. And they want the old man who lost to capitulate and throw his wholehearted endorsement behind Clinton, the way Clinton eventually supported Obama, albeit probably not before she pried a promise of a cabinet position out of Obama. A man’s capitulation is a vital part of the payback scenario they expect and dearly desire. They are absolutely clueless why he can’t play out the standard script without betraying both his principles and his supporters. O’Hehir gets it, and explains it about as well as anyone can.

This primary campaign wasn’t just about two people competing for a presidential nomination. It wasn’t nearly that simple. This is something that a lot of Sanders supporters need to understand also, especially the ones calling for Sanders to run as a third party or independent candidate, which would accomplish nothing. This campaign was not so much about making Bernie Sanders the POTUS but more about “retaking the party from the pro-corporate center-right forces that have controlled it since the Bill Clinton era,” in O’Hehir’s words.

Sanders was just the vehicle to carry that demand forward. The demand itself has not been retracted.

Those of us who have watched beltway Democrats betray one principle after another for the sake of hanging on to their cozy niches in the Washington political power grid are damn tired of it and want it to stop. Last October Matt Yglesias wrote that the Democrats had grown smug and complacent.

The presidency is extremely important, of course. But there are also thousands of critically important offices all the way down the ballot. And the vast majority — 70 percent of state legislatures, more than 60 percent of governors, 55 percent of attorneys general and secretaries of state — are in Republicans hands. And, of course, Republicans control both chambers of Congress.  …

… Democrats have nothing at all in the works to redress their crippling weakness down the ballot. Democrats aren’t even talking about how to improve on their weak points, because by and large they don’t even admit that they exist. … The GOP might be in chaos, but Democrats are in a torpor.

Yglesias goes on to explain that the Dems have no actual plan for taking back states and appear to be perfectly content for having achieved what seems to be a lock on the White House, thanks to the Electoral College map. And yes, I still expect Hillary Clinton to win in November.  What might happen in 2020 is too far away to speculate about.

As I’ve been writing in many recent post, voter demographics are telling us that most voters under the age of 50 — and a whopping 80-something-percent majority under the age of 30 — are nearly frantic to pry the smug, complacent Dem establishment out of the Democratic party so that it might wake up and get a clue. Although there are some great individual Dems, the party itself has become a repository for soulless apparatchiks who appear to run as Democrats more out of habit than conviction. It’s been a very long time since working-class people especially could count on the party, as a party, to stand up for and actually work for policies they need. They did manage to pass the ACA, yes, but much of the demand for watering down the original bill — which was itself far short of what is really needed — came not just from Republicans but from Blue Dog Democrats.

In short, we need Dems with fire in the belly. Instead, mostly their bellies are full of foie gras and lobster, or whatever they serve at $353,400 fundraiser dinners.

In this primary season, instead of engaging with the concerns of Sanders supporters, “Hillary people seem to have become (and maybe always were) more about keeping Bernie people off the boat than they are about rowing past Trump,” wrote a guy on Facebook.

Establishment/Clinton Democrats seem like the party of Eisenhower with a dash of Nixon and a sprinkle of identity politics now — part careerist apparatchik, part hippie puncher, part Prius owner with a rainbow bumpersticker — who apparently believe that a ‘sore winner’ vibe and yelling at the kids to get offa their lawn is the righteous, best way forward.

That’s definitely the vibe I’ve picked up from the Clinton people all along. They haven’t so much been disagreeing with Sanders, inasmuch as they are able to accurately address his concerns at all, which they don’t. They simply dismiss those concerns as somehow having been generated by Karl Rove. From the beginning they’ve been outraged he’s challenged Her Majesty at all.

Clinton is definitely the candidate for complacent people who have given up on the idea that Washington can accomplish anything useful (see “The Can’t-Do Nation“). They rarely express hope of Clinton doing anything in particular except appointing pro-Roe v. Wade Supreme Court justices, which is something I want, too.  But too many of them seem to just want payback — for the endless Whitewater investigations, for Bush v. Gore, for the time in 1974 they lost a job to a less-qualified man.

Getting back to capitulation — Sanders absolutely cannot just stand up next to Clinton at the convention and throw his support behind her. At the core of it this was not about the two of them competing for a job. It was not about the individual Bernie Sanders versus the individual Hillary Clinton. It’s about a schism on the Left that’s still getting wider, and the fight to resolve what’s wrong with the Democrats has to continue.  For Sanders to wholeheartedly endorse Clinton would be surrendering that fight, which has barely begun.

At some point I expect him to suspend his campaign and tell his supporters that it’s better for the nation to have Clinton in the White House than Trump. I believe he’s said as much a couple of times already. But if they want him to give a speech puffing up Clinton as a great future president and as just what the nation needs, no. He cannot do that. It would betray everything the campaign was about.

O’Hehir is right about “the resolution to stop fighting now, in order to fight on another day.” I keep hearing about vast hoards of Sanders supporters who plan to protest in Philadelphia and demand he be given the nomination, which is a stupid demand. That battle is over.

Many of these people sincerely believe the election results in many primaries were not honest, and some of them have some pretty good arguments back that up. But by the time these claims are thoroughly investigated and proved (or disproved), Cliinton will be giving her first State of the Union address. Possibly her second or third. As we learned in 2000 and 2001, recounts after the inauguration don’t count.

It may be that Hillary Clinton will turn into a great, visionary, progressive POTUS, but I see no indication she’s got it in her (see Jim Hightower on that point).  And she’ll get no passes from the Left just because she’s got a “D” after her name. If Clinton supporters are still looking for the fairy-tell ending that rights all the the ways they feel wronged, they’re going to be disappointed.