The Sanders Play

From the beginning of the campaign, the Sanders movement has had the character of a typical modern insurgency,  one that garners up to a third of more of the base of support of its party, based on fresh new ideas that appeal to the college crowd and intellectual set. Previous examples include Eugene McCarthy, Jesse Jackson, and Ron Paul.

Such campaigns serve the Establishment well by field testing the ideas and (to use the modern jargon) memes that will ulimately steer the demos of controlled democracy toward suppporting the correct insider candidates. This phenomenon and strategy of the Establishment is sometimes derisively called sheepdogging.

Sheepdogging, to adopt the term for now, is absolutely necessary for the continuation of the Establishment. This is because the Establishment, being elite guardians removed from the demos, cannot intuitive understand what motivates the people. The Establishment depend on insurgencies to create and reveal the popular will in a continuing evolving fashion.

The media is designed to feed themes back to the people, and to amplify the trends of the moment towards an overall goal of societal conservativeness (as opposed to social conservativeness), which is simply the idea that no matter what else happens in society and the world, the Establishment will still be in charge.

In the mind of the Establishment, this process of co-opting populist themes is proof that their system does indeed "serve the people," since it must necessary discern and harvest the raw emotions of the people on a continual basis, and refine these energies in the interests of stability of the (otherwise fragile) global postindustrial world.

Such insurgent campaigns as the Sanders movement are welcome by the Establishment precisely because they are "doomed" in the traditional sense, in the candidate never had a chance to get close to the real levers of power.

Many fail-safe mechanisms have existed over the decades to prevent such a thing, with modern radio and television media being the most powerful mechanism.

Like clockwork, the supporters of these failed candidates go back to the endorsed Establishment one, and their energy is used to feed the stability of the system. They grumble about it, and some even stay home on election day, but nevertheless they vote based on the idea that their side's candidate is "infinitely better" than the insider candidate of the other party. Electoral "trinket issues" are dangled for support, based on the rhetoric of the insurgency. After victory, a few of them are enacted to satiate populist cravings in issues that Establishment cares little about, or actually endorses.

The 2016 election is a little different, however, because the Establishment is hard pressed to the point of crumbling. The normal fail-safe mechanisms that would have prevented insurgent candidacies apparently are greatly weakened. Specifically the media feels impotent to force the demos of each party to rally on the consensus insider pick.

In the Republican Party the situation has gotten so bad that the Establishment is on the verge of being driven out of power completely (something that is unacceptable to them, and that they will do hardly anything to stop). That the Establishment has had to turn to a man they do not trust to be their standard bearer is indicative of their desperation.

The revolt in the Democratic Party has been more traditional so far. Initially Sanders was a perfect sheepdog during the phase in which his candidacy could be dismissed by the media. But the Establishment is quite weak in the Democratic Party as well, and the crumbling of the Republican Establishment has accelerated the process among the Democrats.

Sanders supporters sense this, and believe with good reason that there is a real chance for an overthrow of the party control. They see what is happening in the Republican Party and tell themselves why could it not happen in their party as well.

As long as the media is kept off guard, and in a state of being unable to declare the consensus winners, then everything is still up for grabs.

Thus the bar for Sanders to continue is very low at this point. He barely needs to win any states---just stay competitive in most of them. The goal would be to deny Hillary an outright majority consisting only of her bound delegates.

Even if she goes into the convention with a majority, Sanders and his supporters will likely not concede, based on the idea that they can yet convince enough party superdelegates to change their minds.

Given that Hillary is likely to keep her delegate lead all the way to the convention, the only viable way in which this strategy will work is that if Hillary can be disqualified as a candidate. As the convention nears, and as the media does its best to try to put forth the message that Hillary is the certain victor, enormous pressure will be on the Sanders supporters to find a way to make Hillary unacceptable.  If they can pull this off, then there will be little or nothing to stop a Sanders-backed takeover of the Democratic Party at the convention. He can freely pick someone like Elizabeth Warren as a VP, and (according to his supporters), they will triumph over any Republican, Establishment or otherwise, in the general election.

The supporters of Sanders sense victory is very close for them. It simply depends on disqualifying Hillary in the minds of enough people, so that ideally she steps aside and lets Sanders win.

We are probably past the point of no return, in regard to a graceful end of the Sanders campaign in which the energy of his movement is channeled back into the Establishment-backed candidate. If they must, of course, Sanders' supporters will suck it up and vote for Hillary in the end. After all, they still believe in the Establishment.* They just want to run it.

* (as seen by how much they yearn for a restoration of it within the Republican Party).