PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE:  This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

A national newspaper story a few days ago describes the tension for Democrats as they could be poised to do this:

Nominate a socialist who wants the government to control energy production and health care, who wants nationwide rent control, and who calls America a “racist society from top to bottom.”

That’s Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

So, in a potential winnable race against Donald Trump later this year, Democrats may be lurching so far left as to promote Trump’s re-election.

Here’s the way the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) wrote about the issue:

“The Vermont revolutionary’s victory portends a long primary battle, unless Democrat voters elevate a single mainstream candidate who can challenge him.  Sanders will get his 25 to 30 per cent of the vote in primary after primary, racking up delegates on his way to the convention.

“If other candidates keep dividing the other votes, he will be hard to stop, as Trump was for Republicans in 2016.  Even if a single alternative emerges, Sanders won’t go down without a ferocious intra-party fight.”

The WSJ asks this question.

“So, how did this happen?  How did Sanders move from the socialist fringe to the brink of controlling the Democrat Party?  The senator’s dogged persistence across decades and especially the last four years is part of the explanation.

“Yet, Sanders wouldn’t be this close to the White House if not for the complicity of Democrats and the liberals who dominate the academy and media.  Rather than fighting the ideas that animate him and his millennial voters, they have indulged and promoted them.  They created the political environment in which he could prosper.”

The WSJ cites several “intellectual currents” Sanders is riding – and, to me, as an observer of federal politics in my cheap seat out West, the currents strike me as exactly on point.

• The attack on capitalism and markets. Sanders wants America to become a socialist state so there is no reward for hard work and enterprise.
• The rise of left-wing intolerance on campus. From the late 1960s on, the political left flooded into the academy and rewrote the curriculum to fit its ideological fashions. First the humanities, then the social sciences and now even the sciences have been forced to bend to identity politics.  Race, gender, class and sexual orientation became preoccupations in scholarship and tenure.
• The critique of America as irredeemably racist. Identity politics took an especially sharp turn on race with the police shootings of 2014 and 2015. Equity and honesty compel calling out racism in all areas where it exists, but it does not exist everywhere.
• Climate change as religion, not science. A generation of apocalyptic climate education has made what was a matter of temperatures and scientific modeling into a cultural identity. No dissent is tolerated, and the solutions must be radical and immediate.

These, the WSJ says, “are among the beliefs feeding the radicalism and resentment of the Sanders campaign.  Yet, rather than challenge Sanders, the other candidates have given him a pass on everything besides Medicare for All.  They have adopted his tax and redistribution arguments, if not all his policies.  They mimic his denunciations of America as racist.

“This year, even more than most years, the country needs a sensible and centrist opposition party and nominee.  Millions of Americans like the results of Trump’s policies, but not his divisive brand of politics and personal behavior.  They are looking for an alternative who doesn’t scare them.”

Count me as one of those looking.