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[damonm]

36. Massive Historical wrongness.

...(T)oday’s political dynamics are far different than in 1972, when Nixon deployed his dirty tricks, a Democratic old guard fought to undermine their nominee, and white Democrats were being wooed en masse to the right. That’s why I disagree with Miroff’s conclusions. As historian Rick Perlstein put it in 2008, “McGovern lost within a context about as foreign to our current political debates as the French Revolution.”

The Democratic Party is today far more unified than it was in 1972, four years after a convention that witnessed police violence in the streets and chaos on the floor as New Left activists fought to dislodge the establishment. It was really, really bad. AFL-CIO head George Meany turned labor against McGovern, calling him “an apologist for the Communist world.” Sore loser Democrat Hubert Humphrey, congratulating Nixon after his reelection, suggested that he had worked to defeat his own party’s nominee. Today, party establishment figures like Ed Rendell might defect to support a third-party run by a neoliberal technocrat like Michael Bloomberg. But whereas in 1972 Democratic voters were deeply split, the Sanders’ candidacy has exposed a new and different gap: the enormous abyss between party voters and officials. The vast majority of rank-and-file Clinton voters would likely back Sanders as the nominee. The same was not at all true of McGovern.
(snip)
The New Deal coalition was fracturing and Nixon adroitly picked up the pieces. Today, things are quite different: Many of the hard hats that aren’t rioting toward Donald Trump appear to be mobilizing around democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. Today’s electorate is once again undergoing a big-time churn but in a totally new way. Sanders’ campaign, as Matt Karp writes at Jacobin, has united working-class whites and young people while Clinton is attracting support from the affluent and voters of color. In 2008, Obama added overwhelming black and Latino support to the standard affluent and educated Dean/Bradley insurgent coalition, while Clinton held on to the white working class. Today, everything is scrambled.


For this reason, Sanders seems best poised to take on Trump’s support among the sort of union-member, working class whites won to the right under Nixon and Reagan. Clinton’s hold on a large majority of black voters poses a big problem for Sanders in the primary (though one that could very well diminish, given Clinton’s slide in the polls and the growing number of high-profile black activists feeling the Bern). In the general election, however, either Democratic candidate would win overwhelming black support. What Sanders can likely do in a way that Clinton cannot is win over genuine swing voters, crafting a true Rainbow Coalition that for the first time includes white working class voters.

from:
[link:http://www.salon.com/2016/02/01/the_electability_argument_is_bogus_why_bernie_sanders_isnt_the_second_coming_of_george_mcgovern/|