Yes, Bernie can win. And he's not the only one.

Annette Nancarrow, portrait of a young Mexican girl and mirror, no date, via Rosemary Carstens.

Who is Mr. Bret Stephens warning, or threatening ("Of Course Bernie Can Win"), as the case may be?

The warning applies to me as much as to anyone else who has spent the past months, or years, insisting that the senator from Vermont doesn’t have a chance. What it comes down to is this: We don’t want Sanders to be elected, so we tell ourselves he can’t.

Is he talking to readers? Is he talking to his colleagues in the panditry? The general problem of confusing your desire with your forecast—you could call it the Bill Kristol problem,  because he's the one who made it the cornerstone of his thinking—is mostly more widespread among readers, I think, while typical pandits are more interested in realizing interesting or contrarian "takes" that they don't necessarily believe at all, like this one, which is interesting because the Very Serious People are united in believing Sanders is unelectable.

Is he talking to the staid conservative readers in The Times's audience, trying to spread panic so early in the season, and for what? What does he expect them to do about it? Register as Democrats and work for Biden or Bloomberg to nip the nightmare in the bud?

He's arguing against those who say that Sanders is doomed because he can't get enough votes:

According to the theory, Sanders’s support has a hard ceiling: It may be intense, but it’s also cultlike and off-putting. Too many Americans know enough about socialism to want a president who wears the term proudly (even if he insists it’s of a more benign variety).

Editing fail there:

• many Americans know enough about socialism to want a president who wears the term proudly
• too many of them for what?

He embraces nearly all of the same policies, like Medicare for all, that raised Elizabeth Warren high in the polls but are now dragging her down.

I thought I was the only person suggesting that Warren was more radical than Sanders. The Sanders deniers Stephens is arguing with think Sanders is doomed because he's almost as radical as she is.

And then there are those clips of him saying nice things about the Soviet Union, or defending the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, or finding the silver lining in the Castro dictatorship in Cuba. Didn’t Jeremy Corbyn, whose ideological affinities run in the same direction, just lead Britain’s Labour Party to disaster?

It all sounds superficially convincing — and eerily familiar. It’s what many conservatives kept saying about Donald Trump around this time four years ago.

Ah, here we are. He's trying to do two things at once: Corbynify Sanders with these revelations of his shocking "affinities", as if people had never heard of them, and then remind us that a more or less equally monstrous candidate won the presidency in 2016, one who during the campaign said nice things about the president of the Russian Federation and had some ideological affinities too, if he did.

Jeepers, I certainly don't recall Trump having a lot of ideological affinities during the 2016 campaign. I recall him having entirely personal views about the individuals he didn't like (Clinton and Obama) and those he did (Putin and anybody who said "nice" things about him) and the groups he didn't like (Muslims and Mexicans and people who lived in ruined places like Chicago and Detroit) and those he did (the "poorly educated" and WikiLeaks). He'd make an occasional gesture to the priorities of some kind of working people (preserving the factory jobs of the 1970s from the influx of Japanese and German cars, taxing the "hedge fund guys", and giving everybody the best health care ever, though there was never a reason to believe a word of that last as his plan remained more secret than Nixon's plan to end the Vietnam War and he clearly knew nothing about the health care system we have, not even what insurance is), but specific ideas to those of normal Republicans, including reductions in corporate and income and inheritance and capital gains taxes and deregulation of industry.

As with Sanders, Trump was seen as being way outside his party’s mainstream: a protectionist in a party of free traders; an isolationist in a party of interventionists; a libertine in a party of moralists. As with Sanders, Trump barely belonged to the party whose nomination he sought. As with Sanders, Trump’s message was that he was fighting a “rigged system.”

Well, maybe those, though in a different way from the way Stephens supposes, perhaps because his own grasp of history is so weak and bound by the clichés deployed by other pandits. Ever since the 1890s, the protective tariff has only been really alive in the Republican Party (Democrats never object to free trade agreements on the protectionist issue (though union leadership sometimes wishes they would) but only on the issues of labor's right to organize and the need to impose environmental standards on other countries. Isolationism has been a Republican issue from World War I, and Lodge and Borah wrecking the Versailles treaty, through the America First (!) movement of Charles Lindbergh to Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot (Democrats never go for isolationism, however much most of us oppose military solutions to international problems). If Trump's "libertinism" represents an attraction to anybody, it's the libertarians who are bound to the party anyway, by their attachment to tax cuts and deregulation. At last a Republican who cares about Republican principles and isn't distracted by weird religious obsessions! they tell themselves, with reason, while Trump himself hangs out with Franklin Graham and Junior Falwell anyway.

I really don't think a possible Sanders victory is predictable on the example of the Trump victory because I don't think the two men are doing anything similar. Annoyed as I may frequently find myself with Bernie, he's got an entirely coherent program, if kind of vague at points, and one with a long resonance in American history (the concept of free college was created by the 1860s Republicans, the most radical party ever to achieve power in the US), and one that can inspire us all in a quest to make American lives better, happier, and more meaningful.

Conservatives aren't necessarily the only people who think Sanders can't win. For one thing, there's the folks from Bernie's (and my) ancestral milieu described in this lovely piece by Joshua Leifer in Jewish Currents:

BERNIE SANDERS simply cannot win, Vivian Gornick told me emphatically over the phone. Gornick, the acclaimed feminist writer and critic, grew up in the working-class Jewish Bronx of the 1940s and ’50s, enmeshed in her family’s Communist Party milieu. She speaks with the kind of old New York accent that is becoming increasingly rare; she is famously frank in conversation. Asked about Sanders, she did not mince words: “He’s old and he’s Jewish and he rants and he raves.” In short, he’s unelectable. 

In the broadest demographic terms, it’s no surprise that Gornick, who is 84, is skeptical about Sanders. While the senator from Vermont is the most popular candidate among young voters by a wide margin, he has struggled this election season, as he did in 2016, to gain support from voters middle-aged and older, who tend to be whiter, richer, and more conservative. There is, of course, a segment of older voters who do not fit this profile: former student radicals and civil rights activists, labor organizers and consciousness-raisers, lifelong socialists and former fellow travelers, Jewish veterans of the left—in other words, people like Sanders himself. And yet Sanders appears to be struggling to win over these voters, too. 

“I do not find him inspiring and I cannot imagine him as president,” Gornick said. “And I do think it’s because, in my eyes, he is a long-winded old Jewish guy. I know that’s terrible, but I can’t help it. That’s how it strikes me.” 

I think I've mentioned this before: for an American leftist of a certain age, he's reminiscent of that guy who dominated every endless meeting, a bit older than the others, humorless, dogmatic, and repetitive, and always interrupting women. I don't feel as negative about him as Gornick does, but I get the picture.

For us old New Leftists Sanders is a pretty conventional Democrat, in spite of the crustiness that makes him shy away from party identification:

Perhaps surprisingly, given their convictions about Sanders’s unelectability, interviewees did not describe the candidate’s democratic socialist positions as too extreme; instead, they claimed that Sanders wasn’t a real socialist at all. “When he gives his big speeches on democratic socialism, the biggest democratic socialist he references is FDR. I think he’s kind of a turbo-charged New Dealer for the 21st century,” said Rich Yeselson, a writer and contributing editor at Dissent (where I am an associate editor) who worked in the labor movement for many years. Gornick, too, shrugged off Sanders’s invocations of socialism. “He’s a reformer,” she said, “which is fine.” 

In fact it's one of the things that's wrong with him. I really mean it when I say Warren is more radical, with her crazy combination of the George Bailey tiny-capitalist ethic and the interest in federal projects for reducing inequality that do indeed recall Lincoln and the Republicans of the original cohort, but if we're called on to vote for Bernie in November I'll be there just as much as I'd be there for Biden or even (God help us) Bloomberg, because we really need to do this thing, and do it in whatever way democracy dictates.

Incidentally Bret Stephens comes in part from a more glamorous version of the same milieu, though I don't suppose he knows much about or has any sympathy for it: his paternal grandmother was the artist Annette Nancarrow, a friend of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo who, after dumping Stephens's grandfather, married the great American composer Conlon Nancarrow, whose music was mostly composed for player piano because it was too difficult for human performers; he was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and a Communist living in Mexico City in what he regarded as political exile.

In my view I guess electing Sanders presents some problems, as do all our candidates. I think pretty much any of them other than the abominable Tulsi can win, handled right, against a Trump who is now tarnished goods the public knows all too well (though there's that 40% of the electorate that doesn't care), and none of them is going to be entirely easy. That's how the cookie crumbles. I still don't know what Stephens is trying to do in today's column unless it's just, like the fat boy in Pickwick Papers, to make our flesh creep,