Why Hillary Clinton will fail to unite the Democratic Party

It was a nice made-for-TV moment: At the Democratic National Convention, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton's hapless primary opponent, put in Clinton's name for nomination as president of the United States, unanimously and by acclamation.

But that small show of unity was quickly drowned out by the shouts of "Ber-nie! Ber-nie!" that seemed to ascend from the floor each time the words "Hillary" or "Clinton" were mentioned. Here was another made-for-TV moment, albeit in a different and damaging way.

For all the expectations that the Republican convention would be a disaster, it's the Democratic convention that seems on the brink (despite the occasional bright moment). There have been more, louder protests against Clinton than there were against Donald Trump, despite her being much more firmly in the political mainstream than her deranged opponent.

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This doesn't bode well for Clinton's task, which is to unite her party.

The left flank of the Democratic Party is mad as hell, and they're not going to take it anymore. Since centrist Democrats took over the party in the early 1990s, leftist Democrats have been seething, secure in the belief that the reason why they weren't triumphant in American politics had nothing to do with the American people not wanting to buy what they were selling, and everything to do with the viciousness of their enemies.

But now things are different. The stunning success of same-sex marriage seems to have shown not only that the left is winning the culture wars, but that the way to win massive political victories is to get very angry and agitated and self-righteous. America's changing demographics seem to promise a "rainbow coalition" that can deliver progressive majorities of the country for the next generation. (Nevermind that despite their decision to nominate a crazy person for president, Republicans control supermajorities of gubernatorial offices and state legislatures, not to mention both houses of Congress.)

In the middle of all that stands Hillary Rodham Clinton. First lady. Senator. Secretary of state. Establishmentarian. Voted for the Iraq war. Pushed for the war in Libya. Took money from Goldman Sachs and God knows who else. Totally a fan of same-sex marriage for all of the past five minutes. That person who once said — can you believe the horror? — that maybe abortion in America should be rare.

For her, uniting the Democratic Party is going to be nearly impossible.

Clinton is the embodiment of the centrist, establishmentarian Democrat who American leftists hate. They view her as having been actively complicit in the destruction of the country by helping sell late-1990s financial deregulation and the Iraq war.

On top of that, her image of personal corruption seals the deal. It's like a failing marriage where there is no trust; even if one half of the couple is willing to say everything the other wants to hear, they're still not going to believe it.

Finally, at this point, uniting the party is structurally impossible. As far as the left has come in the culture wars, the fact remains that, in the United States, as in literally every other advanced democratic country on the planet, national elections are won in the center (otherwise it wouldn't be the center), and it's impossible to build an election-winning coalition simply by pandering to the far-left.

Which brings me to a broader point about the structural change occurring within Western politics: Everyday people are rebelling against the globalist elites. This rebellion can take the form of left-wing politics, like the Syriza party in Greece or the Podemos party in Spain. Or it can come in the form of right-wing politics, like the Front National in France, Brexit in Britain, or Donald Trump in our very own U.S. of A.

That divide — not between left or right, but between top and bottom — is what will define politics for the next many years, if not decades. In this structural change, Clinton embodies the top, not the bottom.

And the bottom ain't gonna forget it.