Is Bernie Sanders the Democrats' Goldwater, Reagan, or Trump?

Democrats have never experienced a phenomenon like Bernie Sanders. Republicans have.

Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | AP Photo, Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images, Mario Tama/Getty Images, -slav-/iStock)

The ghost of George McGovern walks the Earth — or, at least, haunts the pages of center-left and center-right columnists. As Bernie Sanders' campaign continues its winning streak, and begins to attract bandwagoning support from undecided voters looking for a winner, it's not just Michael Bloomberg wondering whether the Democrats aren't repeating their worst electoral decision in modern times, and giving President Trump's re-election campaign exactly what it wants.

But the McGovern analogy has a great many problems. For one thing, McGovern wasn't an across-the-board revolutionary; he was a moralist whose rise was powered by a specific issue: forthright opposition to the Vietnam War. Far from presenting himself as the champion of the party's traditional labor base, that base was the biggest reason why McGovern lost in the general election, as the AFL-CIO failed to endorse for the first time since its founding.

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Noah Millman

Noah Millman is a screenwriter and filmmaker, a political columnist and a critic. From 2012 through 2017 he was a senior editor and featured blogger at The American Conservative. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Politico, USA Today, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, Foreign Policy, Modern Age, First Things, and the Jewish Review of Books, among other publications. Noah lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.