That’s certainly how it looked when the June sun rose Tuesday over the broken glass, looted storefronts, burnt-out cars, and vandalized buildings in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Madison and other American cities. Public officials let rioters exploiting the memory of George Floyd run wild in the streets. Even after nearly a week of violence, these and other liberal Democratic cities let lawless radicals harass and plunder almost at will.

In downtown St. Louis, four police officers were shot after midnight. “I believe some coward randomly shot at the police line,” said police chief John Hayden. A 7-Eleven was looted and set afire, but firefighters were deliberately slowed by protesters in responding. “We had people lying down in the street” and trash cans were placed as obstacles to block fire trucks, said fire chief Dennis Jenkerson.

In Philadelphia, city of brotherly vandals, gangs of rioters rolled through several neighborhoods Sunday burning businesses and cars. They returned for more on Monday, shutting down the highway that bisects the city at evening rush hour.

I don’t criticize him for it. I am a conservative. “Vision,” in my understanding, is for prophets, not statesmen. But Mr. Biden is no conservative. He is a liberal, and liberalism needs vision.

Mr. Sanders is a radical, not a liberal. The liberal worldview seeks a more equitable and open polity by means of piecemeal political reform. The radical outlook envisions a new world, not an incrementally better one. He wants to remake the U.S. economy and banish all forms of inequality.

With Mr. Biden’s ascension and Mr. Sanders’s decision this week to suspend his campaign, Democrats are again choosing liberalism. The important thing to understand about modern American liberalism, though, is that it is a spent force. It is out of ideas. It is visionary, but it no longer sees much of anything. That Mr. Biden has been reduced to protesting the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, safely tucked away in his basement, nicely symbolizes liberalism’s impotence.

(more…)

The Vermont revolutionary’s victory portends a long primary battle, unless Democratic voters elevate a single mainstream candidate who can challenge him. Mr. Sanders will get his 25% to 30% 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 Mr. Trump was for Republicans in 2016. Even if a single alternative emerges, Mr. Sanders won’t go down without a ferocious intra-party fight.

***

How did this happen? How did Mr. Sanders move from the socialist fringe to the brink of controlling the Democratic Party? The Senator’s dogged persistence across decades and especially the last four years is part of the explanation.

Yet Mr. 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. Consider the intellectual currents he is riding:

(more…)