THE DEATH OF STALIN: In “Bye-Bye Bernie,” Kevin Williamson asks, “What did we learn from the primary campaign of Bernie Sanders, the socialist from Vermont from Brooklyn who once again made a strong but unsuccessful run at the Democratic nomination?”

(2) The demographic shift in the Democratic Party is not necessarily a shift to the left. The Democrats are a party in which the power is held by a caste of relatively well-off white people (the little old liberal white ladies) but the numbers and the votes increasingly come from a party base that is less affluent and less white. Sanders’s movement is dominated by champagne socialists: well-off, college-educated white people who resented having to pay back their Cornell student loans. Black voters, on the other hand, strongly preferred Joe Biden, a more moderate Democratic hack of the familiar kind. Senator Sanders and the former vice president have more in common than it might seem: Neither of them is a native speaker of the language of “social justice” and intersectionality, and their attempts to incorporate yesterday’s voguish enthusiasm into their rhetoric have been pretty weak; even with his 1970s Vermont-stoner radical posturing, Senator Sanders, with his focus on labor and social programs, is closer to a New Deal liberal than is, say, Julián Castro. But if you really want an old-fashioned Democrat, why not vote for an actual old-fashioned Democrat? And that is what Joe Biden is. African Americans were not brought into the Democratic Party by Barack Obama—they were brought into the Democratic Party by Franklin Roosevelt. And though they are by no means politically homogeneous, their politics have been, broadly speaking, a New Deal politics. The boutique radicalism of well-off Millennial college graduates raised in the suburbs of wherever may not be the future of the Democratic Party.

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(Classical reference in headline.)