A lot of Democrats don’t want to admit it, but Donald Trump isn’t the only presidential candidate playing with fire and recklessly courting an angry mob.
For the latest round of curse-word hurling, chair throwing, social-media stalking and conspiracy-theory swapping, look no further than the supporters of Bernie Sanders.
Over the weekend, dozens of Sanders devotees lost their minds after the Nevada Democratic Party, meeting for its convention in Las Vegas, awarded a majority of delegates to front-runner Hillary Clinton.
Convinced that the establishment had rigged the rules and that Sanders delegates had been excluded for unfair reasons, they booed and traded barbs with people on stage, including Clinton surrogate and keynote speaker U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer.
The convention ended abruptly, descending into chaos that was captured for the world to relive on Facebook and YouTube.
Death threats and vandalism followed, prompting Nevada Democratic Party offices to close on Monday and its chairwoman, Roberta Lange, to release some downright disgusting voicemails and text messages she had received from Sanders supporters. She also reported threats against her grandchildren.
The episode had the reek of Trump rallies, where threats, insults and sucker punches to defend the presumptive Republican nominee have been common. Yet looking back at the hundreds of Sanders supporters who descended on a Clinton rally in East Los Angeles earlier this month to intimidate her supporters, making one little girl cry, it now seems inevitable that the same kind of violent eruption would afflict those “feeling the Bern.”
That’s a scary prospect for a divided political party that is going to need to rediscover its united front in time for the November election. Like the Republicans whose unity was shredded by Trump’s rise, the Democrats now face the prospect of an internal revolt.
