How will Bernie Sanders’s revolution end?

By S.M. | NEW YORK

BERNIE Sanders is out of the running to be the Democratic nominee, but he is still running for president. The once-rising democratic socialist candidate has faltered badly in recent weeks—losing five of the last six states—yet he signalled over the weekend that he is not ready to dismantle his podium and head back to Vermont. Mr Sanders has his sights on the grand delegate prize of the California primary on June 7th (although he currently trails there by about 15 points) and plans to campaign in all of the remaining contests. “We intend to fight for every vote and delegate remaining” in the nomination battle, Jeff Weaver, Mr Sanders's campaign manager, wrote in an email to Sanders supporters this week. “For us to win the majority of pledged delegates, we need to win 654 out of the remaining 1,061. That is 64%. It is admittedly a tough hill to climb, but not an impossible one.”

Not impossible? Neither is climbing Everest in flip-flops during an avalanche. But the maths is brutal, and not in Mr Sanders's favour. In states that have already held primaries or caucuses, reports Milo Beckman at FiveThirtyEight, 12m voters have pulled the lever for Mrs Clinton, while 9m have voted for Mr Sanders. The Vermont senator trails by an average margin of nearly 9% in states that have not yet voted. And Mr Beckman can find no examples of candidates who have come from so far behind to win the Democratic nomination.

So what is Mr Sanders's plan? Word from the campaign suggests he will stay in the race all the way to the Democratic convention in late July. “It is virtually impossible for Secretary Clinton to win all of the pledged delegates she needs to capture the nomination”, Mr Weaver writes, “without the help of superdelegates at the convention”. While technically true, this observation applies more aptly to Mr Sanders, who trails by 327 pledged delegates in the race to amass a winning threshold of 2,383. (Mr Sanders now has 1,318 to Mrs Clinton's 1,645.) As it happens, superdelegates (politicians and other party bigwigs) side overwhelmingly with Mrs Clinton. But Mr Sanders says they should switch their allegiance to him in states where he won a majority of the popular vote. There’s a reasonable argument for this proposal: it honours the preferences of voters, rather than those of elites. But there’s a rather fatal flaw in Bernie’s new plan: it cuts decisively for Hillary. Since Mrs Clinton has won a lot more states than Mr Sanders has, a large majority of superdelegates would still end up supporting her. She’d enjoy significant leads in both pledged delegates and superdelegates. In other words, Mr Sanders's new spin on the race makes Mrs Clinton the nominee.

It is hard to conceive of the Sanders campaign’s latest exercise in tortured logic as an actual plan to contest the convention in Philadelphia. The misguided superdelegate proposal appears, instead, to be a ploy to keep Mr Sanders’s supporters keyed up for a race he has already lost. He hopes to continue gathering tens of thousands of intrepid fans for his rallies, and he wants to keep the $27-a-pop donations pouring in, all in service of retaining a dais for spreading his messages about the ruinous effect of corporate greed in America and his plan for a “political revolution” to confront it.

But soothing Bernie boosters’ sense of despair in the light of his nigh-impossible odds risks adding fuel to a “Bernie or bust” movement of Mr Sanders's supporters who say they refuse pull the lever in November for Mrs Clinton if she is the nominee. Apparently undaunted by the threat of a Republican presidency, these Bernie acolytes say they’d rather stay at home on election day, write their candidate in on the ballot, or vote for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, and more than 50,000 have taken a pledge to this effect. In the eyes of these Bernie purists, Mrs Clinton is so corrupt, so tied to Wall Street interests, so untrustworthy and so hawkish that it would be wrong to support her as a viable alternative to Donald Trump. "Bernie or else", a Facebook page, compares voting for Mrs Clinton to “colonial Americans accepting British rule as the lesser-of-two evils. Why fight the Empire and risk getting shot by a Red Coat?” Some celebrities have gone public with this sentiment, including Susan Sarandon, who has suggested that the silver lining of a Trump presidency is the possibility he might hasten the socialist revolution. To be sure, not every supporter of Mr Sanders plans to drive off a cliff. George Takei, for one, urges a more pragmatic approach. He wants his fellow Sanders backers to take a pledge to "vote blue no matter who" and reminds them of Mr Sanders’s statement that “on her worst day Hillary Clinton will be an infinitely better candidate and president than the Republican candidate on his best day.”

Revolutions don’t afford much room for nuance: they are times to dream. So it’s no surprise that a chunk of Mr Sanders's supporters are digging in their heels as their candidate approaches the end of his time in the sun and it becomes more difficult to believe in “a future to believe in”. But Mr Sanders is not doing himself or the Democratic party any favours by stoking illusions he could win an unwinnable fight at the convention in July. There is little doubt Mr Sanders will eventually endorse Mrs Clinton, and most of his voters will migrate to her. But the showdown with Mr Trump, a proto-fascist who threatens basic norms of American democracy, is just five months away. It is nearing the time when pragmatism, not cynical, irrational stunts, should prevail.