The 2020 Democratic primary’s getting ugly even before it really begins

Have you followed the process over the last couple months by which Beto O’Rourke has suddenly become a centrist hack stooge of capital? Lord, that was fast! Just two months ago, David Sirota, the Bernie Sanders partisan, was tweeting that O’Rourke should be the next speaker of the House. But more recently, Sirota has torn into O’Rourke, and others have followed suit, and O’Rourke’s defenders took to Twitter, and that feud has already convinced a lot of us that our worst nightmare is all but inevitable.

If it’s like this already, can you imagine what it’s going to be like this fall? I don’t even mean chiefly among the candidates, although that can get plenty ugly. I mean among their backers in opinion journalism and on social media. There is where we’ll see the real trench warfare, the Verduns, the mustard-gas attacks over rhetorical and policy differences that are in the scheme of things comparatively small. We’re headed for disaster.