The Democratic party and its Chicago convention were torn apart in 1968 over a fundamental cleavage over the Vietnam War. The Sanders camp is going to blow up the convention to push debate schedule reform? That's amazing. Reform of the primary process is a much more substantive matter. But remember, as I've argued before, the parts of the process most in need of reform (Caucuses and post-election day shenanigans) are the ones helping Sanders the most! Now his whole campaign is based on getting the superdelegates - which for most of the campaign he has said constitute the core anti-democratic aspect of the process - to hand him the nomination. Consistency is an overrated commodity in much of life, especially in politics. But you can't make the logic of your arguments so structurally unsound that they collapse under the weight of their own ridiculousness.

Let's start with a reality check. Does anyone think there weren't enough debates this cycle? Or that they prevented Sanders from winning? As the Times article notes at one point: "Several described the campaign’s message as having devolved into a near-obsession with perceived conspiracies on the part of Mrs. Clinton’s allies." Indeed.

It is painfully conspicuous how little the Sanders camp is now pressing its issue agenda as its chances of winning the nomination have diminished. On the contrary, it's debates and a 'rigged' primary process, points that are either trivial and nonsensical or hypocritical inasmuch as the 'rigged' parts of the process are the ones the Sanders' campaign has used most effectively. The process reforms Sanders is now marching to the convention for seem like little more than attempts to prosecute and vindicate his overarching claim that the primary process in which he lost was illegitimate. In other words, his justification for continuing is mostly a feedback loop of his refusal to accept that he came close but ultimately lost.

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From what I can tell, the current Sanders campaign is riven between people who are increasingly upset or bewildered by what we might call the resurgent "burn it down" turn of Sanders outlook and others who are fully immersed in the feedback loop of grievance and paranoia that sees all the political events of the last year as a series of large and small scale conspiracies to deny the rectitude and destiny of Bernie Sanders. I've seen many, many campaigns. People put everything into it and losing is brutal and punishing. Folks on the losing side frequently go a little nuts, sometimes a lot nuts. The 2008 denouement really was pretty crazy. But it's not clear that this time we have any countervailing force - adulthood, institutional buy-in, future careers, over-riding pragmatism to rein things in.

He released a statement in which he listed a series of procedural complaints about the Nevada convention, attacked the Democratic Party for not being inclusive enough and warned that “millions of Americans are outraged” and that “the political world is changing.” He offered a throwaway line, three paragraphs down, condemning his supporters’ hooliganism in a statement that mostly justified it.

Mr. Sanders’s irresponsibility is sadly unsurprising. He has stirred up populist energy over the past several months with anti-corporate scapegoating and extravagant claims about policy. He has indulged and encouraged hyperbolic feelings that the country is badly adrift, that most of the nation agrees with a left-wing agenda but is trapped in a corrupt system, and that nothing but a political revolution will do. He has attracted some big, passionate crowds. But as he has lagged in votes, he increasingly has questioned the legitimacy of the process and encouraged his supporters to feel disenfranchised. The result is a toxic mix of unreason, revolutionary fervor and perceived grievance.

What is particularly galling about the Sanders camp’s complaints of disenfranchisement is that Mr. Sanders has benefited or tried to benefit from a variety of sketchy quirks of the nominating process. He has claimed support for his cause in caucuses, which are quite exclusive, but he complains about closed primary elections, which are more inclusive. In Nevada, his supporters were trying to game the rules to get more delegates and got upset when they did not succeed. As veteran Nevada politics reporter Jon Ralston put it, “Despite their social media frothing and self-righteous screeds, the facts reveal that the Sanders folks disregarded rules, then when shown the truth, attacked organizers and party officials as tools of a conspiracy to defraud the senator of what was never rightfully his in the first place.”

Mr. Sanders denies reality when he tells supporters he still has a plausible pathway to the Democratic presidential nomination. But passion cannot trump reality. It also cannot excuse violence, threats and attempts at mob rule. It is past time for Mr. Sanders to be honest with his supporters, before they take the campaign’s irresponsible ethos to greater extremes and thereby help ensure the election of Donald Trump.

A little more than a year ago, I wrote the following after it was announced that Senator Sanders had raised an impressive $1.5 million in the 24 hours after he announced his candidacy:

"The mister and I played a small part in Bernie’s surprisingly successful showing: We made our first political contribution of 2016 to Sanders’ campaign yesterday in the hope that his candidacy would drag Hillary Clinton a few centimeters leftward. Little did we guess we were droplets in a socialist cash tsunami!"

Sanders is still surfing that tsunami, but now I am heartily sorry to have been a part of it. Sanders’ arrogant statement yesterday, in which he failed to condemn the appalling behavior of his supporters at the Nevada Democratic Convention and instead engaged in crybaby complaining about the process, was the last fucking straw for me.

For weeks if not months now, whenever someone would suggest that Sanders might screw the pooch by irreversibly ginning up ill-will toward the Democratic Party among his fringier supporters, I insisted that Sanders cared too much about making progress on his issues and preserving his influence in the senate to go down such a damaging path.

Well, the statement linked above suggests that y’all were right, and I was wrong. Sanders seems prepared to Nader us, so (to quote valued commenter Burnsie) fuck him, the horse he rode in on, the farrier who shod the horse and the farmers who grew the wheat and oats.

I still hope and trust that the vast majority of Sanders supporters will come around after Clinton wins the nomination. All the ones I personally know plan to do that — they aren’t morons.

I still suspect that many of the loopier BernieBros were never Democrats in the first place but rather Greenies who voted for Jill Stein in 2012 because Obama wasn’t pure enough for them or Paultroons who are in it for the Fed audit. So if they defect, it won’t much matter.

But I’ve learned my lesson about making political gestures. This is serious shit; it’s too important for playacting. I wish I were confident Senator Sanders understands that.

For months I'd thought and written that Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver was the key driver of toxicity in the the Democratic primary race. Weaver has been highly visible on television, far more than campaign managers tend to be. He's also been the one constantly upping the tension, pressing the acrimony and unrealism of the campaign as Sanders actual chances of winning dwindled.

But now I realize I had that wrong.

Actually, I didn't realize it. People who know told me.

Over the last several weeks I've had a series of conversations with multiple highly knowledgable, highly placed people. Perhaps it's coming from Weaver too. The two guys have been together for decades. But the 'burn it down' attitude, the upping the ante, everything we saw in that statement released today by the campaign seems to be coming from Sanders himself. Right from the top.

This should have been obvious to me. The tone and tenor of a campaign always come from the top. It wasn't obvious to me until now.

This might be because he's temperamentally like that. There's some evidence for that. It may also be that, like many other presidential contenders, once you get close it is simply impossible to let go. I don't know which it is. That would only be my speculation. But this is coming from Bernie Sanders. It's not Weaver. It's not driven by people around him. It's right from him. And what I understand from knowledgable sources is that in the last few weeks anyone who was trying to rein it in has basically stopped trying and just decided to let Bernie be Bernie.

Sanders speech tonight was right in line with his statement out this afternoon. He identified the Democratic party as an essentially corrupt, moribund institution which is now on notice that it must let 'the people' in. What about the coalitions Barack Obama built in 2008 and 2012, the biggest and most diverse presidential coalitions ever constructed?

Sanders narrative today has essentially been that he is political legitimacy. The Democratic party needs to realize that. This, as I said earlier, is the problem with lying to your supporters. Sanders is telling his supporters that he can still win, which he can't. He's suggesting that the win is being stolen by a corrupt establishment, an impression which will be validated when his phony prediction turns out not to be true. Lying like this sets you up for stuff like happened over the weekend in Nevada.

As I said, it all comes from the very top.