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Notes -
I have 2 hypotheticals:
I ask because Sanders appealed very strongly to many Trump voters, doing great in e.g. West Virginia but lacking e.g. black support (which the democratic primaries overfocus on. Besides Wasserman-Schultz et al.'s machinations.) His approach was not based on identity politics etc. I'm curious how people think his "movement" or time in office would have turned out.
Had he won the primary or presidency, I think it would have turned out very similarly to Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. Bernie has been in politics on the fringes of his party for a long time, but has no friends in high places, would face a generally unfriendly media, and is extremely weak to idpol infighting. Do I think he could have beaten Trump? No, but Trump's victory would have looked very different. Bernie is not a strong character in direct interpersonal conflict, and he would face a great deal of that from within the party before even getting to Trump. Then you'd have relentless Trump bullying, probably in a manner closer to the primaries than to his contest with Hillary - say what you want about Hillary, she's no shrinking violet - playing up all the weirdnesses of Bernie's character and platform. Trump probably runs significantly closer to the center on policy (not that that's ever affected people's impressions of him), and the Republican Party donor class falls in line behind him far faster. The election is decided more conventionally, since the outcast white working class is more divided - that's one part of this scenario I'm not sure about, the extent to which "white working class rage" is sidelined as a media topic compared to our timeline, or if an anti-both-candidates media plays it up even further. The one wild card would be the extent to which the leftist organizers and agents (in the sense of media agents) behind the rise of the Squad, Mamdani, etc. step into the limelight earlier and pull something crazy off, though they would be younger, less organized, and in a less developed social media environment.
If Sanders won, there would be a crazy three-way power struggle in his administration between the Old Left (him), the New Left (woke), and the party establishment. I really find it hard to see anything other than the Old Left capitulating as far as possible to New Left demands. Sanders himself is not really woke, but the entire activist apparatus supporting him, and anybody under 70 he could get to staff his admin, would be New Left as much as they are Old. Sanders himself was very happy to drop policy planks, like immigration skepticism, where the Old conflicted with the New. But the end result is very different for "woke", in that it becomes the flagpole of an insurgent populist movement rather than an establishment ideology. Essentially, instead of a Trumpist right against a woke establishment, you have a much weaker but still fairly powerful populist right (this is not the critical defeat for populism that a Hillary victory would have been), a bipartisan establishment, and a SocDem/woke populist left. Bernie most likely ends up a pretty ineffective and chaotic one-term President (think Trump 1, but more internal shambles and economic problems than enemy action), which also harms wokeness by association. The private sector's wokeness is bigger in some ways but comparatively muted in others, at least among upper management, since the vibe is not "us the institutions resisting Trump", but more a fearful compliance with the Administration of the type you're seeing now. The civil war we saw in news media between cautious management and woke staff kicks off way earlier. Covid finishes the Sanders administration off, and the next admin probably inherits a significantly worse economic position, ratcheting up the three-way tensions between woke/Trumpist/establishment going into the incoming Republican (Cruz?) administration.
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