What is the establishment? It's the existing power arrangements and the conventional thinking that comes with it. If you are an establishment figure, you are fundamentally comfortable with the existing power arrangements. There are problems of course, and the establishment system needs tweaks, and so if you are an establishment political candidate you run as one who will be most effective in effecting the tweaks. You can claim in that sense to be a change candidate or even a progressive candidate: "Tweaks you can believe in."
In contrast, a transformational politician is fundamentally uncomfortable with and deeply frustrated by the existing power arrangements. Such a politician could be an insider like Gorbachev or FDR, or he could be an outsider like MLK or Hitler. You can be either on the right or the left–someone like Reagan was pretty fringy and outsiderish in the '70s, but he disrupted the New Deal establishment consensus, and replaced it with what became the Neoliberal establishment consensus. So the mission of the transformational politician is to fundamentally disrupt the establishment, its power arrangements, and its basic habits of thinking regarding what is legitimate discourse, what is possible to achieve and what is impossible.
Bernie Sanders is more of an insider than an outsider because he's been working in Washington for twenty-five years, but he's clearly an anti-establishment transformational politician, or at least a politician who aspires to be transformational. If elected, he may or may not succeed in his transformational project. No one will know if he's a transformational figure until he has the chance to try. In the meanwhile he remains an anti-establishment politician running against Clinton, who, like Obama, is an establishment politician.
Obama ran as a transformational candidate, but governed as an establishment politician. We gave him the chance to be transformational, but he governed as a 'tweaker'. The ACA is at best a tweak, the best that was posible within the Neoliberal establishment framework. It's not just that he didn't fight for the public option; it's that his acceptance of the Neoliberal frame was something he never even tried to challenge.
And that's why so many people, including Sanders, are disappointed in him. He didn't do badly as a tweaker. He got some tweaks done in a fairly hostile environment, but he didn't try to transform or disrupt the establishment. He might go down in history as one of the better tweakers, but he was elected to be transformational. Maybe at one time he sincerely aspired to become transformational, but at some point he became convinced that it wasn't possible for him. But I don't think it was ever in his nature to be anything more than a tweaker.
Clinton clearly doesn't believe that's it's possible to be anything more than a tweaker. It's outside her imagination to be anything more. Obama's presidency if anything reinforced it for her. She thought Obama's transformational messaging during the primaries in '08 was a con, that he was selling the country a bill of goods that he couldn't deliver on, and it looks like she was right about that. But I'd say that it wasn't that Obama couldn't, but that he wouldn't. He hadn't the will to do it.
And now Clinton is trying to tell us the same thing about Sanders. I'm sure she sincerely believes that Sanders' campaign is essentially the same con as Obama's, and it's driving her crazy that she finds herself in this position once again. But while her competency argument for herself attracts a certain kind of sober, conventional voter, it doesn't energize the electorate the way a transformational candidate can. She lost to Obama for that reason, and there's a very good chance that she will lose to Sanders for the same reason.
Is she right? Is Sanders conning the electorate the way Obama did? No, and here's the difference: Obama ran as a transformational candidate, but once elected he governed as a disappointingly conventional establishment politician. All the absurdity about seeking to be bi-partisan with a congress that wanted only to obstruct. He lost the congress in '10 not because he wasn't bipartisan and reasonable, but precisely because it became clear to the electorate that he didn't represent the transformational change that they elected him to effect, that he didn't even seem remotely interested in being such a change agent, that we were back to the same old, same old. He didn't give the electorate a reason to vote in a congress that would work with him to disrupt the establishment status quo because clearly had no desire to be a disruptor. He came to embody the essence of the establishment at a time when people wanted it disrupted. Young people who elected him in '08 went back to sleep in '10. If Bernie is elected, I think the congressional elections in '18 will have a very different dynamic.
So in '08, while there was the opportunity, Obama didn't seize it. When push came to shove, he was too timid to attempt it. Sanders is not timid. It's not about whether he would, but about whether he could. He will try. He may fail, but he will try. He's energizing the electorate in a way similar to the way that Obama did in '08, but while Obama was an empty screen onto which many Americans projected their hopes, Bernie is no empty screen. He's for real. He's more than simply his positions or his democratic socialist label. He's a mensch who will govern as he campaigns. Whether or not he can succeed remains to be seen, but he deserves to get the chance to try. And we shouldn't allow fears about his electability to prevent us from supporting him. He's not George McGovern, and this isn't 1972. It's more like 1932 or 1980.
Clearly it's better to elect a tweaker than a disruptor like Trump, but I'd argue that the country is in the mood for anti-establishment disruption, and if they don't get a choice for a disruptor on the Left, they are very likely to choose one from the Right.
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