MSNBC’s Long, Flailing Road to the Trump Era

Before the network stumbled upon a winning formula of turning a deluge of Trump-related scandals into fodder for the Resistance, it lurched from one identity to the next. Over the course of its two-decade existence, it has been a platform for conservative misfits, aging shock jocks, and anti-Bush warriors—sometimes all at the same time. MSNBC’s prime-time lineup may now be anchored by liberals Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes, but it has had more than a few twists, turns, and dead ends:

By 2015, its popularity sometimes dipped below not just Fox News and CNN, but also CNN’s airport-lounge spin-off, HLN. There was speculation that it had become too liberal, that the appetite for stem-winding perorations in the vein of Keith Olbermann’s raucous, Bush-era “special comment” programming was simply too limited, and that there was perhaps no national market for a left-leaning counterpart to Fox. 


Then came the 2016 elections, and the incredible rise and victory of Donald Trump.

https://newrepublic.com/article/153435/msnbcs-wild-ride

The Democratic Party Is Radicalizing

and it's Bernie's fault

If you want to understand just how radicalized the Democratic Party has become in recent years, look at the ascent of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. A self-proclaimed socialist, Sanders served as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and was then elected to the House in 1990 and the Senate in 2006. It’s hard to overstate just how left-wing Sanders’s views have been, at least by the standards of American politics.

Sanders has been a consistent defender of regimes led by anti-American dictators like Daniel Ortega and Fidel Castro. He took pains to separate his brand of socialism from the “totalitarianism” of the Soviet Union, but on a 1988 trip, repeatedly drew contrasts between the Soviet system and the United States that cast his own country in an unfavorable light. In the 1970s, Sanders called for the nationalization of entire industries and 100 percent taxation on those making more than $1 million. Since then, Sanders has moved away from calling for government to own the means of production, but he has hardly experienced a Damascus-road conversion. He is still a proud leftist.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/progressivism-making-democrats/586372/