Has democracy degenerated into mob rule?

Fortunately, everyone now admits what became obvious during the 2016 race: Bernie Sanders presides over a disgusting, rage-filled, conspiracy-crazed, potentially violent and downright Trumpian mob. I wasn't surprised when the only left-wing mass shooter of recent years turned out to be a Bernie Bro.

Even if you like Sanders, this new piece by Jonathan Last should disturb you. Last begins by quoting a few choice bits of vileness offered by Bernie's bros and hos. Last then offers this observation:

This is, as everyone else has pointed out, not very different from Trump’s social network army.

By which I mean that it’s morally different, but functionally the same. Unlike Trump, Sanders does not encourage online bullying himself—he only employs some people who do. That’s a big difference in terms of the moral framework!

Bullshit. There is no moral difference between Michael Corleone ordering someone else to kill his brother and Michael Corleone doing the job himself. Charlie Manson didn't kill Sharon Tate but he went to jail for it. Bernie refuses to take responsibility for the lies, paranoid accusations, threats, brutality and demeaning language routinely offered by his crazed minions. His refusal to apologize makes him 100 percent culpable.

(You should read the quotes in Last's article. It's just so bloody adorable: The same easily-offended progressives who always demand "trigger warnings" -- who get the vapors and demand safe spaces whenever they receive even the lightest criticism -- always use the worst possible language when denouncing a perceived enemy. The bros have turned hypocrisy into a fine art.)

No other candidate has anything like this sort of digital brownshirt brigade. I mean, except for Donald Trump.

The question no one is asking is this:

What if you can’t win the presidency without an online mob?

What if we now live in a world where having a bullying, agro social media army running around popping anyone who sticks their head up is either an important ingredient for, or a critical marker of, success?

Then give up on democracy.

If democracy has devolved into mob warfare, then the result will not be a unified nation but Chicago, 1925. Or maybe Syria, 2014. Recall the words of Abraham Lincoln:

When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”