Any doubts that the Democrats are the top-down party and the GOP is the bottom-up party should be resolved by the latest round of criticism telling Bernie Sanders to stop behaving like anything other than a token opposition candidate, intended to provide cover for the inauguration of the successor to the throne at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  After all, the only reason socialist/independent Sanders was allowed to run for the Democrats’ nomination was that he was expected to lose gracefully.

He hasn’t stayed on script.  In fact, he’s been having the time of his life, and attracting wild support from Democrats as outraged at their party’s establishment as Trump supporters are at the GOP.  And Bernie, who has been a nonentity in the Senate, never taken seriously by the Democrats with whom he nominally caucused, suddenly finds himself leading a movement that, however simplistic and nonsensical, gives the alienated base exactly what it wants: revenge and free stuff (they hope).

The problem is that his well justified attacks on Hillary Clinton are having an effect.  Hillary’s campaign manager Robbie Mook calls them “poisonous.”  As The Hill reports, “Dems fear their primary has reached danger zone”:

Sanders has leveled some of his most biting criticism at Clinton in recent days, stirring passions in the race that insiders say could leave the party divided heading into November’s elections.

It certainly should. Hillary is, after all, a transparent phony, pretending to represent the “little people” as her soul sister Leona Helmsley called them, while building a huge fortune and acting arrogantly when the cameras are turned away.

The left of the Democratic Party has long been uneasy about Clinton’s coziness with the corporate world. But the emphatic, persistent way in which Sanders is attacking her on the topic risks painting her as a cipher of Wall Street — and such a charge could drain liberal grassroots enthusiasm if she locks up the nomination.

“I am worried about the increasingly harsh tone and tenor of this campaign [that could] turn off Sanders supporters in the general [election],” said strategist Jim Manley, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who has endorsed Clinton. “I’m afraid they’re going to stay home.”

Or some of them might even vote for Donald Trump if he is the GOP nominee.  After all, he rails against dishonesty and corruption, just like Bernie.  He may not offer as much free stuff, but he serves the same angry impulse toward the establishment.

And keep in kind the wild card.  A global economic crisis may be in our near future, and the timing of it could be as critical as it was in 2008.