The public typically likes to imagine that it is selecting its representatives out of some sense of "realism" about what is "realistically possible" given the "political situation." Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the political field is littered with fantasy politicians, politicians that people think they are electing but who exist mainly as figments of the public's imagination. A brief look at the "political situation" will allow us to find and identify the fantasy politicians.

Upon the eve of Super Tuesday, last Tuesday, the Democratic Party politicians all saw that they weren't going to make the 15% thresholds required to earn delegates, and decided at once to stop campaigning so that the elite consensus that "Bernie must be stopped" had to be upheld. The current elite consensus has existed before Bernie and is a reaction to the Sixties cultural revolution. Yes, it goes back that far. Its primary attribute is that the public must never, EVER, be allowed to expect anything new for their hard-earned tax dollars (unless new wars or new subsidies for the rich count as something new the public is getting for its tax dollars). Bernie Sanders disrupts that consensus -- his campaigns therefore count as expansions of the public imagination.

Bernie was bright enough, moreover, to understand that a "political revolution" was necessary to achieve his consensus-disrupting aims. He couldn't just run as a politician making promises. Which brings us to examining a significant fantasy about politicians: 1) your politicians can deliver on their promises. Now, really, it is the job of a politician to say "if elected, I will do X." That's what they do. Fantasy politicians deliver on their promises. The key to allowing fantasy politicians to deliver on their promises (within the boundaries of the elite consensus) is to keep those promises away from promises of new benefits. Bernie Sanders, who wants to disrupt the elite consensus a bit, must have a "political revolution" if he is to do so. There's no marked-out path to fulfillment if what you want is something other than what they're already offering.

There's definitely a fantasy Joe Biden out there. He's the guy who "stutters," but doesn't have dementia. The rise of Joe Biden's delegate count has inspired the spread of this fantasy Joe Biden in the fizzy world of social media. We are told that this guy is going to fight for us; he's going to reverse all the bad things the evil fantasy Donald Trump has done, and he's far better than any Republican. The real Joe Biden might be a smiling guy who frequently loses track of what he's saying; but he's not important. The important guy is the one making vague promises on his website, the one with lots of pleasing African-American faces on it. The segregationist dude doesn't count. People go to the polls to vote for the fantasy politicians, and the real ones take their revenge thereafter.

The fantasy Joe also has policy proposals, and I would be irresponsible not to mention them. One can look, for instance, at the Biden proposals in education. The fantasy Joe wants to help with actual problems, student loan debt among teachers for instance; but the proposals themselves stop significantly of concrete pledges to spend public money. The voter is thusly assured that something will be done, without references to concrete action.

I'm not going to go over the real Joe's past involvement in the Crime Bill or the Bankruptcy Bill here -- never mind all the inappropriate legislation and inappropriate touching and so on -- what needs to be noted is that the fantasy Joe Biden, promoting a world with an "economy that rewards those who actually do the work," is stunningly successful with that portion of the population most likely to have been victimized by Joe's past behavior as a policymaker, which is to say, older African-Americans. These are the people who most clearly turn out to vote for the fantasy Joe Biden, and the ones whose suffering comes first in racist America.

There is also a fantasy Donald Trump out there. It's the "Republican-sounding" version of the fantasy Joe Biden. It's a bit more concrete than the fantasy Joe Biden, but in a mean-spirited sort of way; it's anti-immigrant and anti-environment. It still has very little to connect it to the physical world occasionally touched-upon in Sanders speeches -- the world in which most people just getting by. The big Trump fantasy is one of a President who presides over a lot of job creation, without reference to how much the jobs pay.

Now, it is the job of politicians to spread fantasies about themselves, because this is what gets them elected. And human beings are prone to fantasies, and for good reason -- fantasies are the foundation of our visions of the future, our careers, our ideas of what we might be, our concrete plans. The catch is that there are time-honored political fantasies that can be spread by politicians, fantasies connected to what politicians actually do at work which are at the same time fantasies which benefit us. What has taken the place of these fantasies are vague slogans of the sort that one sees in the worst sort of undergraduate writing done in English Composition courses.

In this regard, Bernie Sanders' policy proposals appear as an improvement, because they're connected to concrete policy proposals. There is even a website detailing "how he is going to pay for it all," the question nobody asks when Congress throws trillions at the Pentagon. Yet we need to be careful to avoid projecting a fantasy Bernie Sanders that doesn't help us. The real-life Bernie Sanders can benefit us if he wins elections, because then the fantasies promoted in the Bernie Sanders campaign (the ones undergirding Medicare for All, College for All, the Green New Deal, and so on) stand a chance of influencing reality. The Bernie Sanders who doesn't win at the convention cannot in any significant sense transfer those fantasies to Joe Biden, whom he will predictably endorse if he doesn't win at the convention.

The paradigmatic Sanders slogan is, "not me, us." The fantasy thus projected is that of a politicians whose proposals intend to benefit us rather than merely himself. However, the Bernie Sanders who endorsed, and campaigned for, Hillary Clinton in 2016 was principally about Bernie Sanders, the politician who needed to survive politically as a politician. And, predictably, Clinton thereafter lost, with the good outcome of all that effort being that Sanders cannot be credibly accused of not having campaigned for her. One can only marvel at all that effort to fend off a hypothetical accusation imagined three years down the road.

At some point we will need to decide what we want to do, hopefully with Bernie Sanders' help, but perhaps without it. Having already discarded the fantasy Donald Trump and the fantasy Joe Biden, we will at some point (hopefully later rather than sooner) have to discard the fantasy Bernie Sanders as well. We need to be able to decide what to do without the help of politicians, neither real ones nor fantasy ones. The future of the planet is too important to be left to fantasy politicians.