The past couple of weeks have been pretty tough on Bernie Sanders. The Vermont senator and presidential candidate has recently come under attack by several prominent Democrats from every corner of the party, and left-leaning news outlets have piled on as well.

In a documentary set to premiere this coming Saturday, Hillary Clinton is reportedly quoted to have said of Sanders, “nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician.” This scathing summation of Sanders’s nearly-forty-year-long political career was followed up with a direct attack on the entire “movement” which has apparently grown around Sanders. Clinton remarks, “it’s not only him, it’s the culture around him. It’s his leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie Bros.” When asked if she would support Sanders if he were to win the party’s nomination, she said, “I’m not going there yet.”

These assessments from Clinton began after the Sanders campaign drew fire from both Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren as well as former Vice President and Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden. Sanders was reported to have said to Warren that he does not think that a woman could win the Presidency, an allegation which he fervently denies, citing his long history of supporting women in politics. 

As if these accusations were not enough, the Sanders campaign was also found to have been speaking against Biden, alleging that he has “a big corruption problem” and is therefore unelectable. Sanders has since apologized to Biden for allowing his campaign to publish such calumnies, but the damage to the reputation of the campaign was already done.

Many Democrats, especially moderate Democrats, are afraid that the radicalism of Sanders, paired with his unwillingness to be uniform with the rest of the party which he stubbornly refuses to join, may result in the collapse of the party as a whole. While this result is unlikely, the recent series of reprisals against the tumultuous Sanders campaign has made very clear the growing factionalism and the disparate worldviews of the Democratic party and its members.

It is feared that this lack of cohesiveness and unity among Democrats may prove to be their weak point in fighting against the policies of a stunningly organized and overhauled Republican party in the upcoming 2020 election cycle.