“Shopworn” is not substantive. Hillary won the popular vote in the primaries. The rules were tilted to favor moderate candidates after the lopsided 1972 loss, but Bernie would have lost even if they weren’t.
Personally, I find Bernie’s arguments more persuasive, but I think pictures of him hanging out with Sandinistas would have be fatal in a general election. I submit Nixon vs. McGovern as evidence. That was a long time ago, but Trump is Nixon magnified and he just got voted in.
I agree that the DNC purposely promoted ex-news people to absurd power, same goes for all the people willing to cut corners in the name of winning. But that isn’t what the corporate Dems have done, that’s just what corporations do - and it is plainly against the interests of the party. Same goes for “kneecapping” Sanders by favoring the party candidate over the complete independent who only stood to hurt the party candidate. I find it more ridiculous people would expect other human beings who have devoted their livelihood to the DNC would then be cool with someone outside the party coming in solely to use all the benefits of the party with nothing in return (besides a potential win, but that’s sort of a silly response to what I’m saying).
The corporate Dems are not dangerous for their hold on the media, they are dangerous because in order to enact a handful of progressive pieces of legislation they are willing to throw any amount of fuel into defense institutions, work hand in hand with horrible regimes that are financially expedient to the country’s business interests, etc. Normally this is done through a series of short term losses to enact long term legislation, but anyone who is not a zealot who thinks a facist state might not be a bad thing is a fickle as fuck voter so those short term loses become permanent change - so in the end every 1 long term win turns into a half dozen long term loses. The cherry on top is that every loss can be pinned onto the Democrats for compromising while the belt and suspenders legislation comes later.
Sanders was also a Democrat for all of an election season. I really hoped he came back as a Democrat instead of staying independent while still trying to make substantial change.
Hey maybe this Bernie Sanders guy should consider a presidential run. I’d vote for him.
I like Bernie. However I’m always suspect of ‘polls show x person is really popular/thing is terrible/millinials have their heads up their asses/whatever.’
God willing.
That’s probably only true in a specific demographic: millenials, who are as enthusiastic/self-interested about reducing student debt as seniors are about maintaining medicare.
Otherwise, you just don’t find “socialist-friendly” opinions among self-declared Republicans.
I heartily recommend that advice to the Republican party. That strategy elected Bill Clinton twice. (“No, but this time, it will work!”)
and here I thought he was a senator…
8 years of mayor of a city aren’t governing?
The problem comes when 30% of the electorate wins nearly every election because the best turnout we ever get is about 65%.
She mouthed a lot of words. She didn’t really adopt anything.
you are misunderstanding my sarcasm. I’m totally with you.
I guess I’m saying that building the resistance (and hopefully, the recovery) around one guy is bad strategy. Even if he never loses popularity, what if he croaks? The response to republican domination of the last election has to be broad and deep. He’s one guy, who, for any number of reasons, could lose his mojo.
Under Obama, the republicans relentlessly tore away at the party body, so when the presidency was lost to Trump, all was lost.
He failed to get the support of people of color. He wasn’t knee capped he was just so blind to issues of race and only hammered on issues of class.
When someone like Cornell West can live in an affluent neighborhood and get arrested for breaking into his own house, the message that we need to take down millionaires and billionaires rings so very very hollow.
Bernie is learning. But he lost on his own accord.
Hell here in Nevada he never sent any canvassers to canvass my middle middle class neighborhood that was full of working class people of color. We got Hillary people several times a month.
To say that Bernie was kneecapped is to ignore that his campaign actively sucked. His policy was fabulous. I even caucused for him. But the nuts and bolts of his campaign fell apart. The DNC didn’t do that. He did.
I agree with the quote.
Bernie Sanders supporters know policy. But they don’t know politics. By and large there’s a cultural problem where the mechanics of how our government works is somehow lost on an entire segment of our population.
That happened in '08 though. Obama totally pulled the rug out from under Clinton and if Sanders ran a better campaign he would’ve done it to Clinton too.
The Dems didn’t even get that much, did they? They definitely didn’t get enough of the independent vote. Every bit counts. The Dems didn’t really break out of their core states in that last election. Those cores states are the most populous, but that didn’t secure the Electoral College votes they needed. Your country could use some electoral reform, but you have to win elections with what you have to work with, and the Dems didn’t: they lost badly on so many levels.
I’m Canadian. We had to put up with a Conservative majority (with a minority share of the popular vote) because the liberal vote was split between Liberals and the NDP. Earlier the Conservatives were splitting the vote on the right with Reform, so the Liberal/NDP vote splitting had much less effect. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. That’s why I say 4 or 5 parties would be better.
Then you have to ask why that is, eh? Might be that a sizable amount of the electorate sees nothing in the election for them, eh? Might even be that they’re right?
I’ll be blunt: I saw your last election as a choice between slow poison and fast poison. It might even be that you were lucky that the fast poison was elected, because if you had gone for another round of neoliberalism, it’s very possible you might have set the stage for someone much more effective than the Donald. If you organise and work at it, you should be able to purge this particular poison.
But that’s thing: to achieve results that reverse the self-destructive trends your country is going through, you need to organise not just to push back against the various injustices that are accumulating like flies on shit, but to articulate a vision of what the country should be and how to achieve it. And given that so much of that injustice is systemic, and that the system is the way it is for economic reasons, you really cannot look at reforming the rest without seriously losing the neoliberalism.
The criticism is entirely warranted. AND he has fucking goddamn plans. This is the real deal DO NOT THROW THIS AWAY AGAIN!!
I’m supposed to listen to someone on racial issues who confuses Cornel West (and can’t even spell his damn name right) with Skip Gates?
Sheesh. Okay, I’ll listen a bit anyway.
And how much better would his campaign have been if the corporate-chained DNC had been working with him, instead of against him? And if the corporate media had paid him any more than one tenth the attention it paid to Trump?
