This is not something restricted to Republicans.
Bernie Sanders is only kinda sorta a Democrat…
Speaking as an outsider (I have never been a member of the Democratic party, and have never claimed to be progressive) this seems pretty accurate to me.
All that being said, I would certainly have voted for Bernie Sanders in the past if I had been permitted to do so.
…What? I don’t get the connection?
The constant “GTFO” of the Establishment Democrats to BernieCrats is insane. They’re literally saying “No, we want to be the Republican Lite party, go away because if too many of you join, we might lose control of the party and actually have to stop licking corporate taint for five minutes and maybe even pass some legislation that our constituents want”.
Bernie is what the DNC should be, and it’s exhausting to have the Hillary Die-Hards (WHY!!!) constantly try to excuse her poisoning the party against him (don’t lie, Hillary supporters; the Brazile book finally confirmed that this DID happen, so stop pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about) by saying “Well, it’s okay because he wasn’t a TRUE Democrat…”.
Yeah, and it’s okay to shoot black people because they’re not REAL people? No? That’s horrifying? Exactly. That’s how you sound to the rest of us that aren’t blinded because we WANTED Hill-Dawg to be a much better person and candidate than reality allowed her to be.
And fallen off a cliff in basically every other office in the country.
Typical behaviour of entitled white men, always agitating for economic equality.
But only 22 of the last 50 years. So, while you see a 64% success rate, I see 44%. Not very successful.
No, it’s not the only way.
A better way would be for everyone to stop voting for Republicans and Democrats alike. A national campaign to permanently crush the two-party system would be the greatest step forward that we, as a people, could possibly take.
Bernie Sanders was young, vital, and ready for office and people didn’t vote for him because they’d brainwashed themselves into thinking they were “throwing their vote away”.
And then they accuse us of ideological purity testing for not agreeing with them.
Can we all just agree that the “BernieBro” narrative was 100% a Clinton-crafted PR narrative? It made no sense, nobody really ever tried to define it… It was pretty obviously just a wedge term created to try and somehow, in Bizarro-logic, equate Bernie Sanders with Silicon Valley sexism.
I have challenged many Hillary supporters, at least a dozen, pre- and post-election, to define “BernieBro” when they throw it out there as a Snarl Word, and I have literally never had a response. No kidding.
If the RepUglyKKKlowns want a class war, they just started one they will not win.
#TheResistance
I recall when Rosario Dawson was asked whether Sanders had a problem attracting non-white voters during this interview:
She looked back at the crowd behind her, then turned back to the camera to tell them that wasn’t the case. It was probably pretty easy to find a lot of predominantly white crowds out to support Bernie at the first few primaries in states that are 91% white and 94% white. Yeah, no shit most of his supporters in New Hampshire were white.
Funny how it turns out that income inequality reform, education cost reform, healthcare cost/access reform and similar issues are really popular across race, gender, *-identity, and countless other intersections.
Gee, I wonder why establishment Dems might have felt threatened by this broad appeal. /s
I voted for Sanders, but the way for Sanders supporters to move forward is to stop with the shoulda/woulda and move their local party to the left (as we did in my state). While Brazile is an unreliable narrator, it is undeniable that that DWS abused her authority in the DNC. The party is actually quite small-d democratic, in the sense that power devolves upwards from below and it is easy as hell for anyone who wants to get involved to get involved.
people didn’t vote for him because they’d brainwashed themselves into thinking they were “throwing their vote away”.
That’s not a reason for not voting for Sanders in the primaries. Some might have not voted for him because they were concerned that he was less electable than HRC, but even that excuse went away when she became inevitable.
One advantage of a caucus (which the my state uses) is that part of the voting is actual conversation with your neighbors who are voting for the other candidate, and even though Bernie easily won my precinct, the enthusiasm for HRC was strong and real, and I wouldn’t disrespect the people who had this enthusiasm by claiming that it was founded on an abstract political calculus.
To clarify, I was referring to all the elections Bernie Sanders lost when he was a young man who wasn’t running as a Democrat.
I’ve always appreciated your point of view on this, BTW. Thanks for speaking up, and continuing to do so, even though we don’t always agree.
Thanks for that link. Thomas Frank is one of those voices trying to make sense of what’s going on. But unfortunately the Democratic Party will not hear him at all. He’s been blocked from MSNBC and the other main US media, which is why he mentions he writes for foreign papers now like the Guardian.
The other people with similar views on this are Edward Luce, Guy Standing and Mark Blyth who also point out that this is not a US phenomenon but global in nature and has to do with the neo-liberal revolution 30 years ago with Reagan and Thatcher as well as the Great Convergence of the emerging economies catching up and entering the global work force.
Do the math. How many Yemeni kids will have been killed by the US/Saudi war by the time of the midterms? How many more by 2020?
This is one of the many reasons why just waiting to vote out the Trumpists in 2020 is not an acceptable solution.
Even now knowing what you meant, I feel that the connection wasn’t really that self-evident, just FYI.
Got it.
John Anderson’s recent passing is a reminder that our voting system makes the emergence of viable and enduring 3rd parties practically impossible. I continue to think the most likely path to a better political future is through a takeover from within of the Democratic party (just like the Clintons et al did in the 80s, but in reverse).
The refrain that the DNC is corrupt, or in the pockets of big business/Soros/whoever, is both verifiably false, plays into the narrative of the wingnut noise machine, and is a little tinfoil-hattish. But, worst of all, it is defeatist, as it convinces people who could make a difference to sit at home and bang uselessly on their keyboards.
Maybe I should have said conservatives, to include all republicans and the right-wing of the democratic party.
