That’s the only potential in stumping for Ole Bernard. Admit it. With Biden’s victory they can hold out hope that Bernie would’ve been able to do something different. There’s no alternative to an independent and international party of the working class.
Hard disagree. Its not idealist to say that two politicians (both who are not materially independent of one faction or another of the bourgeois class) will lead to largely a similar outcomes. Bernie didn't win because he didn't have a mass political movement behind him. Full stop. If he had somehow won, it would be because he made fundamental compromises with the system that would hamper his ability to actually deliver.
But let's say for the sake of argument that Bernie won in 2020 with more senate seats than Biden. Heck lets say he even hit 60 senate seats. Bernie's ability to bully senators and reps into submission assumes that mass media would go along with it in the way that they went along with Trump. He would get shit on every day on every major news network. His team would get mysteriously banned off one social network after another for suspiciously vague charges. There would be FBI investigations into him and his team. And finally, more importantly than all of that -- he would still be sitting on top of a party that will not do what he wants. A party that fundamentally disagrees with him. A party that has taken hundreds of millions to not do the Bernie agenda.
A 'Bernie' type will only get into the presidency once labour is so organized and powerful that it cannot be ignored anymore. And at that point, why is a Bernie even needed?
I'm not saying that he'd deliver policy, although doing something like cancelling student debt wouldn't be nothing. I'm saying we'd live in a world where more people believed that things could fundamentally change. I think that him and Corbyn both losing made that feel impossible again for a lot of people and that's going to demobilise them. There were a lot of people whose first engagement with organised politics came from Bernie and Corbyn stuff. I think that them losing ultimately that makes it harder for us because it leaves a lot of people feeling helpless and so they don't engage at all. Like, I don't see how it wouldn't be better than what we have.
I agree with you that the US will need a stronger labour movement for left political movements to be successful though
Hmm. I'll need to think about it more.
Either way, the path Bernie tried was a dead end. He didn't get elected and even if he did w/o making compromises, I agree he would've been torn down much as you describe. I think we only disagree about whether there could be significant people mobilized to fight for "demsoc" changes in that situation.
Maybe that could have been better for radicalization of more people, but I could tell a plausible story of the opposite effect too