Been talking to socialist alternative about this recently. I think that since bourgeois politicians are in the end only going to do things businesses want, they prefer to run on bullshit over lying when possible. So they're "a President you could have a beer with", not the other guy, etc. They try not to make specific promises, in my local elections half the time they don't even bother putting together a policy platform until they're elected. When they are dumb enough to make a specific claim, they obfuscate and say it's some other politician's fault the thing didn't get done and they're "in talks" about it, or they have to try and gaslight everyone that they meant $2000 total instead of $2000 checks, or whatever. People remember that stuff; there's a limited amount of lying you get before you lose re-election to the other party (representing a different slice of capital).
The thing SAlt really liked about Bernie is that he made Medicare For All more important than the guy himself. Every time he got up on stage he talked about it and if elected he might have even tried to do it*. I think there is some value to getting specific policy proposals in the public eye. Everybody's been calling for "police reform", whatever that means, for the better part of a century. But once people started to say "defund the police" - literally decrease the police department budget - the gloves came off and we got a tremendous backlash from the bourgeois parties. It's too specific. In a few decades they'll probably be renaming police departments to Department of Resident Health and Wellness and calling it defund, but for now candidates who say they support defunding actually mostly mean it, voters believe that they mean it, and so the rest are forced to tell you straight that they won't defund. In Chicago Lightfoot ran on "police reform", but Johnson did not run on defunding the police and strenuously tried to avoid talking about it.
I mean there'd be no enforcement mechanism to make President Bernie do M4A, once he's in office he can do whatever. You could maybe theoretically have an accountable politician in a bourgeois democracy if their entire campaign apparatus was done by a worker's party, and if they did bad stuff in office the party would guarantee that they would not be reelected. But dubious on a national level or with term limits - think of all the stuff the lame duck presidents do. Right now the social democrats have their own campaigns that get support from a bunch of different orgs, so when DSA helps elect a promising politician they can generally just fuck off, break all their promises to the org, and get reelected on their own as an incumbent.
Been talking to socialist alternative about this recently. I think that since bourgeois politicians are in the end only going to do things businesses want, they prefer to run on bullshit over lying when possible. So they're "a President you could have a beer with", not the other guy, etc. They try not to make specific promises, in my local elections half the time they don't even bother putting together a policy platform until they're elected. When they are dumb enough to make a specific claim, they obfuscate and say it's some other politician's fault the thing didn't get done and they're "in talks" about it, or they have to try and gaslight everyone that they meant $2000 total instead of $2000 checks, or whatever. People remember that stuff; there's a limited amount of lying you get before you lose re-election to the other party (representing a different slice of capital).
The thing SAlt really liked about Bernie is that he made Medicare For All more important than the guy himself. Every time he got up on stage he talked about it and if elected he might have even tried to do it*. I think there is some value to getting specific policy proposals in the public eye. Everybody's been calling for "police reform", whatever that means, for the better part of a century. But once people started to say "defund the police" - literally decrease the police department budget - the gloves came off and we got a tremendous backlash from the bourgeois parties. It's too specific. In a few decades they'll probably be renaming police departments to Department of Resident Health and Wellness and calling it defund, but for now candidates who say they support defunding actually mostly mean it, voters believe that they mean it, and so the rest are forced to tell you straight that they won't defund. In Chicago Lightfoot ran on "police reform", but Johnson did not run on defunding the police and strenuously tried to avoid talking about it.
* no enforcement mechanism obviously
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I mean there'd be no enforcement mechanism to make President Bernie do M4A, once he's in office he can do whatever. You could maybe theoretically have an accountable politician in a bourgeois democracy if their entire campaign apparatus was done by a worker's party, and if they did bad stuff in office the party would guarantee that they would not be reelected. But dubious on a national level or with term limits - think of all the stuff the lame duck presidents do. Right now the social democrats have their own campaigns that get support from a bunch of different orgs, so when DSA helps elect a promising politician they can generally just fuck off, break all their promises to the org, and get reelected on their own as an incumbent.