I loved Bernie in 2016 and 2020, Bernie and M4A were big reasons I moved leftward, but I'm disappointed by how big of a tankie Bernie has been about Israel. His far left online supporters have infected his brain with fascist ideas like having news coverage unfairly report how many Palestinians have died. I first got hints of his redfash Marxism when he wanted to abandoned the women of Afghanistan by saying the US should end the forever war, but forever war = forever equal rights.
Anybody else taken back by how far left Bernie is on Foreign policy? I'm kinda glad he lost now ngl
I will never forgiven him for sharing my contact info with the DNC
I knew I was making a mistake when I contributed to him through ActBlue, but I still went ahead and did it, like a fucking dumbass.
Still to this day endless text harassments. I have a block lost 100s of numbers long and it just keeps coming. ActBlue is a fucking life virus that they exempted from spam laws.
it lets me reply with expletives and accusations to every dumb fundraising text I get at least. Hope some intern on the other end is reading my replies telling them to eat shit and die in Ukraine for Zelenskyy
It’s not like I think Clinton or Biden were better options in retrospect. Sanders was a harm reduction vote for Keynesian economics and against neoliberal economics.
The funniest thing to me is that Keynesian policies are exactly the sort of thing that would keep the wheels on the bus of US hegemony for an extra couple of decades. A hypothetical Sanders presidency where he got to fulfill his campaign promises would have been beneficial to Yankee capital and empire -- but they're so ideologically committed to whatever it is they think they're doing, they couldn't recognize that. It's nearly poetic.
Yup. At the time, I was thinking not to be accelerationist, but in a global sense, maybe I should have voted for Trump both times just to watch the
burn.the fun thing is, US decline is basically guaranteed no matter who you vote for
In hindsight, Hillary would have been the accelerationist candidate. It's a historical fluke that Trump called off the first strike on Iranian soil; which would have almost certainly resulted in a much wider war.
Which is wild because Trump was openly talking about how the US should invade Libya and Iraq and occupy the oil fields during the primary.
This is the kind of post that lemmy users see, with their messy conception of politics and lack of understanding of anything left of liberal, and they end up having no fucking idea what to make of it at all and determine this is an esoteric troll instance.
Good post. Post more like it.
any significantly advanced post is indistinguishable from trolling
I used to get into fights on the old sub about his shortcomings as a figurehead so mostly feelin kinda vindicated
Yeah, lots of Berniebros were dismissing Warren supporters and saying misogynistic things like "she's a spoiler candidate who opportunistically pounced at anything he said in a moment where Democratic moderates were mounting an offensive against the only current viable progressive candidate," calling her a snake, and other microagressions. Red fash gonna red fash
Glad we got a real feminist president instead of grumpy Bernie (he reminds me of my toxic father, which was my personal Afghanistan)
:vote:
my point back then was that
is dumb, that a socdem is not a socialist, and that social democracy is the moderate wing of fascism.
It's funny because at that point in time I read Bourgeois and Proletarian Democracy by Lenin and it kinda went over my head because you bet I was glued to my monitor paying close attention to Bernie's campaign. At least I have a feeling of comradeship with all my fellow naive dogooders who got burned at that time too, and I remember enough of the insanity from that time that I still go on deranged rants about Warren supporters.
Bernie was always seen as the least shit-covered kernel of corn in a pile of shit by sufficiently jaded leftists
He maybe could have moved the Overton window to the left for the first time in 75 years if he got elected but wasn't the messiah socdems thought he was.
He failed to grasp the utility and magnitude of his power base independent of the Democratic Party. When the moment called for him to fight, he blinked. Shame really, he could have had a legitimate shot at establishing something like a labor party, but demurred lest we fracture the base and elect trump… which is what happened anyway. Especially in ‘20, sure we got Biden but what difference did it make
the concept of "overton window" is radlib idealist nonsense and not how reality works
...by how big of a tankie Bernie has been...
Anybody else taken back by how far left Bernie is on Foreign policy?
(tee hee, nobody read the post just the title)
These are the posts that i come back for, my poor sides
but forever war = forever equal rights.
I spend a substantial amount of money, time, sanity going "social" and "all out" for Bernie. To me it was one of those "what did you do?" type moments in history. We tried. We fucking did everything. Only for Bernie to capitulate to the scratched liberals.
Yes Benie was a compromise candidate. He had his flaws. Foriegn policy being the weak point but it seemed like he understood US meddling and it's consequences. Like it would be better for the global south. He seemed at least on the surface to understand what Bibi is and spoke to holding Israel to account.
Only for Bernie to capitulate to the scratched liberals.
As soon as the fix came in for Biden in 2020 there was no winning move. Bernie could have:
- Split the party, guaranteeing a Trump victory, which would have immediately discredited whatever nascent left party Bernie created in the eyes of the people most likely to join (left-leaning libs, irregular voters who have any interest in winning). Democrats would have (correctly, seeing as Biden won) used this loss against the left for at least another generation. They would have imagined all the things Biden totally would have done instead of living with the reality of his actual presidency. What would have been the point? Or,
- Given up like he did, which is a loss, but at least doesn't let Democrats credibly blame anything on the left, regardless of how the 2020 election turned out. A big reason none of the blame for Hillary's 2016 loss stuck to Bernie was that he campaigned for her after dropping out then.
It's hard to imagine what concessions he could have extracted from the party, because they knew he had no options but losing big by splitting or losing small by quitting. And of course the fix came in right as Covid hit, so any sort of "fight to the convention" strategy came with a real health risk.
There's a huge contradiction between describing how thoroughly the system is rigged for capital and ripping Bernie because if only he didn't give up he really could have done it. His campaigns still moved millions of people left, which is significant no matter what else the guy did.
He should have split it. A destroyed Democratic Party is necessary to make any progress in this country
You have to convince millions of people that this is necessary before you do it, though.
I mean, if Bernie won in 2016 or 20, he would be a better president than Biden or even better than he is as a Senator right now, because he would owe his position (and reelection chances) to the left donor/activist base. And a bunch of liberals would probably support a 3rd party candidate against him, so even as an incumbent he would probably have big problems with getting reelected. Right now, he is a Senator, if he wants to run again in Vermont he can easily do that and he doesn't need the left base anymore, since he is not running for president ever again.
So instead he can support whatever policy positions he actually wants, OR he is trying to win favor with Biden in exchange for some small policy crumbs in some other area (something that he should know doesn't work with any liberal politicians, but again, I guess he is just old). In both cases, I disagree with him ideologically, but he is an old guy who is probably retiring from politics soon, so whatever. The left should not be too hung up on individuals, remember that politicians are just a tool to implement policy. The really sad thing is that it will be harder and harder for a Sanders-style candidate (someone who wouldn't actually owe his position to big corporations) to even run for the nomination ever again, especially since big money interests kind of figured out they "only" need to outspend left-wing candidates by around 3:1 and they've been very successful in recent elections.
Naw. It made sense in the moment with what we knew at the time - we live in a society that talks about socialism and communism now in part because a grumpy old man permanently associated the terms in the American psyche with objectively good things like Medicare for All, cracking a hundred years of red scare propaganda that socialism and communism were synonymous with totalitarianism and dictatorship.Now unfortunately, all that stuff I'm talking about is in the superstructure, and it's not clear if the American base is capable of creating the conditions for a socialist uprising, but all we can do since none of us are Lenin is to keep banging our drums and keep latching onto every moment we can.Actually never mind we gotta keep riding for Biden yee haw
I don't think the term tankie applies for people not on the left. The term you're looking for is dronie. Droneie? Droney...
Equal Rights is when you fight wars forever that ruin other countries, and Bern just couldn't grasp that
