I feel like this sentiment will circulate the liberal press and r/politics for a few days until the party line solidifies on blaming the voters. By Sunday we’ll just be hearing about how racist and sexist voters are with no further examination of what happened.
MSNBC already manufacturing consent that this loss is because dems were to pro trans. They claim the Trump "Kamala is for they/them" ad actually swayed the election.
"we need to be more racist and transphobic" is the message the democrats are taking away from this election. Not "let's do things that make peoples lives better" because that means stepping on the toes of their donors.
I told a bunch of libs a prophecy back in 2016 and again in 2020 that bernie sanders was not radical, and represented a deep compromise that a lot of people on the left put up with in order to have any kind of ideological penetration into mainstream political discourse; as well as an attempt stop the bleeding for a nation that a) absolutely doesn't deserve to have the bleeding stopped and b) was riding on the hope that literally any of the machinery of power worked as advertised so that maybe (real) incremental work could be done to bring things to a stable and less globally destructive place. That if (when) he failed, that represented a full break for a lot of people. He was a canary set out despite already knowing the mine was toxic - but when he came up dead that was going to be it. There would be no walking back from the increasing contradictions of capitalism, there would be no stopping the reaction to those conditions.
I wasn't fully radicalized - I hadn't abandoned electoralism entirely yet - but lots of smart and correct people said this was a pointless maneuver and a waste of emotion and resources, and would just disillusion new activists before they could make a difference. It still feels necessary, to have a public display that dispelled the illusion of business as usual that people still largely believed. It was and (for a shrinking number of Americans) still is a refuge and a cope that things work the way we're told.
I feel like Bernie managed to permanently damage the liberal establishment's air of civility and pragmatism, because suppressing the commie became more important - i feel like I saw the mask slip the most not for Trump, but for Bernie, and I think American leftists really needed to see that happen.
Any kind of retrospective defending or reflecting on Bernie as "correct" is bittersweet. Too little too late. Bernie fucking sucks. He sucked in 2016, and in 2020, and he was only useful because he was willing to publically attack capitalism and empire rhetorically. If he had gained power, if he had any agency to act on his heart he'd have done some stuff that would leave us in a maybe more stable position and perhaps more positive goodwill for socialism among the credulous - which might be a less fucked playing field for leftism, but nobody should pretend he was gonna save anything or spearhead the vanguard.
The canary is dead, and going "gosh their song was so pretty I wish they were still alive" feels really useless coming from the gasses that killed it.
i have to admit that i admire his stubborness; i usually give up every once and a while, but he never seems to stop.
he never seems to stop.
When I think of Bernie I think of army ant death spiral. It's when army ants get confused and start marching around in a circle. Like all ants - they remain forever determined but they can die of exhaustion.
An ant mill is an observed phenomenon in which a group of army ants, separated from the main foraging party, lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle. This circle is commonly known as a "death spiral" because the ants might eventually die of exhaustion. It has been reproduced in laboratories and in ant colony simulations.
The phenomenon is a side effect of the self-organizing structure of ant colonies. Each ant merely follows the ant in front of it, which functions until a slight deviation begins to occur, typically by an environmental trigger, and an ant mill forms. An ant mill was first described in 1921 by William Beebe, who observed a mill 370 m in circumference. It took each ant two and a half hours to make one revolution. Similar phenomena have been noted in processionary caterpillars and fish.
watching us all go through the 1980's hiv/aids crises again but with project 2025 makes me think that we're doing the same things as the ants.
if these historians were any good at historying, they would be billionaires that owned history apps and history factories with thousands of employees and then the Democrats would have rightfully listened to them.
Rigueur said, "One of the things that Bernie Sanders has been saying since at least 2014 has been about how the Democratic party, if it wants to keep these coalitions, needs to talk about bread-and-butter issues. It needs to talk about politics."
“Excuse me sweaty, but being the adult in the room means knowing that the only path forward is to get politics out of politics.”"Get politics out of politics" is actually a pretty good description of the Neoliberal project. Move more and more things out of the domain of politics and into the domain of economics so that they're not subject to popular control, but can also be portrayed as natural, just the way things are.
Also the framing that politics and economics are two separate realms and the two shall not meet.
Don't steal his valor.