I still think back to the AOC endorsement announcement, where he says "I do not feel lonely now" 😭
This video almost makes me cry now
Fuck the world where Joe Biden is 'our savior'
Joe Biden on his own terms is a fucking bench warmer for the next fucking monster, but also the one to sign a blank check for the FBI+CIA.
powerful moment. I still think back to this woman telling Bernie that he's her family's only hope . I wonder where she is now
Bernie might not be the ideal leader for us now, but ugh what a just absolutely incredible human being. All we can hope for is that leftist leaders of the future express the same sort of extreme compassion that Bernie and Corbyn (but also know how to fight harder).
i just wanted free college and healthcare, now im a fucking communist. hope 3 more years of neo liberalism versus like 100 of social democracy was worth it guys
Yep, there's a handful of quite achievable things, some quite modest, that could have restored my faith in the system, but now I guess apparently the only way to save the planet is to break the back of the bourgeoisie.
The more I sit with it the more I'm convinced it couldn't have gone down any other way. Fuck this country.
Brexit 2: Electorial FuckedUpAgainALoo was a warning.
If Trump wins again, it'll be 2 for 2 on countries fucking over themselves for nationalism.
God that shit about buying insurance is so ghoulish. Nobody gives a fuck about their insurer. They care about their access so medical care. It's not like Bernie ever suggested scrapping supplementals like AD&D, life, or the 100s of little hospitalization ones anyway. Nobody wants to grant their child the teeny tiniest deductible money can buy, they want to buy them fucking medicine and x-rays and shit. Maybe HSAs are awkward and unwieldy during the transition, but that wouldn't exactly be the collapse of the empire (inshallah)
I'm left wondering if there will ever be another reason to have political hope in this country in my lifetime, or if it's just going to be like the latter half of this year for the rest of my life.
Also, this video made me cry. I'd forgotten how close it felt back then. Yeah, he's a lib, but I just wanted a shot at giving people genuinely decent health care in this country, and I feel like that's totally gone now (along with so much else).
I dunno who that lady is in the opening seconds, but I hate her so fucking much. I wish I could hate her to death. (In Minecraft, obviously)
Y'all need to move on from Bernie; I liked him too, but he was never gonna be allowed to do this shit. He was always gonna get dragged back into the pit.
The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can keep pushing forward.
Everyone here has moved on from Bernie in the sense that they're no longer looking to him for leadership. But it would be ridiculous not to acknowledge his role in moving many people left, and it would be a waste to not use the policies he put forward to create similar campaigns that can have the same effect going forward.
It's also defeatist and counterproductive to claim "he was never going to be allowed to win." If a bumbling oaf like Trump can win the nomination of a party that's more coordinated than the Democrats, someone in the mold of Bernie can win. Neoliberal politicians aren't going to get any more popular as the material conditions of the country continues to deteriorate, scare tactics about socialism will continue to get less effective, and future candidates can build on what Bernie had to start from scratch back in 2015.
It's foolish to put all of our eggs in non-electoral baskets. We don't have the union organization to leverage strikes, a protracted people's war isn't coming anytime soon, and all the mutual aid efforts in the world aren't going to resolve structural problems like climate change or healthcare coverage. Electing someone who's willing to openly challenge capital is at least as likely as any of those efforts to bear fruit. No one knows how to build socialism in the imperial core, and it'd be a mistake to abandon an electoral system that most people view as the only political game in town.
It’s also defeatist and counterproductive to claim “he was never going to be allowed to win.” If a bumbling oaf like Trump can win the nomination of a party that’s more coordinated than the Democrats, someone in the mold of Bernie can win
Somewhat fair. I do disagree with the notion that Trump was comparable to Sanders in regards to the primaries; Trump was permitted to, as he was not perceived as a threat to capital in the way that Bernie was. Trump was a wildcard, but he was never going to push massive tax increases on the rich, or worker ownership of companies. It was also more an observation of the backroom politicking that seemed to play out towards the end.
We don’t have the union organization to leverage strikes, a protracted people’s war isn’t coming anytime soon, and all the mutual aid efforts in the world aren’t going to resolve structural problems like climate change or healthcare coverage. Electing someone who’s willing to openly challenge capital is at least as likely as any of those efforts to bear fruit
No argument here. My comment was not meant to be a wholesale rebuttal of attempting electoralism, moreso a write-off of it bearing fruit in the immediate future; If Biden wins, it will have been achieved while moving right, if he loses, leftists will be faulted. I think another candidate will come along, but for now, it feels like organizing and building community are going to go a lot further (or working towards becoming that candidate while doing the above).
Trump was permitted to, as he was not perceived as a threat to capital in the way that Bernie was. It was also more an observation of the backroom politicking that seemed to play out towards the end.
Trump was eventually adopted by the Republican establishment, but initially every other candidate (and some of the conservative media ecosystem) was trying to take him down. If Trump can overcome that initial resistance, so can a leftist candidate (Bernie showed this in the first four primary states). Leftist candidates have also shown the ability to fundraise from ordinary people (so they don't need to take corporate money to be competitive), and the more demonized the Republican Party becomes among Democrats, the harder it will be for the media or the Democratic establishment to undermine an eventual leftist nominee.
As for the backroom politics of this past primary, think of how many things needed to fall into place for the establishment to pull that off.
- They needed a popular former president to step in and coordinate the other candidates. Will some of the shine wear off Obama going forward? Will Obama -- who has pointedly avoided politics since leaving office -- step in on behalf of someone who he didn't work with for nearly a decade?
- They needed a split field where consolidation could overwhelm the leftist candidate. What if the 2024 primary is 1v1 like 2016, only the leftist candidate runs a serious campaign from the start? If centrists go all-in on one candidate and that candidate turns out to be unimpressive...
- They needed a centrist candidate with an independent, reliable base of support. They didn't consolidate around Biden until after South Carolina because until that point no centrist candidate had shown any real attractiveness to any key part of the Democratic base.
- They needed to get lucky on the timing of major scandals. What if the Tara Reade story had dropped the week before South Carolina? Or in December? Biden might have been badgered out of the race before consolidation.
- They benefited from the timing of Covid. Remember when schools and businesses started to shut down, and Bernie's fundraising messages went from "donate to the campaign" to "donate to coronavirus relief?" Remember when the Biden campaign told people to vote in a primary in the middle of a pandemic, while Bernie told people to be safe? Remember when states didn't want to push back their primaries because doing so would obviously hurt the candidate running against Medicare for All?
- Finally, they needed the leftist candidate not to be too strong. Bernie was a nice old white man from a small state who had very little national recognition prior to 2015. He was popular, but not overwhelmingly so. A stronger, more popular candidate would be harder to ratfuck.
All of those pieces aren't going to fall into place every time.
If Biden wins, it will have been achieved while moving right, if he loses, leftists will be faulted.
I think we may be able to challenge that. While he's certainly to the right of Bernie, and the left is ultra-sensitive to anything he does that leans right, he's also running as "the most progressive candidate in history." His website contains a number of progressive-sounding policies. Of course he has no intention of doing any of that, but in the event of a Biden win we should push that stuff as the reason why. Similarly, in the event he wins and then congressional Democrats get clobbered in the midterms, we should push his failure to enact any of his progressive promises as the reason why.
