Bernie Sanders Is Doing Something More Than Just Running for President

[Rebkeh]

Bernie Sanders Is Doing Something More Than Just Running for President
As the senator barnstorms New York state, he’s staging a modern-day, secular revival.

D.D. Guttenplan 4/13/16

snip

Jeff Lofton was one of them. A young African American who’d just come off his shift at Walmart—“I had to stop at home to drop off my box cutter”—he works a second job at a nursing home to make ends meet. “I wanted to go see Trump, too. But I had to work,” he said. “I want to see things for myself before I make up my mind.”

By the time Sanders reached the point in his stump speech where he talks about how “people are exhausted. Tired of working 50 to 60 hours a week,” and reminds the crowd that 100 years ago the labor movement in the US began with the demand for a 40-hour work week—“And we’re still fighting for a 40-hour week!”—Loftus was nodding along. And when Sanders, who has sharpened, and personalized, his attacks on what he calls “the billionaire class,” called out the Walton family, who own Walmart, for paying their workforce so badly many are forced to rely on food stamps and Medicaid, demanding they “Get off of welfare and pay your workers a living wage,” he was pumping his fist in the air with the rest of the crowd.

snip

... And as he [Sanders] does in every stump speech now, he followed that with an invocation of the civil-rights movement, “when brave people stood up together and decided to fight back against hundreds of years racism.” Then he moved on to “the feminist movement, when millions of women stood up together,” adding, as he always does, “and I know every man in this room is going to stand with the women in their fight for pay equity.” Then, when the cheers died down, he reminded the crowd of the victories achieved by “the gay rights movement, who stood up, with their straight allies, to demand the right for people to love one another regardless of gender.”

On paper this may sound like mere genuflection, or virtue-signaling. But in the room it felt more like a revival—of a peculiarly, determinedly secular kind perhaps, but with the same mobilizing effect on its audience as any tent meeting. It made visible their own power—in this case the power to change, not themselves but society. By invoking radical history, Sanders is summoning up radical hope. “The American dream is that parents work hard so their kids can do better,” he tells his audiences, pledging “we will not allow the American dream to die.”

snip

But as I drove yesterday from Buffalo to Rochester to Syracuse, I remembered that this part of New York State had once been the center of a revival that eventually swept the whole country. Religious in origin, this early-19th-century Great Awakening also sparked the abolitionist movement, the feminist movement—Seneca Falls, where the abolitionists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott issued the first declaration of women’s rights in 1848, is just a short turn off the Thruway between Rochester and Syracuse—and socialist communities in Skaneateles and Oneida.

Let's go, New York! Let's do this.

Full article:
https://www.thenation.com/article/bernie-sanders-is-doing-something-more-than-just-running-for-president/

[dchill]

1. Yes! Let's DO this!

[Uncle Joe]

2. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Rebkeh.

[Agony]

3. Rock and Roll!

[pat_k]

4. kick 'n' rec!

[Dem2]

5. Good article, thanks for posting

I like the positive message that Bernie provides.

[madokie]

6. We have to do this

We, Oklahoma, gave him 76 or our 77 counties, surely NY can do some of the same
Our future as a democracy depends on our winning this one more than ever in our history.
With Bernie in the Oval Office the first Americans can finally get to be a part of what makes this a good country