For the long term and especially the short term, the Democratic party needs to embrace Sanders.
Last edited Tue Oct 20, 2015, 08:12 AM - Edit history (3)
The Republicans are all fascist clowns falling over each other to prove who is the most fascist blustering idiot.
O'Malley cannot get any traction. Webb is honest, but honestly half Republican. Chafee is a lightweight. So that leaves us with Clinton and Sanders.
CNN is a huge contributor to the Clinton campaign. Wall Street is a huge contributor to the Clinton campaign. Drug companies are huge contributors to the Clinton campaign. Rich people in general are huge contributors to the Clinton campaign. If you are at all concerned about wealth inequality and corporate overreach, how can you possibly trust Clinton even to try to govern differently?
The Republicans are so scary that Sanders seems tame in comparison. The American public actually agrees with Sanders' stances on almost every single major issue. The only exception is single payer (only 48% of the US public say they want it), but that's only because people conflate it with unpopular, demonized Obamacare.
Here is the whole problem with "the third way" as I see it. If you compromise your ideals before it is absolutely necessary to do so, just to supposedly appeal to the widest focus group of low information voters, you end up with the complete mess our great nation currently faces. The problem all our recent Democratic leaders face is that they "compromise" before they even put the matter on the table in the interest of a "bipartisanship" that works only one way.
The only way to win is to proclaim your winning position loudly over and over and over. You only compromise, just as you only go to war, as a last resort. If you don't stand up for what is right as strongly and as vociferously as possible, regardless of what the corporate media addled public supposedly "thinks" according to corporate polls, your defeatism becomes self-fulfilling, and you end up with the political mess our country now faces: a government of the 1%, for the 1%, and by the 1%.
If Democrats want to win state and local elections, our candidates are going to have to start working to energize the disaffected masses that the Republicans keep trying to disenfranchise both by law and by apathetic attrition. Democrats are going to have to go after the rich, powerful, and entrenched interests that are ripping Americans off and offer some tangible relief to the average citizen. Simply not being quite as bad as Republicans is no longer a viable strategy. Democrats are going to have to work hard to channel the anger of average citizens against the corrupt oligarchy that currently controls our government at almost every level. Until the rigged system is changed, Democrats have no choice but to reach out to many people who have completely given up on participating politically and give these people some compelling reasons to engage.
Bernie Sanders has said the exact same things he is saying now over and over and over for the last 30 years. During this entire period, he has been derided and marginalized for being too extreme and too radical. His argument against wealth inequality and for a basic level of economic justice has never changed. The only thing that has changed is that the situation has gotten so out of hand that the message now strongly resonates, despite corporate media's continuing best efforts to marginalize and demonize this message.
To me, simply having millions of people exposed to these ideas, many for the first time, is a huge sign of progress, and a sign that maybe, just maybe, there finally is some hope for positive political change in the USA. Accelerating wealth inequality and environmental destruction are just not sustainable. We have to start somewhere to address these issues. Business as usual is simply not an option.
So I say support Sanders until he draws his last political breath if only to wake up one more otherwise apathetic kid to the inevitable battle our nation now faces. Are we going to go quietly into the Banana Republicanism promised by Citizens United or are we at least going to put up a fight?
= new reply since forum marked as read
excellent post.
