Why Radical Leftists Need To Stop Worrying and Back Bernie Sanders
"Far left" to corporate Dems generally means thinking that the New Deal was a good idea. Below is what it means to people who are actually on the left. 40 years ago, the "far left" were more interested in winning the mimeo wars than in talking to non-policy wonks. Nothing's changed except that now it's Twitter and Facebook wars.
http://inthesetimes.com/article/18425/why-the-radical-left-really-really-needs-to-quit-whining-about-bernie-sanders
This key question immediately begs another, even more fundamental one: How to awaken tens of millions of people from the entrapments of mass hypnosis, prostration and indifference and into the first halting steps toward recognition and self-emancipation? The quandary is as old as the parable of Plato’s cave—that mythic netherworld of darkness and illusion inhabited by us fallible mortals. The solution—the way out of the cave into the liberating light of knowledge—is as stubbornly elusive now as it was then. But simply naming the problem of the “false consciousness” that stymies the oppressed—as endlessly and vehemently reiterated by the legions of the far left for a small eternity—does not by itself yield a solution, as the long history of leftist impotence and isolation attests.
It is understandably frustrating for the leftist sects and sages to have all the answers except that most important one: how to lead the “masses” out of the darkness of ignorance and ideological deception into enlightenment. The leftist groups—with their obscure tomes of theory, their blogs, their conferences and meetings, their tinker-toy bureaucracies, their streams of manifestoes and critiques, their insular feuds and splits and fiery excoriations of left, right and center—are self-declared leaders without followers, generals with an invincible plan for battle who lack only one small detail: an army.
Ten parts bellowing grandiosity to zero parts real influence, the far left fails a litmus test more important than any it applies to Bernie Sanders: Marx’s call not merely to interpret the world but to change it. So we must ask: at this moment of gathering darkness for our species and planet, in this pivotal presidential campaign season, who is making greater strides toward triggering the mass enlightenment that is the key to empowering the oppressed: Sanders or his left critics?
If politics is the art of communication, then Sanders must be judged the winner, hands down.
In fact, the Sanders campaign represents a breakthrough for progressive “messaging” of remarkable scope and impact. Sanders, with his calls for political revolution against the billionaire class, is not just another standard-issue, forked-tongue, feel-your-pain Democrat; at each MSM-covered appearance he blasts out piercing alarms about the radical inequities and irrationalities of the status quo, along with sorely needed solutions—primal truths that would otherwise lie dormant and buried in the scattered isolated islets of far-leftdom.
= new reply since forum marked as read
just probably not as part of the official proceedings of the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate.)
However, Occupy did something Bernie had not yet done and altered the national conversation on wealth and income inequity. And, Boston Occupy 
is credited with resurrecting Democratic Socialist's George Orwell's term, the 99%, which caught on and, years later, is still being used and understood.
In any event, yes, American is hearing the message now in straightforward, clear and honest terms, including "A great nation can do anything."
No more, "A great nation can do anything when it comes imperialism, war, snooping, etc. without even stopping to count the cost, but is helpless to keep seniors in the Northeast from dying for lack of electric service and home heating fuel." Of course, no one said that or talking about it much; it was just allowed to happen. Still is.
