2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Who would ever want to ask our young people to scale back their dreams and goals? [View all]Meldread
(4,213 posts)I am undecided between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. However, this line of attempted persuasion toward Sanders comes off to me as really weird.
My entire political life has been about keeping the eye to the long term goals. As a Queer person, I was asked by many of the people supporting Sanders to support other candidates in the past who stood against me having basic equal rights. Indeed, it was only in the 2012 election that I had, for the first time in my life, the opportunity to vote for someone who openly supported my right to get married. It took us over 40 years of fighting to get marriage equality. It required us to hold our noses and vote for Democrats time and time again, even as they openly said they opposed our right to get married, even though they--at times, and even Obama himself---openly courted the votes our most hated enemies. We kept our eye on the prize despite the fact we kept losing, over and over and over and over again. We knew that over time that we would win, and in the end we did.
Now, today, there was literally no one in the Democratic Primary who did not support marriage equality. Both candidates fight over who has been more pro-queer and for how long.
I learned from this experience that change is hard and difficult. In order to be successful, we have to be willing to keep fighting even in the face of defeat, and perhaps just as importantly we have to keep our eyes on the long term objectives that we seek to accomplish.
I think it is irrational to believe that simply electing Bernie Sanders is going to be enough. We need to control the Congress, and we need to control the state governments. It has always been about a struggle for power. Sanders and his supporters talk a lot about revolutions, but at least among his supporters I don't see or hear plans of waging a revolution. I see an investment in a single man and a campaign. Not a plan to actually shift the country to the left, a plan to seize political power, and even more importantly--seize control of the Democratic Party.
As a radical leftist, I'm happy to join the revolution when it comes. However, Bernie Sanders is not a leader of a revolution. This much is clear. There is no such thing as a nice revolutionary. There is a reason they tend to be violent, bloody, and rip social institutions apart. I'm willing to rip the Democratic Party to shreds, if it means that we can shift the country radically to the left. Bernie Sanders is not even willing to go after DWS, who is all but telegraphing how the party establishment plans to give the nomination to Hillary.