Given that many notable achievements, and not just political ones, have been established specifically because someone has pushed as hard and as far as they could, calling to eject those elements from your party is one of the worst things you can do. It may be your job to rein them in, but abandoning them is abandoning the passion that drives people to vote in the first place.
it’s not a blunder. Turns out it might have worked exactly as planned; keep Bernie from running 3rd party like Nader, get his young fans engaged in politics but more easily resigned to voting Hillary in the GE rather than burn Sanders early to the ground and “turn them off.” At the end of the day, once the ads woulda aired on Bernie, the GOP would’ve turned him into Vladimir Lenin. The GOP has said so much about Hillary over a generation and she’s still standing.
With regard to support for a Sanders agenda–of course we do.
We know that at most, there will be about ten senators and representatives who have actively supported Sanders left over from the current Congress. (That’s basically the number of congressional Democrats who have endorsed him. I’m assuming they all run again, and win.) We can throw in maybe a dozen more who haven’t endorsed Clinton either and might–might–be supportive of some of his ideas, even if they aren’t publicly backing him. So, maybe 22, 23 current members of Congress, at most. This is a fact; we ***know ***this.
And Sanders himself has pretty much written off the rest of the ongressional Democrats. They’re all part of the establishment. They “don’t want change.” He thinks they support the billionaires and the banks. Tonight, after all, he blamed low voter turnout in 2014 on “the Democratic Party” for being on the wrong side of issues. He clearly doesn’t expect people who support Clinton–the people who make up the vast majority of Democrats currently in Congress–to turn around and give him their support. We ***know ***that the bulk of Democrats currently in Congress aren’t on his side–he says so himself.
Okay, well, how about new people? Well, we know there will be mighty few freshman Sanders supporters coming into the next Congress. Sanders and his folks haven’t bothered to create an infrastructure to help elect like-minded people. Sanders himself doesn’t seem interested in helping to bring in people who might see things his way. He has endorsed a grand total of three House candidates, after all. Three. He has done, as far as I can tell, no fundraising for anyone else (and not much for those three). There are a few pro-Sanders candidates running, a few insurgents (see the Senate primaries in MD and PA last week); they’re not winning, and I’m not clear whether Sanders has noticed. He certainly doesn’t seem to care. The upshot: Of new Democrats entering Congress, there might, *very *generously, be a couple of dozen who are supporters of Sanders. We know this.
So, yes, we DO know what the next Congress will look like, more or less, at least on the Democratic side. We don’t know whether the D’s or the R’s will be in charge, we don’t know exactly which incumbents will be given the boot. But we ***know ***that Sanders will be dealing with a Congress in which even members of his “own” party don’t agree with him on the issues he cares most about. If he were to have 25 strong supporters, I’d be surprised.
And what I can’t wrap my mind around is, this is the way he seems to want it.
Gotta add this: When has *Sanders *ever realized he can have transformative success with a progressive agenda inside the party? :rolleyes:
When you promise bullshit it’s nice to have someone else to blame when you can’t deliver.
Can’t, or just can’t be bothered to dig in and try.
First they ignore you: done
Then they laugh at you: done
Then they fight you: in progress
Then you win.
We just haven’t reached the “win” stage yet. When we do, you will have been with us all along.
Is this like the Marxist notion that communism will eventually come after capitalism… just you wait?
Yes, progressives have their work cut out for them. But you know, IIRC it didn’t take a WHOLE lot of instances of Republicans getting successfully primaried by Tea Partiers to give all the rest of them a SERIOUS case of the heebie-jeebies about crossing the Tea Party line. I suspect it will work this way with the Dems and progressives, too, because the bulk of Dem centrists are only in it for the money, Lebowski, just like the Republicans they have snuggled up so closely to.
Because we all really like what the Tea Party has done to our politics. Here is hoping the establishment Democrats have a good deal more spine.
In other words, Obama wasn’t going to risk achieving absolutely nothing if he didn’t get 100 percent of what he had hoped for. Considering this country was coming out of its worst economic crisis since 1932, considering the country had no clear mandate for doing 100 percent of the things that Bernie Sanders are demanding now, I think that was probably the wise choice. Millions of people were not in a position to have the president fall on his own sword. I want a president who can actually achieve something, not act indignant if people aren’t persuaded to buy into his vision for how the world should operate.
A hundred thousand people have already died on Hillary’s watch, because she and people like her gave their support to an illegal war. Why on earth would I believe it is better for the President to actively be on the side of evil, rather than doing their best to stop it but being overruled?
Right, and how has that worked out for the republican party? How has that worked out for the congress in general? Basically, you’re advocating for radicalization of the democratic party.
I’ve got news for you. The United States is a conservative country. It may from time to time drift to the left as a way of rejecting the extremism of the right, but it will never become the kind of America you dream of. Ever.
The only thing that radicalization of the left would accomplish is to completely discredit the entire progressive movement.
You won’t get there, for the reasons Ulf quite cogently laid out in his post. Bernie actually has the opportunity to build some momentum at the grassroots level, but he’s simply not putting in the time and effort to do so. I get that he’s in the middle of a campaign, and maybe he can devote more time to transformation between now and 2018, but I remain skeptical. There’s nothing now that suggests Bernie will be anything other than a fad.
Mostly because Obama was not leading no stinking revolution.
Oh he was revolutionary to be sure, just because of who he was. And he was part of creating a successful movement. But it was not his fault that so many would not believe him when he stated over and over again that he was a moderate and that the way he was a revolutionary was the revolutionary belief that we could get past partisanship some and come to meaningful compromises in the service of accomplishing greater goods for this country.
And he kept fighting for THAT revolution throughout with some victories along the way and sometimes retrenching to “us and them” methods when dealing with extreme obstructionism. But to his terms’ end he has attempted to work with the revolutionary idea of trying to not demonize his opposition even as he outmaneuvers them and offers reasonable compromises.
No Obama did not fail. He got things done. He made real progress against difficult odds.
And Obama’s movement succeeded, and is succeeding, precisely for the same reasons that Sanders fails and others before failed to create one. Because while Sanders’ “movement” is still mostly as Ibn put it, “pissed off white, college educated lefties”, Obama instead united a coalition of groups more of who will both stick together and stick with it over a long haul of incremental progress.
I think I’ve got a record here of supporting Sanders and speaking out pretty loudly against obnoxious behavior from Clinton supporters. Keep that in mind as I say, what the hell are you thinking?
Your post here and continuing in your other posts demonstrate a remarkably self-centered approach to politics. This is an excellent place for you to check your privilege.
A Trump presidency is likely to have severe impacts on people of color. Are you white, such that you can ignore these effects? It’s likely to be miserable for Muslims. Are you non-Muslim, so you can safely ignore these effects? There’s a pretty good chance (who the hell can even tell) that it’s not going to be great for women of childbearing age. Are you male, such that you can ignore these effects? It’ll probably be awful for kids living in poverty, and for their parents. Are you middle-class, so that you can ignore these effects?
A Trump presidency will have very real, very serious adverse effects for literally millions of people. For you to decide to stay home on elections day because of hurt feelings is a terrible way to cast a vote.
I’m not at all crazy about Clinton. A lot of Clinton supporters completely disgust me with their behavior. But my emotional state is not so fragile that a bunch of yahoos saying dumb things about me are going to cloud my political analysis.
I’m at the point where the superpower I wish for is the power to clonk peoples’ heads together like coconuts. About a third of Sanders supporters, and about a third of Clinton supporters, would be making the most satisfying clonking sound right about now.
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And Obama’s movement succeeded, and is succeeding, precisely for the same reasons that Sanders fails and others before failed to create one. Because while Sanders’ “movement” is still mostly as Ibn put it, “pissed off white, college educated lefties”, Obama instead united a coalition of groups more of who will both stick together and stick with it over a long haul of incremental progress.
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Obama started an ongoing movement? What are it’s goals? Who is in the coalition?
Lefties looking longingly at the Tea Party is both hilarious and sad. Tea Party excesses have utterly hamstrung conservatism and the only people who can’t seem to see that are Tea Partiers and a handful of progressives.
It’s like wanting to build an air force out of kamikaze pilots. Sure, it’s flashy and people might remember and fear you, but it’s still suicide.
The coalition thing reminded me of something. I have seen a lot - here and other places - that if we had a true multi-party system, it would be better. Its often said by Sanders supporters, which is why I’m sticking this thought here.
If you had multiple parties, you would still need to work in coalitions - you would still need to make compromises and deals. You would still need the moderate Democrats to move anything forward.
And if you had multiple viable parties, you would have the possibility that someone becomes president with 20 or 30% of the popular vote. Small groups of people - that currently are fringe - and in some cases insane, could win the presidency. Progressives think that’s cool, because they see themselves in that chair. But what if its fundamentalist Christians, Sovereign Citizens, American Nazis, Big Business Plurocrats?
The coalition has been pretty much everyone who is not batshit insane, which unfortunately sometimes seems to be only slightly more than half this country. It includes lots of Whites, Hispanics, Blacks, gays, women of all ethnicities and races, and others. The goal has been to move towards a country that can respect each other even as we disagree with each other, gives all of us opportunities to succeed together, to have us try to be better together within our country and within our world. It’s a work in progress to be sure but the key bit remains that he has helped us make progress.
The downside is illustrated by Israeli politics. The balance of power has often held by small relatively extremist parties who are, Tea Party like, able to extract huge concessions from the much larger parties in return for their support, support required to form a ruling coalition. In Israel that historically played out as pandering consistently to the settler movement and to the ultra-Orthodox parties, who have rarely had much support from the population as a whole but without whom majority coalitions have been hard to create.