Bernie’s greatest legacy: Suddenly, it’s OK to question capitalism!

[applegrove]

Bernie’s greatest legacy: Suddenly, it’s OK to question capitalism!

by Andrew O'Hehir at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2016/04/24/bernies_greatest_legacy_suddenly_its_ok_to_question_capitalism/

"SNIP...............


Bernie Sanders is not going to be president. But in defeat he has accomplished something extraordinary, probably something more important than anything he could have achieved in four or eight frustrating years in the White House. For the first time since the end of the Cold War — and perhaps since the beginning of the Cold War — large numbers of Americans have begun to ask questions about capitalism. Questions about whether it works, and how, and for whose benefit. Questions about whether capitalism is really the indispensable companion of democracy, as we have confidently been told for the last century or so, and about how those two things interact in the real world.


Bernie Sanders did not invent those questions or cause them to emerge, to be sure. They have emerged from a whole range of objective conditions and subjective perceptions, including the dramatic worsening of economic inequality, the near-total paralysis of our political system and the awakening of an entire generation of young Americans, supposedly from the non-poor classes, who have graduated from college tens of thousands of dollars in debt. But Sanders has served as an important channel or catalyst for such questions and the shift in consciousness they represent. He or his advisers appeared to see or sense a rising current of discontent that took nearly everyone else by surprise.

After several generations in which a capitalist economy dominated by the neoliberal policy prescriptions of tax cuts, deregulation, privatization and fiscal austerity has been understood as the natural order of things — and as the oxygen necessary to nourish democracy around the world — the Western world’s entire leadership caste has been startled to encounter a resurgence of systematic nonbelief. To the bankers and politicians, it feels almost as if a crusty old Vermonter had come close to stealing a major-party presidential nomination on a platform of Flat-Earthism, or by professing that the moon landing was a fake. (Those politics, to be fair, are largely confined to the other party.)

For many decades, all lingering remnants of nonbelief in the goodness and naturalness and blessedness of capitalism have been endlessly derided and driven to the margins of political discourse, which now looks like an admission of weakness or the work of a bad conscience. In the United States, “socialism” became a bad word, apparently poisoned forever by the disastrous failures of Eastern-bloc Communism. (While the situation has always been different in Europe, most of the so-called socialist parties have drifted steadily rightward and embraced market ideology.) Pockets of socialist or Marxist thought could be found in the groves of academe, layered in dust, but in the realm of politics those terms belonged only to zealots and weirdos. Cornel West’s pre-Bernie quest for an alternative radical politics, for instance, led him into the arms of Bob Avakian and the Revolutionary Communist Party, a tiny Maoist sect that has haunted the far left since the mid-’70s.



................SNIP"

[virtualobserver]

1. at least YOUR "accept defeat" strategy has a touch of subtlety

[applegrove]

2. I don't agree with all that is in every article I post, but I think it is worth posting for other

reasons than saying Bernie has lost. I hope you agree. He's rocked the world and Bernie supporters should be proud.

[insta8er]

3. Keep telling yourself that this is an assault on Capitalism while you know it is about corruption!

[Stallion]

4. If Democrats Become the Anti-Capitalism Party They Will Be a Permanent Minority Party

despite the sentiments by Bernie supporters. Democrats trended more towards business precisely because they couldn't win General Elections otherwise

[applegrove]

5. But like anything human we can now criticize capitalism. That is the point.

[Stallion]

6. I Agree We Can Improve, Encourage Competition, Education, Social Services, Progressive Tax Policy

I believe many of the ills of our government can be solved simply by a 5th Democratic nominated Justice on the Supreme Court including campaign finance, voting rights and gerrymandering. I believe the Democratic Party offers effective policies to deal with many of the issues which cause despair and distrust in government but those policies have been blocked by Republican control of Congress and 30 years of Supreme Court control