Food for Thought on Bernie Sanders' Historic Candidacy

[benny05]

This is from Jacobin, released this afternoon. It's pithy, but I'm glad to see some political philosophers and economists are having a discussion of the potential impact of Bernie's campaign and thoughts of its potential legacy.

Bernie Sanders and the New Class Politics

Excerpt:

"... I’ve recently heard some nominally “progressive” commentators posit the opposite view, that the campaign failed. Some of those expressing it had unreasonable expectations, in part driven by what strikes me as a naiveté about electoral politics, a tendency to underestimate the institutional weight of the party apparatus and its linkages from the local to national levels and through institutional allies like most unions and the civil rights and women’s organizations.

Some who are eager to pronounce the campaign a failure are motivated by other ideological objectives. For example, Trotskyists and others who fetishize association with Democrats as the greatest sin in politics want to argue that Sanders would have been more successful if he’d run as an independent.

That’s a delusional position. In the first place, an independent candidacy outside the Democrat[ic] and Republican primaries would have received no attention at all to this point, which means we’d have wasted the last year, and almost none of the unions or other entities would have endorsed it."

This helps explain why Bernie ran as a Democratic candidate and not as an Indy. Bernie has said as much himself.

Read the rest here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/08/bernie-sanders-black-voters-adolph-reed-trump-hillary/

[LWolf]

1. This was a great read.

It reinforced my personal convictions about several issues.

Our major party choices in the GE: a neoliberal or a sociopath.

The determined false propaganda promoted throughout the primaries.

A way forward for the revolution.