What Is Actually Radical About Bernie Sanders’ Democratic Socialism Isn’t the Socialism

[eridani]

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18559/saul-alinsky-and-bernies-sanders-vision-of-democracy

The brouhaha over Sanders’ self-identification as a “democratic socialist” has largely missed what is truly radical about that identity. It’s not the socialism. Sanders has never used the “S” word with precision—for him, it seems to be simply a shorthand for robust investment in public services and the common good.

That shorthand has proved remarkably useful, allowing him to distinguish himself from liberals and most Democrats, while pointing out that much of what he calls socialism is already deeply embedded in American society in a variety of popular programs and institutions, most notably in public libraries and parks, in the Social Security and Medicare programs, and in various aspects of the military. The ambitious agenda he has laid out would amount to “the largest peacetime expansion of government in modern American history,” as the Wall Street Journal has noted. At the first Democratic debate, the former senator from Virginia, Jim Webb, used one of his few speaking opportunities to toss a pail of cold water on Sanders’ proposals. “I don’t think the revolution’s going to come,” he said blandly, “and I don’t think the Congress is going to pay for a lot of this stuff.”

Webb was correct about the odds of Congress passing much of Sanders’s agenda for public spending. But he was wrong to conflate that agenda with the revolution Sanders has in mind. What makes Sanders a radical, and what constitutes the essence of his revolution, isn’t his commitment to certain spending priorities or a particular economic plan—it’s his fierce commitment to democracy.

“Change never takes place from the top down,” he told his audience at the University of Chicago. “It always takes place from the bottom up. It takes place when people by the millions, sometimes over decades and sometimes over centuries, determine that the status quo—the world that they see in front of them—is not the world that should be, and they come together. And sometimes they get arrested. … And sometimes they die in the struggle. And what human history is about is passing that torch from generation to generation to generation.”

Though they are very different in their approaches to achieving it, Sanders shares this commitment to a radical version of democracy with Saul Alinsky, the activist and organizer who made Chicago his home and has played an outsized role in our recent national politics. Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals, the summary of his organizing philosophy that was published a year before his death in 1972, is particularly notorious among right-wing pundits, and he was often invoked by conservatives in the 2008 and 2012 elections as evidence of Barack Obama’s secret radicalism. Obama was, famously, a community organizer in the 1980s for a Chicago-based organization, the Developing Communities Project, inspired by Alinsky’s strategies. Hillary Clinton’s ties are even more direct. She was born in Chicago and grew up in a suburb, and she wrote her thesis at Wellesley about Alinsky. In a letter she sent him in 1971, Clinton wrote that “the more I’ve seen of places like Yale Law School and the people who haunt them, the more convinced I am that we have the serious business and joy of much work ahead.” His ghost will no doubt be conjured once again if Clinton wins the Democratic nomination.

[Demeter]

1. True--it's the insistence on democracy

and this time, we are going all the way...we have had 70 years of history lessons, after FDR did a save on Capitalism, to learn that Capitalism (tm) isn't worth saving.

[dreamnightwind]

2. Interesting read, thanks for the OP

Maybe it's not about wealth inequality so much as power inequality. In a true democracy, the little guy is empowered, which is I think where the author of this article is seeing the Alinsky/Sanders intersection.

We live in a kabuki democracy, where we get to vote but power operates behind the electoral outcome, largely immune to the will of the electorate.

Looking at Sanders' life work, I think he consistently has tried to address this problem. A noble work, hopefully people wake up and lend a hand. I

t's going to take a lot of people deciding that supporting one political party's establishment candidate over the other's isn't going to get it done, and that establishment politics is entirely unable and unwilling to address the major issues we must deal with. The power behind the politicians won't deal with the issues on their own, either, they are mostly in it for a buck.

Leaders are invaluable in these efforts, and Sanders is a gift. Hopefully more will emerge, and soon.

From the article the OP is about,

We must believe that it is the darkness before the dawn of a beautiful new world; we will see it when we believe it. - Alinksy