These are the times when I wish the psycho-historians were still active to put the Liberal-Left onto the couch. The left-wing of the Democratic Party has been abused since at least the Jackson campaign, but the decades of abuse by the party establishment only draw them tighter into the grip of the abusers. They are constantly on the hunt for the Good Father and they see him in the strangest incarnations: Dennis Kucinich, Mario Cuomo, Paul Wellstone, Barack Obama. They are so desperate to be accepted, to be loved, to be coddled, that they remain completely blind to the fact that they are about to be tasered back into submission.
The Democratic Party bought into neoliberalism with the election of Carter (they’ve always been imperialistic) and the sale was completed during Clinton time. Since then there’s been no revolution or even minor rebellion inside the party. Even Bernie, the putative socialist, speaks fondly of the booming Clinton economy. How can this party be saved? Why should it? Give Bernie credit for honesty–at least. He has finally admitted what he is: a Democrat with all the baggage that comes along with that membership card and a pledge to support (and never attack) the inevitable nominee: HRC, the preeminent neoliberal politician in the world today.
It is time for a little political realism: a realism that comes from understanding who Bernie Sanders is and the role he is now playing. Bernie has inherited the time-honored role of the Pretender, an essential character in Democratic Party stagecraft. There have been other mighty figures who have strutted and fretted their way across the primary season: Gene McCarthy and Shirley Chisholm, George McGovern and Jerry Brown, Cuomo and Jesse Jackson, Bill Bradley and Patricia Schroeder, Kucinich and, yes, even Barack Obama, the Pretender who became president.
Yet, none of these insurgencies, dating back to McCarthy’s 1968 campaign, have ever moved the party even one micron to the left. Instead the DNC has lurched ever rightward, one election after the next. If nothing else, the Obama experience has demonstrated that the potency of the change agent dissolves almost instantly when dropped into the swells of the System.
The sole purpose of these insurgencies is to keep the Left locked inside of a party that no longer actively represents any of their interests. It’s a sad and hopeless confinement, a kind of political life without parole. Sure, many of the Left’s most cherished issues, from abortion rights to climate change, minimum wage to single-payer, get put “on the table” as a way to keep the backers of the losing campaign animated enough to vote in the general election. Some of these planks will even get inscribed into the Holy Writ of the Platform, where they will be promptly embalmed and entombed until the next convention.
Bernie Sanders had a choice. He could have run as the outsider he claimed to be. He could have run as an independent. He could have run as a Socialist or a Green. He could have been a threat to the immiserating status quo. But he wilted. Either because Sanders really is at heart a Democrat or because he is a political coward who feared retribution, he chose to lend credence to a party that has brutalized nearly every progressive policy he claims to champion.
Meanwhile, truly independent campaigns, the ones that forcefully challenge the neoliberal dogma and imperialistic militarism of the Democratic Party from the outside, are crushed, their candidates and supporters vilified and demonized. Go ask Ralph Nader.
But thats the entire reason you try to get politicians to address your issues, to put laws in the books.
) economic populism is fine but he needs to relate it better specifically to Black audiences
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