Playing Revolutionaries As The World Burns

I have had a really rough several days and am just catching up with things like Samantha Bee Youtubes,  I saw the one I'm going to post about twenty minutes ago.   This phenomenon of "Bernie" or Busters, the "Bernie" Delegates Network and the Green Party dupes should be giving everyone on the left a wake up call.   Bernie Sanders has admitted that in this election the most important thing is to make sure that Donald Trump is not president in January but there are still large numbers of those who supported his candidacy and, allegedly, his policies are quite prepared to see Donald Trump become president.   Some of them do so on the absurd theory that when you have a horrific, crypto-fascist or, in his case, an explicit fascist in charge of the government it will hasten the revolution.  If that idiocy began in Marx and Engel's lunatic adoption of the imaginary Hegelian dialectic, I don't know.  I do know that I've been hearing it from mostly white, mostly affluent, mostly academic lefties since the 1950s and, let me clue you in, kids, it ain't never happened, not since that crap started.  If it were going to then your dream revolution would have happened during the terrible 19th century or, really, whenever in history you want to locate the horrific government that would have sparked it.  The reality is that a Republican-fascist president cements fascism into place, it doesn't hasten the day when it falls.   I mean, Hegel died in 1831, when's that ol' dialectic going to shift?

These idiots never gain power because they are nutcases who couldn't mount a local campaign to do anything but get attention for themselves.  They are a burden and millstone around the neck of the left, they are the assholes at meetings who screw things up, they are the John Reed faction of the play-left who destroyed the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs as it was actually doing what the Greens haven't done, win major elections on a national level as well as those controlling local governments.

The left has got to dump these guys.  The Tea Party style of lunacy works for fascists because fascism is all about exploiting peoples' weakness and bad points.  It doesn't work for democracy because democracy is made of the best in people.  Childishness, egocentricity and attention getting have been a curse for the left.   As a long time observer of the left, I could go on and on about why these idiots have to be dumped, shoved aside, overridden and distanced from the real left.  In looking around at the leftist media online, the magazines, the webazines, I'm still reading stuff supporting this lunacy, now, on the second of August, less than a hundred days left in the only chance we have to avoid having Donald Trump as president.

This campaign has opened my eyes into the reasons the left has failed, so completely, in the past half century in ways that I've never seen before.  Even with the experience of the Bush II regime, with the irresponsibility of the likes of Condi Rice and George W. Bush in sleeping as warnings of an attack were ignored, the criminal enterprise that Dick Cheney oversaw as his self-appointed regent, the worst foreign policy and military crime in our history resulting in a blown-up Middle East, etc. and that hasn't been enough experience to educate these prattling children, not the real children who might have an excuse or those entering into their seventh and even eighth decade of their extended childhood.   The kind of thing that you can only do if it is other people who will pay the price of your self-indulgent let's play revolutionaries game.  It's no wonder they're willing to see Trump as president, they are as unattached to reality as he is.

If you want to see what has discredited the left, here it is.

As is said, they should stop pretending they represent anything to do with Bernie Sanders, at the very least.  They're Jill Stein's stooges and they were from the start.

Update:  I agree with what Phyllis Jacobson said about the real damage that the guys who wanted to be considered the most leftist in the room did to socialism.

[Lillian] Hellman said that "radicals" like herself had done no harm. She was mistaken. By promoting a totalitarian movement in the name of socialism, she and they had done enormous harm. They had impeded the development of an authentic socialist movement by distorting the basic concepts of socialism, promulgating the idea that a society based on the destruction of working class independence, on terror and the liquidation of millions was socialist. They not only distorted history but made a mockery of the American radical tradition.

I don't, though, think that the Trotskyites of the SWP were much better.  Marx and Engels, the Fabians and others are the ones who damaged the radically leveling, democratic concept of socialism to the point of its entire discrediting.   It was in the period before Lenin's hijacking of the Russian Revolution that socialism reached its high point in voter acceptability in the United States, when it was, truly, seen as an expression of economic democracy, before it became associated with the mass murders, the oppression, the entire violation of the anti-democracies that arose in various places after 1917.  It was, in fact, at the command of those like Lenin and Trotsky that the old Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and Victor Berger was wrecked by the Leninist faction, just as the SDS was later destroyed by the "Progressive Labor" Maoists.  Though I think that the Marxists among the Socialists would have become a problem for democratic socialism in the United States.  By the 1930s even Victor Berger's widow, Meta Berger. was signing onto statements defending Stalin's show trials and his dictatorship, such as that mentioned in Jacobson's review.  

I think that the word "socialism" has been so damaged, the concept so damaged, that it is no longer useful or wisely used.  We need to replace it with something that gets back to its original ideals and protect it from being appropriated by those who don't begin in egalitarian democracy.