Bernie Sanders is going to be a total jerk, apparently, keeping his campaign going even though it risks encouraging his idiot Bernie Bots to try to drive down the Democratic vote for the one who will be the nominee other than Bernie Sanders. And the old scumbag knows it will have that effect, he's no political neophyte and he's practiced that kind of politics for a long time.
We know what his course risks for the country and the world, putting Trump-McConnell back in for another four years of pillage, plunder and installing a fascist judiciary.
But he's also risking a great deal for the left, his play-left and whatever of the real left that people can be convinced are associated with it.
If Biden and Democrats win big without the early and earnest help of Bernie Sanders and his supporters, they will have proven that he and they are not only not needed for victory, it will be a rational conclusion that the Democratic party, center to left, are far better off without them. If Democrats won a big enough majority in the Senate, not likely but possible, and could ignore Sanders it would end up with them being farther from power than they were during the brief Obama majority. And Sanders isn't going to last forever. I strongly doubt that his wife would be able to step into his shoes and I really don't see any replacement for him in his movement. This was the year I realized that Sanders had more in common than he'd like to believe with the thankfully late, though hardly late enough, Lyndon Larouche.
Anyone who wonders why Elizabeth Warren didn't endorse Sanders after she ended her campaign is just not thinking very hard. There was certainly no prospect of her stepping into Sanders' shoes, considering the venom and dirt heaped on her by the Bernie Bots, not that I think she would have wanted to lead such a crew. And I have absolutely no doubt that any of the ideas about why Sanders has been and will be a liability for the real left have already occurred to Elizabeth Warren. Not to mention her complete justification if she believes he did her dirty and then encouraged his followers to attack her, her endorsers, her allies. Sanders has a habit of unleashing the worst of his followers to act in social and the pathetic play-left media while keeping a thin veneer of plausible deniability to give an appearance that he is above it. Most of this is something I've come to believe about him in the past five years, before then I respected him.
So this could end up with the biggest loser being the Bernie Sanders' iteration of the American left. Which I may have once regretted but now I think if anything good comes out of this nomination battle, it will be the discrediting of him and his cult and the wider, perennial and spasmodically damaging futility of the play left. If that includes the Democratic Socialists, a group I once respected, that might be less obviously a good thing, I would feel ambivalent about their demise or diminshiment now. In the past I'd have thought it was a shame, now I'd be far more ambivalent about it. I would think it was too bad if AOC went down with it though as the Bernie Bots showed over the past two weeks, she's not going to be acceptable to them as a leader either. I really think there is no prospect of a woman attracting even the pathetically inadequate leadership of such a left. If the other two Bernie supporting members of The Squad stay with the Bernie left, they will certainly marginalize themselves. I think it's telling that the most politically accomplished and experienced member of it, Ayanna Pressley supported Warren.
If Sanders spoils another election it could very likely have a similar though much angrier, much more determined effect in marginalizing his left. I've had enough of them already, that even as I was a fan of Senator Sanders as I had been when he was Mayor and Representative Sanders. If they spoil this election, it's war. I say that as a leveler-socialist who is, in many ways, to the left of Sanders and certainly to his wife and Jeff Weaver.
The safest thing for his left would be for him to stop the charade of his campaign, endorse Biden and in the remaining months assert himself to talk enough of his supporters to vote for Democrats and not attack Democrats - that will be the only way they will retain their influence with the possible winner of the election. As for the United States and the world, the only way to make things better from the Trump disaster is through the Democratic Party. That's the only route ahead, if it is blocked, things will get steadily worse. That is certainly something that Sanders knows, the question is if he really does care about it more than his self-regard.
No comments:
Post a Comment