You're still my candidate, Elizabeth Warren, I don't want you to endorse either of the men, they're in their late 70s one of them is guaranteed to be ballot box poison down the ballot as well as at the top, the other one isn't exactly a great bet, either. Both have had serious health issues. I want you available to step in if needed because you were the best candidate in the race.
If that doesn't happen you should hold out to get the most you can from whichever it is who wants your endorsement, I know you know best how to do that, certainly better than me. I would want you to accept the vice-presidency if it is offered if you think that would be the best thing in your judgement. I could give you a long list of women you could demand be named as the price of your endorsement, hopefully one that would not mean a Republican got to name their successor in the Senate.
People who wanted Elizabeth Warren should still vote for her because it will strengthen her hand in extracting promises for her support.
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I have been testing the Bernie Bots and am finding that while some of them are prepared to vote against Trump by voting for the only other person who will be on the ballot who will be president in 2021 a large number of Bernie Bots will vote Trump by either not voting or will vote Green or Bernie as a write in or whatever.
Going on from here, they've done it in election after election, the quasi-Marxist, Marxist, and now, I have to face the fact the Democratic Socialists who I used to contribute to, are the never will-win-enough-elections play-left who have achieved nothing but to act as spoilers to put Republican-fascists in office and lead young and older idiots to dream of what will never be.
That ever left-behind left have policies which I might agree with but which, clearly, will NEVER get a majority of American voters.* As I've noted, "socialism" is a label which has been discredited by those who used the word and by a large number of its theorists.
I remember when I read Michael Harrington's book of that name I had to shake my head as often as I found myself nodding in agreement. I found his example of nationalizing the production of salt to be one of the most discouragingly pathetic things I ever read. If I could find my old, no doubt moldy, copy of it I might go through some of it, his catalog of the "mistakes" of the history of socialism, up till the late 1980s is a very partial list, an entire book of the same size would be required to list the malignancies that appropriated the name, everything from the worst forms of Marxism to the lesser atrocities flowing out of the theories of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, etc. to, yes, that too, National Socialism. So many of America's indigenous discrediting socialists have latched on to some of histories worst mass murderers and oppressors, including those who clearly saw workers as a material resource to be exploited as certainly as the most depraved capitalists have.
When a word has acquired the kind of self-imposed damage that various self-named socialists have heaped on socialism, it is not any surprise that it becomes a label which carries problems. In the United States, "socialism" has a burden of such associations that probably means any socialist will never, ever have enough votes to become president and will seldom, except under the rarest of congressional districts or states, be accepted by a majority of voters for a few candidates for the Congress. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comes from one of those rare places as does Bernie Sanders (at least when it's him) and then only in the period after Vermont became, effectively, a colony of New York City.
They are rare exceptions that are bound to remain rare exceptions, I doubt there are many if any congressional districts in Massachusetts or California or elsewhere where an overt, life-long, dedicated and self-declared socialist can win in a general election on a reliable basis. If they could be, that would have happened by now. Even at the height of the only really successful Socialist party in American history, it managed to elect two members of Congress and a number of municipal governments, the "real" "left" the Communists on orders from Lenin and Trotsky destroyed it a hundred and one years ago.
One of the first experimental pieces I ever wrote as a blogger was about one of those congressmen, Victor Berger who was derided even as he was a successful Mayor and even as he did what no one had done, be elected to the House of Representatives as a Socialist, his supposed comrades derrided him as a "sewer socialist" because one of the things he did as mayor was to make good on his promise to provide a sanitation system that would not mean people were getting killed from drinking their tap water. He did that while his more ideologically pure socialists did nothing at all. And even his kind of socialism that got real results for real people couldn't stand up to the bad publicity it got from the publicity stunts and posturing and posing of his political enemies on the "left".
If you look at that link you will note I said that I thought Bernie Sanders running for the Senate as an independent was the only third-party effort I could support, but, then, there was a lot of stuff I wrote then that, looking at fourteen years of history and reading and hearing fourteen years worth of the unfiltered thinking of the play-left, there is a lot I believed then that I don't believe anymore.
One of the things that I have learned is that the alternative of fascist gangster government isn't Marxist gangster government, it is egalitarian democracy. It is through egalitarian democracy and, even more than merely being informed, encouragement to be people of good will that the alternative will be found. It won't be found in Marxism, it is found in the Golden Rule. One of the things I read from the goddamned Bernie Bots as they were tearing down Elizabeth Warren in favor of Sanders, called it a choice between Louis Brandeis or Eugene Debs. Since it was in one of the higher-mid-brow play-lefty sources, Jacobin, there was never any doubt that on the basis of ideological purity it presented Debs uh, Bernie as the real right choice. It did so as it noted the political futility of Eugene Debs' several runs for president - it doesn't mention the role the real true-believers had in destroying Debs' Socialist Party on behalf of the anti-democrats in Moscow who wanted to see it destroyed.
It also doesn't note the alternatives it poses carries its own answer. We never "got Debs" there was never any real prospect that we would "get Debs" we did get Brandeis but it was only when the deeply flawed and rather awful Woodrow Wilson, an ELECTED Democrat, appointed him to the Supreme Court. It's an inapt analogy but one thing is clear, it might have been a long shot but it was possible that we would get a Warren, it is a far longer shot that we would get a Sanders and once he was there, there was absolutley no prospect for him getting the pie-in-the-ever-to-be-put-off future to be made law in the Congress that a president Sanders would have to get it through. Warren's programs would have been hard enough to get made law, Sanders' for all of their attractive dream quality will not be for the lifetimes of anyone who cast a vote for him.
Cleary, for a lot of the play-leftists, being able to have a president who wears the "Socialist" label is everything, even losing that is desirable to them than saving egalitarian democracy. And by that they prove they are irresponsible children, even when those people are in their late 70s and older.
We're struggling in a losing battle to try to hold on to the progress that came with not only the only real revolutionary in the history of our presidency, Lyndon Johnson got but also the legacy of his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt and even the reforms of the progressives Woodrow Wilson and the Theodore Roosevelt. For fucksake, we're struggling to keep the vestiges of electoral democracy alive in the wasteland of Trumpian fascism. We won't even hold on to the Civil War amendments when the Roberts courts are done.
If the play-left hadn't done its best to join with the Republicans to bring down Hillary Clinton, we wouldn't be struggling to do that, right now.
* In the end, the left has to decide if it really is in favor of democracy, in which case it means that you have to trust The People, as a body, to make better decisions more often than any ruling elite will. You have to really believe that only a government that governs with the consent of The People or a majority of them can be legitimate. No "Democratic Socialist" who doesn't really believe that even when the majority doesn't want to take a risk that your "good-socialism" is better than what the Marxists, various elite-Socialists (Mitterrand socialism, really?) and the National Socialists when those socialisms have been so bad. Not even the "good" "Democratic Socialists" of the past were that big in condemning the worst of the socialist governments when they were murdering enormous numbers of people. Look at Sanders' past enthusiasms in that regard, look at how even Eugene Debs made nicer to them than I'd like to read about. Victor Berger's widow signed petitions supporting Stalin's show trials.
No, "socialism" is a label that will always be ballot-box poison in the United States. It should be scrapped and while we're at it, we should scrap a huge part of what it came to mean. Absolutely rejecting and banning anything and everything that is anti-democratic is only the minimal requirement for coming up with a genuine left alternative to it. I'd think worker ownership of the means of production and an absoulute limit on the ownership rights of money lenders is a good basis for that alternative. Nationalization of the health system as well as the educational system are proven legitimate areas for that, regulated private sector entities with safe guards against money being injected into our politics and, most of all, a prohibition on the media lying us into fascism, are necessities.
