One of the things that I have learned in the past two decades 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, the most successful Socialist Party in the history of the United States, on behalf of the anti-democrats in Moscow who wanted to see it destroyed.
It also doesn't notice that 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, racist 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 absolutely 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.
Clearly, for a lot of the play-leftists, being able to have a president who wears the "Socialist" label is everything, even losing that is more 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. I should add here that not an inconsiderable number of them are the children of affluence for whom this is more like a game than it is for anyone for whom it is a real struggle to keep their heads above water or for whom it is a matter of life or death. The just below the surface fury of a lot of them for the rejection of Bernie Sanders by a large majority of Black Voters doesn't seem to teach them anything.
The play-left live in a world of unreality, one in which they're certain to suddenly gain power through a veil over the eyes of "the masses" suddenly being lifted and that they would suddenly vote our way and those are the most near to reality among them. In the fever dreams of the more decadently thrill seeking, that they would rise up in their cinematically imagined revolution. As if lacking the power to convince a majority of voters into their third century, they're going to motivate Americans to rise up and overthrow the system.
Clearly, what the majority of voters want something other than what the play-left imagines it wants or demands that it should want at its own insistence when it has been unable to persuade them of adopting their vision of the future for generation after generation. Insisting that they were going to have what the play-left demanded, whether they liked it or not, would seem to be the real political platform of the play left.
And then there is the discrediting effect that the play-left, the Marxists, the quasi-Marxists, many of them and others who appropriated the word "socialist" destroying everything positive and attractive which has also used that label as has been the history of that word. Discrediting the Democratic Party, the party that has actually produced real revolutionary change during the Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt administrations - both opposed by the play-left - a significant echo of that in the Affordable Care Act pushed through by Nancy Pelosi during the Obama administration when both Obama and Harry Reed wanted to throw in the towel.
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 including some of Bernie Sanders biggest fans in the electorate, among the rich and famous, certainly in the lefty media (the goddamned Nation and In These Times not to mention the podcasting dolts and such entities as Democracy Now!) 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. Hillary Clinton was far from my ideal candidate, neither was Sanders because I knew he would lose the election. Only a total idiot of a socialist wouldn't wish we had her now instead of what their purity politics got us.
Yeah, This Is What I'm Afraid Of: Supporting Documentation
From The Guardian June 1, 2017
Labour’s election campaign received rousing support from American progressive champion Bernie Sanders on Thursday at the start of a three-day UK speaking tour .
Drawing parallels between anti-establishment anger at both ends of the political spectrum in Britain and the US, the former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination also applauded Jeremy Corbyn’s efforts to reshape the Labour party.
“What has impressed me – and there is a real similarity between what he has done and what I did – is he has taken on the establishment of the Labour party, he has gone to the grassroots and he has tried to transform that party … and that is exactly what I am trying to do,” said Sanders.
“I am also impressed by his willingness to talk about class issues,” he added during a sold-out speech promoting his book at the Brighton festival. “Too many people run away from the grotesque levels of income and wealth inequality that exist in the United States, the UK and all over the world. We will never make the kind of changes we need unless we take on the levels of inequality that exist.”
The comments are the most extensive yet linking the two movements, though Sanders stressed that his remarks should not been seen as a formal endorsement, arguing that this would be inappropriate behaviour for a foreign politician at this time.
Here's Vox from last December
The British electorate voted Thursday in one of the most important elections in the country’s modern history. And the results show that they voted overwhelmingly for Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson and for Brexit: a 78-seat parliamentary majority for Johnson and the worst showing for the opposition, the left-wing Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn, in nearly 100 years.
This does not appear to be because Johnson was a particularly adept or well-liked political figure. His approval ratings were deeply in the negative, according to prelection data from YouGov. His central campaign promise, finally getting out of the European Union, divided the country in half. He has a reputation as an untrustworthy buffoon and an even more sinister history of racism: He has compared women in burkas to “letterboxes” and claimed that Muslim immigrants lack “loyalty to Britain” because of their religion: “Islam is the problem,” as he put it. He once penned a column describing Africans as “pickanninies” with “watermelon smiles.”
Johnson appears to have benefitted not from his own unique political talents, but from his opponent’s problems. Brexit put Corbyn in a much tougher position than Johnson, needing to appeal to both Leave and Remain voters while Johnson could focus on the former. But Corbyn was also profoundly unpopular personally: While Johnson was at minus 12 in the YouGov approval rating polling, Corbyn was at negative 40.
I would attribute it more to Corbyn's ideologically motivated inability to bother much with trying to understand the electorate or his own party members.
I have every confidence that Bernie Sanders would do for the Democrats in 2020 what his fellow hero of the play-left here did for Labour in Britain against one of the worst and Trumpian Prime Ministers in their history. If you go through the posts of Majority Report, In These Times, The Nation, etc, you can see how much they adored Corbyn because, you know, "he's a socialist!"
They apparently don't want it in Britain, either.
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