If people want to call Medicare for all, free higher education for our children and equitable taxs and treatment under the law so be it.
AOC, by the way, only makes a two second appearance. The others in the video are key there.
I suspect for the petulance.
I doubt you got the point of the white clad democratic congresswomen who led a celebratory cheer in the midst of Trumps speech.
Bernie has to know it was not the Russians that cost HRC the election, but seems incapable of blaming himself because Bernie would have to admit that not only did HRC run a horrible campaign, but he sold millions of his acolytes out by endorsing a political, loser and a Wall Street quisling.
From my perspective, even if true about Russia’s meddling in 2016, Bernie would still have been able to bury Trump if he had been nominated for POTUS.
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Regardless of Putin, Comey, Assange, whatever, Clinton could have won if she hadn’t run such a backward campaign.
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Don’t care. Didn’t watch. Got much better things to do with my time than listen to Trump.
The small world of CD commenters continues to shrink.
It’s about quality not quantity. Understand?
I’m afraid that a Stalinist mentality still exists in much of the left. No one is ever good enough and if they are not perfect- they must be rejected. Sanders and Warren are both good people with good ideas and have possibilities. Of course, they and others need to be pushed and I think they are responsive. Given the alternatives are people like Pelosi, Schumer and Clinton - what are we complaining about?
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What I have been saying for a long time: Bernie has been nothing but a progressive shill for the democrats to con the progressives that they are the party of change.
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There just seems to be an expectation among people that Bernie waves a magic wand and all of a sudden an alternative third party infrastructure appears. He can wave a wand and the Greens all of a sudden have a national infrastructure that THEY haven’t been able to really build on much. The Greens will all of a sudden be involved in the daily struggles in every city across the country, which the DSA is actually doing (which is why it is growing). Does the DSA beg Bernie to do this or that? No, THEY just do it. Most of these critiques could be articulated towards the DSA too, since it also operates largely in the Democratic Party. Bernie has spent his whole life fighting the good fight, and because he makes decisions that people don’t agree with, people are willing to just wave him away. Howard Zinn wrote books arguing against the “great many theory” (I think he called it) of history, where if you study historical events, it is always about great leaders. Want to learn about WWII? Well, here is what FDR, Stalin and Hitler did. Zinn told the history of various events from the perspective of working people, the poor, immigrants, people of color, indigenous groups, union organizers, socialists, etc. What I hear from some on the left is a yearning for Bernie to be the great man, instead of doing the dirty work of creating a mass infrastructure that can take on these parties and at least provide a viable alternative avenue to go down. The left hasn’t built this (the Socialist Party did in the early 20th century), and they expect him to just create it by fiat somehow. It’s a-historic and unrealistic. He has to exist in this rotten system, and that rotten party if he runs. If he does, the entire system comes down on him, and he is not a young man anymore. Those are constraints imposed on him, and he is doing his best given those constraints. I don’t agree with everything he is doing or has done, but I would have to be unrealistic in my expectations to think that he alone could do tons more than he is. I used to do activism alongside some groups on the left that I thought were pretty authoritarian and out to lunch (wanted unrealistic things in the short term and talked about revolutions that were simply not in the cards). The Spartacist League, some anarchists involved with the Black Bloc (personally convinced that half of them are informants). There was no reasoning with them, and I was attacked often because of my background in economics. I was told that economics was itself “bourgeois” and those that studied it were “bourgeois”. Would have been news to Marx, Proudhon, Oskar Lange, Otto Neurath, Robin Hahnel, Michael Hudson and countless others, but whatever. If he has a chance to win, if it is close and loses because of this bullshit, I will just scream. Would be such a lost opportunity. I mean, I get the critiques of the Democrats. They’re horrible, we should be building up an alternative infrastructure. We are doing that now, but until it exists and can take on the two parties, then what? Do we sit on the side and pat ourselves on the back for being the biggest radicals in the room?
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There is no shortage of Dunning Kruger effect, as in, look in the mirror, pal.
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Hope you all don’t mind if I leave a little music here…
I think your thinking is binary and simplistic. Anyone that has seen me post over the years knows I am not a supporter of the damn Democratic Party. I am dealing with reality. I think your point is more valid if we are talking about supporting Harris, Beto, Booker and the like. I am not a supporter of death by simply mentioning that we are mortal. Things sometimes just are, and you can accept the reality or invent one of your own. We need to create new parties, but those new parties will not be created in time for the 2020 election. So, do you vote for the Socialist Workers Party or whatever if Bernie is the nominee and pat yourself on the back for being really radical, or do you vote for someone that can actually move things to the left and towards where we need to go? Sanders alone makes that at least somewhat possible. Maybe Warren, on some issues at least.
Nonsense. They are advocating for particular policies and are doing so in the only avenues that are realistically possible at the moment. Once again, until the left (which includes you) creates actual alternatives, what should they do? Should AOC have run as a Green? She would have obviously lost to Crowley. Explain how that makes things better and how the left broadly would have benefited from that. AOC isn’t in office, isn’t pushing for policies at least on the social democratic left, and Crowley is still in office doing Crowley things. The left, working people, our democracy benefits how exactly from that? The DSA operates largely in the Democratic Party because it has to. Should they not, and then, because they don’t have the infrastructure in place to exist as a third party on their own, get no one into office? Explain, give me the logic behind your responses.
I would be willing to bet he has done more to push the policies of the left than one million Die.Barts. Again, I agree that he does things at times for the Democrats that aren’t great and I hope that one day someone like him has more options available to him or her. But, right now, he has to face realities as far as how to get things done. Noam Chomsky agrees with me, by the way, and I trust Chomsky more than you. No offense. But we will have to agree to disagree on this.
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Goes to show you that 'murikans don’t even know what a socialist is if they think any of the current crop deserves the moniker. None of them would hold a candle Eugene Debs, the ghost of what should have and could have been. When the DSA decided to cut ties with international socialists and throw in their lot with the Democrat Party, they seem to have lost the thread of the worker narrative. No socialist would ever tolerate the US war-as-foreign-policy exhibited over the last century. When you dance with the devil, you don’t change the devil, the devil changes you.
DSA proudly backed Julia Salazar during the last election but Salazar was actually a right-wing activist for much of that time she boasted of being a “community organizer.” She co-founded and was the president of Columbia’s chapter of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), a right-wing Christian Zionist student group, and in that capacity appeared on Glenn Beck’s show remotely from CUFI’s convention in San Antonio.
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I do understand. Do you believe quality should lead to such shrinkage?
“For the last year, Sanders has joined the DNC in blaming HRC’s loss on the Russians.”
You can’t support that claim.
“Don’t know how to use a search eng-”
Obviously he doesn’t say the Russians caused her to lose.
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Autobiographical jam?