Sanders Slams 'Big Money Interests' and Consultants That Control Democratic Party After Loss to Trump
Sanders Slams 'Big Money Interests' and Consultants That Control Democratic Party After Loss to Trump
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders forcefully called out Democratic Party leadership for losing the White House and at least one chamber of Congress to Republicans.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/22241305
Jessica Corbett
Nov 06, 2024"While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change," said the Vermont Independent. "And they're right."
Unfortunately, Bernie fought tooth and nail for this status quo over the last 4 years. I agree with the sentiment, the Dems have to go, but Bernie is acting as a sheepdog.
Or he's a pragmatist who is concerned with both harm reduction and the likely reality that the only takeaway that Democrats will ever have from losing an election to someone right wing is that Democrats need to go even further to the right to win.
If leftists give the impression that nothing will ever be good enough for them then
- Democrats have no incentive to court the left
- Democrats have no estimate for how many votes they would even be able to pick up from the left relative to how far left they might try to reach
I personally believe that if the Democrats had taken on a progressive populist anti-genocide platform they would have won the election handsomely, but I am left with no way to empirically prove that to anyone because so many leftists opt out of voting entirely.
It's not pragmatic to lose, for what it's worth. We know that reform is impossible, and Bernie likely knows too. You're correct that had the Democrats run on a progressive anti-genocide Social Democratic platform, they would have won, but that's not what their donors want and need.
Marxism is vindicated by the passage of time.
It is not harm reduction to support genocidal neoliberals. It is not pragmatic to contradict all of your stated ideals to go to bat for them, give them your donor lists for a song and fail to do any movement building whatsoever.
Stop defending these losers.
I think a lot of people are irrationally scared of "socialism" and "handouts". If a party was like "we're going to take some of the ultra wealthy's stuff and use it to build free housing, health care, transit, and public spaces" they'd be like "no that's communism I'd rather live in a box eating lead paint than get a government handout"
He's been vocally outspoken against it for 50+ years! WTF are you talking about?
Sanders will say It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, and he’ll rail about “oligarchs” and “crony capitalism” and “über capitalism”, but in the end he’ll always be a liberal, so he’ll never attack capitalism as-such, and he’ll never call for abolishing private ownership of the means of production, no matter how many times he purports to be a socialist.
Bruh... Can we fucking start with universal health or some other more basic shit?
DNC cant even be bothered to campaign on bread and butter "liberal" positions.
The last ~45 years of grinding neoliberalism shows me little reason to believe that we can.
The US has never been and will never be a democracy, because it was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. [Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
The US working class got some temporary gains in the 20th century (and I could describe the extraordinary—unique, really—causes of them), but those are very unlikely to ever fully return under capitalism.
American universal healthcare would mean eliminating a huge pile of profits for healthcare-related companirs that are effectively just charging you rent for the privilege of going to a doctor. Those companies are large donors and fund think tanks that spread PR about how it is actually fiscally irresponsible to pay less for healthcare while changing where the balance sheet is calculated and what will happen to all of those jobs predicated on wasting your time and money to get healthcare?
You will not get universal healthcare, let alone single payer healthcare, without having some kind of leverage and using it in a disciplined way. And unless you are a CEO, your leverage can only come from collective organizing, of power in numbers, of political education so that everyone in the org is practically aligned on these goals and will noy disintegrate or be coopted by liberals.
"Slam" 'em harder, daddy