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.
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.
