AnthonyJK-Admin
The fundamental failure of the Sanders insurgency of 2016-2020 was the same failure that killed Jesse Jackson's campaign in 1988: overreliance on the failed strategy that the Democratic Party could be "reformed" from within through moral suasion and popular dissent.
It completely underestimated how the overall corporate system works through corporate and billionaire/millionaire cash and machine politics to maintain the "center" and pull it well to the Right.
AnthonyJK-Admin
The collusion of corporate- and billionaire/millionaire-dominated corporate media and a system dependent on wealth feeding it for its survival, is more than enough to undermine & undercut any attempt from to "reform" the system or even use it for progressive means.
Combine that with the organization of conservative interest groups serving to mine resentment & opposition to underprivileged & marginalized groups for the sake of exploiting them for profit, and you have the situation of today.
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@AnthonyJK@mastodon.redgarterclub.com
i mean, yeah
I think Jesse Jackson probably had much wider impact than Sanders in terms of building upon grassroots local organizations, like teh civil rights movement that survived COINTELPRO which is a mixture of militants who got involved in local politics, and the quieter NAACP, SCLC middle class types, and so there was a protracted struggle between racist white liberals and black/poc progressives, and the white establishment have developed advanced techniques for coopting and disrupting any kind fo grassroots opposition internal or external, call it COIN or the progressive plantation, it's a big fucking trap. Not to mention the multi billion dollar non-profit industrial complex, which is just an evolution of Carnegiesque Philanthropy, like it's literally rockafeller foundation etc. Several Rockefellers were powerful liberal republican politicians iirc
Could also go back to Missisipi Freedom Democratic Party, Fanny Lou Hamer and them ( also Kwame Ture, soon to be Panthers) The Panthers themselves tried to go the electoral route what 72? Ran Bobby Seale and someone else for City Council, lost, banktrupted the whole party ( after forcing local chatpers to relocate -- I think Huey was basically Mkultra'd as well as Cointepro'd anyway )
I think that the democrats could be forced to support concessions if there is sufficient pressure from the outside, it's possible to put progressive candidates on the ballot etc. But you have to have the grassroots movement first, which can't be coopted and doesn't need to bow to teh democratics.
So Sanders campaign never had the kind of connection to like BLM that should have happened, maybe because of Bernie Sander's soft imperialism and the not-so-lo-key racism of white sanders supports.
In any case we need strong working class organizations without any allegiance to the Democratic Party and not indepted to NGO industrail grants.
AnthonyJK-Admin
Excellent points.
It should be noted also that the Sanders campaigns attracted an eclectic mix of riffraff all attracted to him by dissatisfaction with the duopoly, but for their own different reasons. Plenty of actual Leftists, but also plenty of right-wing populists and opportunists who were grabbing on to his campaign to cover up their own not so subtle and not so wholesome agendas. No surprise that when it broke apart after 2020, everyone went every which way.
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@AnthonyJK@mastodon.redgarterclub.com
I don't know if a proper journalistic autopsy of the Sanders campaign has ever really been done, but lots of people got behind sanders at least in spirit, which includied a lot of dissolutioned and confused people, many of whom became trumper, qaners etc. but would have gone along with Sanders if it actually became a thing, and while Sanders was and is a top class orator with his pulse on the real center of american politics, but Sanders was never able to build an organization or movement around himself, like he just talked about a "political revolution" as if other people were going to do it, you know who also did a political revolution and engaged in social democracy, Lenin, If Sanders Read 2 Tactics we'd live in a different world right now. But Sanders isn't even a socialists, he shouldn't have even used that word lmao he should have conned the electies into thinking he was just an opportunist oboma type. Sanders is good at a certain kind of politics that works in a local and state election, it helped him carve out a chunk of democratic influence, but he just gives speeches he doesn't do anything locally outside of vermont, and you see the people he picked to lead his election campaign, and the extreme heirarchal and elitist way it was structured, just comparing the Sanders campaign to Obama '08 it's just embarassing lol.
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