FrankSpace

aab
June 25, 2016 at 12:39 am

I just don’t think this is fair to him. I don’t see how this hurts the Greens. Name something that’s time sensitive that deadlines before the end of July. They’re supposedly working on getting on more state ballots. I haven’t heard of a deadline impacting that process that ends before the Democratic Convention, and there are already plenty of Sanders supporters working to help her, as far as I can tell.

When the odds are against you, it means you’re likely not to win. That doesn’t mean your strategy is bad or that you’re acting in bad faith. If he wasn’t “going to the convention” he’d have to concede his delegates to her right now. That means we’d be getting EVEN LESS information about her various crimes and corruptions. Today, her people voted down every single Bernie plank at the platform committee. That’s meaningful. It means if he decides not to endorse and possibly go third party, it’s harder for them to misrepresent him and the progressive movement. It’s harder to say “Oh, their positions are really the same. It’s just the details.” That’s now demonstrably untrue. There aren’t details in the platform. Planks are basically big picture ideals. Now the Democratic Party is on record as being pro-TPP, anti-$15 minimum wage, anti-single payer health care, pro-death penalty, pro-fracking. She’s been trying to fudge all that. Her mouthpieces — both volunteer and paid — will still say crap like that. But it will be harder to do, and easier to disprove. It will be easier to get more people to realize they can’t give in and vote Democratic. It is those soft progressives whose spines need stiffening. They need to be peeled away from the Democratic Party, and going all the way to the convention was a necessary condition for that, if we to have any hope of breaking the neolilberal hold on the country peacefully.

Bernie doesn’t own his supporters. He doesn’t herd or direct them. He has explicitly been teaching people not to ever fall for that line from any politician. He never says “I’ve got this.” He says “We’ve got this.” He’s not keeping anybody on the sidelines. He’s teaching people how to organize and connect who might never have done it otherwise.

Stop talking about him like he’s a savior or a martyr. He has done absolutely nothing to deserve the scorn or screams of betrayal I keep reading all over the place. He may fail. He probably will fail. To expect one elderly pol from Vermont with the entire global elite against him to crush hegemony and bring forth a new political order is asking entirely too much. He has done something brave. There is value to his strategy. You are free to help gather signatures for Jill Stein right now. There is plenty of time for people on the sidelines to learn about her and vote for her. The kinds of people you are fretting about were not going to be doing signature gathering for the Greens in June anyway.
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