Jimmy Carter and Bernie

This is ALL true but it also whitewashes the story because it’s only part of the WHOLE truth.

If you also do not account for the “muslim scare,” immigrant resentment, backlash on racial issues, etc. then you have not put your finger on the issue.

This is the american populist formula and it’s OLD. Nothing new here. But. When there’s socio-economic dissatisfaction, and you want people to vote against their own interests, then, you stoke those kinds of fears and prejudices.

Focus on only one of those 2 things (1. inequality, 2.fears/prejudices), and, you’re just missing everything.

It’s both and was from the beginning and still is. You cannot separate the 2 issues.

So how do you beat that? Alliance politics. People with different primary causes unite in commonality. What do I see too often on the left? Division. Going after allies and bashing them because they aren’t pure, or have “the wrong primary cause,” and so on.

It’s the United States. We are never going to have a majority purist left. The left is a unity of different, even disparate, causes. In-fighting does not help alliances work and alliances are the only way to beat this.

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wv wrote:

So, i agree alliance building is critical. But so far the only alliance building thats been successful that i can see — is the alliance building the Duplicats have done and the alliance building the Replicants have done.

Civil rights. Anti-war (Vietnam). Much less dramatic and more incremental than civil rights, there’s also women’s rights and LGBT issues (it’s not 1961 anymore.) Bernie didn’t draw from a single, uniform, homogenous center. Climate change awareness is broad-based. Fight for minimum wage increase is broad-based. There’s growing support for single payer. Resistance to Trumpian economic AND immigration policies is broad-based.

Party politics and movement politics are different things. The real force for progress in the USA has to do with cause/movement politics. Watch that, and you see things happening.

It’s negative too—Tea Party, alt-right, NRA, that kind of thing.

Right now it’s all roiling and boiling. If progressive movement politics gets behind a candidate and wins, then I think there will be enormous change.

Either way, I would never have predicted 10 years ago that a Sanders would get as far as he did.

And yes the dem party has been a machine for a long time. Heck I remember the era of Mayor Daley.