forjusticethunders
forjusticethunders's JournalThe Revolution will be LARPed
Just like it has been for the past 50 years. A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Protest votes and protest candidates have been running for decades, and they've done nothing to stop the corporatism most of us decry because making a lot of noise and play-acting the rhetoric of "revolution" like it's 1917 doesn't actually resonate with real people anymore.
Revolutions generally *aren't* televised, tweeted or anything else, they take years, often decades of effort, time and organization that the Left has neglected because of the mistaken belief that we're just "one crisis" away or something. It took the Right 2 election cycles after World War II (where Eisenhower basically said any party that tried to roll back the New Deal would be politically irrelevant) to get their extremism to the General Election, and 2 more after that to win, and several crises on top of massive corporate funding and religious institutional backing to push it along. I may not be super excited about Hillary, but it's clear that her base is closer to a "revolutionary" one than Bernie's, and has the support of the groups and organizations and entities that have fought the grass roots fight, rather than making noise.
"If we refuse to vote for Hillary if she wins and Trump/Cruz burn America to the ground"
"America will wake up and stop voting GOP!!!1111"
Yep, that's why Kansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, after Republicans turned those states into borderline Third World countries, are rock solid blue states where the chastened inhabitants vote progressives in en masse to clean up the messes of the Republican wreckers...
actually that didn't happen lol
The problem is that what Bernie needs to accomplish his agenda
should have been built by the left grassroots starting in 2000, if not in 1980. But for the most part the "Professional" Left retreated to their highly-paid, highly-privileged and highly-white cul-de-sacs instead of continuing to fight and organize the downtrodden when Nixon and Reagan defeated the union movement (granted the unions had their own problems) and broke the New Deal coalition. When the far right was defeated in 1964, they reorganized and rebuilt their coalition into a winning one 16 years later. Now we're playing catch-up by trying to forge an intersectional left-wing movement, but that movement, because of the abdication of the economic/socialist left, has more or less decentered class despite the fact that class intersects every single person. The corporate Dems essentially took up the space that the left abandoned.
Because of the left's refusal to participate in coalition politics, they're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. They sit out elections because the Dems is too far to the right? The Dems aren't going to listen to them, let alone be pushed to the Left. Even now you have people on the left saying Bernie is a sheepdog, who sucks progressives into Democratic politics where their "energy" is dissipated. But don't you think, looking at a voting bloc that is roughly 45% of the party, you WANT that energy in the Democratic Party as opposed to the Green Party where you'll just throw the election to a fascist, and thus move the Dems even further right because that's what happens when they lose?
Also a key thing is that a lot of leftists are making money off the status quo just the same as DLC insiders do - by complaining about it while not doing anything to change it other than virtue signaling. But POC, LBGT and other oppressed groups don't want to hear you whine about their oppression, they want you to support them in their struggle, interact in their communities, and make an effort to listen to that. Centrist DLC Dems have done a better job in that than the "Left" has even when Bill signs DOMA and welfare reform and Hillary supports marriage equality at the LAST possible moment, listening matters.
There's a reason the entire Progressive Caucus has endorsed Hillary.
There's a reason most unions have endorsed Hillary.
There's a reason Bernie is losing AAs 80-20 nationwide.
The economic, class-oriented Left has failed for half a century due to horrendous tactics and strategy and the fact that Bernie is not winning, indeed, not crushing Hillary (who's a rather flawed candidate in and of herself) , is a testament to that fact.
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