Bernie last night...

[Hortensis]

9. Maybe wrap your head around the joint Republican/Russian

efforts to destroy our liberal democracy.

For aware liberal progressive Democrats, this is not about tribalism.

It is about whether our vote will be real or pretend in future, about whether progressive liberal government will continue or be replaced by a RW authoritarian government, probably in the form of faux democracy that so many authoritarian states masquerade as.

The Democratic Party is the army battling to save our democracy. We're it. There's no one else.

And the reality is that people like Sanders have always emotionally focused on the Democratic Party as the nation's big problem, almost to the point of being unable to worry about the giant threats growing on the right. Just look at the bizarre concentration on which healthcare system we should have while conservative legislatures strip newly elected liberal governors of power, elections are blatantly stolen across the nation, and the Supreme Court is packed with RW economic, social and religious extremists. The question is whether progressive government itself will survive.

What happens to our civil rights and protections, everyone's but especially of minorities and women, if we no longer can vote to protect ourselves? Gone.

Liberals are the nation's big progressive power, currently organized as the Democratic Party. This nation was founded as a progressive liberal democracy by liberals, and every social and economic progressive advance without exception has been made by liberals, in better times with cooperation from others but none would or could have happened without us.

Every time Sanders tells America Democrats are hardly different from Republicans, he strikes at progressivism itself. The 2016 tragedy was a dreadful blow to progressive government and may still turn out to have been fatal.

Btw, I notice Sanders' followers almost never call themselves Progressives any more, but they should be proudly and determinedly calling themselves progressive. It's way past time to take the fight for everything they believe in to the Republicans.