cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/26797181
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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Late Stage Capitalism
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Bernie is done as a political force, and failing the easiest "do you oppose genocide" test ever is inexcusable. There's a big danger of projecting this backwards and taking the wrong lessons from 2016-2020, though.
I think you're vastly underselling the importance of education/activation and overselling Bernie's alternatives once the fix came in during the 2020 primary.
Showing people that there's a viable set of policies to the left of Obama is the very first step towards anything resembling a socialist mass movement. Making Medicare for All the centerpiece of his 2016 campaign checked so many boxes: popular, radical, building off an existing program, and highlighting a huge difference between Obama Democrats and even a tiny step left of them. Most succinctly, it's the first major Democratic policy proposal since the 60s that hasn't been neoliberal "give a tax credit so qualifying businesses can do it" garbage. There's a reason why so many leftists today trace part of their radicalization back to Bernie.
And once the fix was in during 2020, Bernie had exactly two choices: back Biden or split the party in the middle of the greatest global crisis since, what, WWII? Keep in mind the split would have been over essentially internal party politics ("you played too dirty in the primary"). There's no principled stance to fall back on, and you'd just be handing neoliberal Dems endless talking points against the left for decades to come.
I might be forgetting something, cause I'm not sure what you mean about "the greatest global crisis since WWII" during 2020. Or do you mean a different year?
I mean, we can't go back and redo it anyway, but supposing he had straight up went on camera and said, "You made phone calls behind closed doors and rigged the primary for your chosen candidate and I refuse to back you and encourage people to vote third party to show that they will not have their votes controlled by a backdoor process," would that have really been a bad thing for the country as a whole? What we got from four years of Biden is a lot of genocide and exaggerating economic differences Biden made (I feel like I'm being generous, some of it from dems was more like gaslighting about how reformist Biden was), and a party that blames anyone but themselves for losing to Trump when that was the best they had to offer.
The "talking points against the left" already happened and do happen regardless of Bernie backing Biden. We got another dose of "Jill Stein bad because third party" in the last election. We got a stream of blaming various demographics for why Trump won.
Maybe I am, I don't have hard data by the numbers on how impactful his campaigns were, but I purposefully highlight "his campaigns as a whole and the volunteers and activists in its orbit" as something to give credit to because that's the part that went further than Medicare For All. Based on how Bernie acts in his post-campaign state, the campaign seems to have been a more radical platform than he would personally stand for on his own. And it's also just a thing where I find it important to highlight the broader elements of political movements, rather than giving too much credit to a single person. It can be said that Bernie contributed to helping radicalize people, but then he reached his limits and pulled back, and from where I'm standing, he's no longer much of a help with that. The "leftist" movements moved past him and have a better stance on Palestine than he does, among other things.
I'm not sure we're really in that much disagreement. Some of it may just be in the takeaways.
Covid. It hit the U.S. in March 2020.
You're right that they will trot it out whatever the facts are, but that doesn't mean it'll stick. It didn't stick after 2016 because Bernie campaigned for Hillary after dropping out, and so far I haven't seen it stick that well after 2024 because "I won't endorse genocide" is hard to honestly oppose, especially when Trump forced Israel into a ceasefire before he even got inaugurated.
It would have stuck in 2020 had Bernie split the party, because that really would have had an impact on a Biden loss.
That's about where I am, yeah.
Oh right, I thought you were referencing a political event and got stuck in that realm of things. I also sort of blanked for a moment there that that was happening in 2020. It has been a long five some years...
But would the tradeoff in what the left might have gained been worth it, I think is the more important question. What specifically would have been the fallout I think is hard to nail down, unless you've got an extremely similar event you can compare to. But I'd certainly agree there would have been fallout. I'm just not convinced it would have been overall a bad thing. The more I think about it in detail, the more I think it would have been a good thing for someone with influence to stand up to the democratic party and might have actually forced the democrats to make some concessions in order to get re-elected. Hell, Bernie could have done a halfway thing at least and gone, "I'll support you if you adopt Medicare For All as a campaign policy. Otherwise, no dice." I'd argue part of the problem with the dynamic of democrat-republican in the US is that nobody meaningfully holds the democratic party accountable to being an opposition party, so they aren't. They know that as long as the republicans are bad enough, they can say "they are worse" and campaign on minor tweaks, and if a terrible republican is fresh enough in memory, it'll probably get them back in office for another four years.
I know it's more complex than that overall, but the total lack of anyone with power actually trying to force the democrat party's hand and instead being expected to cave immediately with no demands... it's stunning. Bernie folded for "anything but Trump." And now we have Trump again. What was that worth? And even regular voters get shamed at the idea of trying to have expectations from the democratic party and not handing over their vote like it's fealty to a king. Not saying you do that, just that's part of the dynamic that I think contributes to how easy it is for the democrats to be a big nothing. And Bernie folding so easily hits right on that wound, of simply giving up when the stakes are high.