this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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The pipeline does work but only through their failures. Give hope with vaguely left ideas, then expose yourself as a huckster or expose the system you operate in as fundamentally corrupt. This is how the AOCs and Bernie's assisted radicalization. It was not by directly inspiring the youths to read Das Kapital and so on.
Mamdani would likely need a similar path because he is not backed by a party and they don't do education or even really agitation. So fingers crossed that it is failure through systemic pushback and pointing the right fingers, as all of the forces in the country will try to make him own it and cowardly make excuses for the system.
I had flirted with Marx and felt inspired by socialist movements in Latin America prior, but the Bernie and AOC shit sent me off the rails for sure. I think that if Bernie had won, his mask would've slipped eventually and I would have ended up on a similar path, but it would've probably taken another 5-10 years for me to get where I am now, which STILL isn't terribly far.
It would have been interesting to see, at least - Bernie doesn't seem up to the task of using the biuly pulpit let alone using or building an organization behind him, so he would have owned his failures like any typical bourgeois politician.
Oh definitely, I guess I just mean that it was better a failure than a success because it accelerated my political development past electoralism into (striving towards) principled marxism
Yeah that makes sense. It's easier to be disaffected by a party ratfucking than to realize the person your wanted to win actually sucks.
Definitely. And at the time I didn't really think to dig into Bernie's positions on particular things. I had done it in the past with other politicians but I was limited in my ability to really find out what I wanted to know so it would take me hours and hours of searching to really figure out my position on politicians. My first election was for Obama's first term and even then I was like "man all of these candidates are saying a lot of nothing but I GUESS his platform is the best"... So after that, with Bernie's rhetoric it was easy to ride the wave and not put the effort in since even his milquetoast positions were way more radical