Bernie woulda won! Twice

Time for a socialist democratic party

     We were spoon-fed Kamala Harris. Democrats did not follow our democratic process when they anointed Harris their (and our) presidential candidate. If they don’t follow the process, then how can they complain when the process turns on them, as it did last Tuesday? What I’m getting to is that the Democratic Party leadership wants to win power but not by using the democratic process. That sucks! Especially when we believe we know that in both elections which Donald Trump won, Bernie Sanders would have beaten him if the Democrats didn’t gerrymander Sanders out of the election picture.

    The social progressives who lined up to support Sanders are not dedicated followers of the Democratic Party apparatus as it slowly evolves away from Clinton’s neoliberalism. They want Bernie’s more socialistic platform. But because the Democratic Party will not listen to them, those people went over to the dark side and voted for Trump.

    “It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real!” Krystal Ball wrote. “When these voters had a choice between Trump and Bernie, they chose Bernie. For many of them now that the choice is between Trump and the dried out husk of neoliberalism, they’re going Trump.”

    And the worst of it is the Democratic Party leadership, instead of admitting their mistake, are actually blaming the left wing of the party for the Trump trouncing. The truth is the Democratic Party under Biden and Harris is using a strategy where instead of moving towards their strength on the left, they are moving into Republican territory, trying to be better Republicans than the Republicans.

    How many people will you bomb, Kamala? More, she says, more than them. How high will you built that wall, Kamala? Higher than them? she cries. In school yard terminology, this is chickenshit. The Democratic Party is afraid to define themselves as socialists and because of that they have lost the Bernie progs and have left a new era to be defined by authoritarians, who will now show us how mad MAGA can be.

    Someone I respect deeply suggested maybe it’s time for a third party. I thought that party was going to happen when the Republican Party split, but that’s not going to happen now. There is room where the Liz Cheney Republicans can meet and greet the Biden-Harris Democrats. The Democratic Party seems to want to be that place, just left of MAGA and quite a bit right of the Sanders wing. The new configuration in my crystal ball would be the MAGA Republican Party on the right, the Harris-Cheney Republi-Dems, in the center and the Sanders Social Democrats on the left. (This, of course, would include the Green Party.)

    As Krystal Ball wrote, “And as I write this now, I have zero hope or expectation that Democrats will look at the Bernie bro coalition and realize why they screwed up. Cable news pundits are already blaming the left once again for the failures of a party that has little to do with the actual left and certainly not the populist left.”

    A third party that is social-democrat to the core would not only attract ‘Bernie’s bros’, it would also siphon off a significant number of like-minded supporters from the other two parties. Since socialism is an anathema to many Americans, I suggest it not be used in the name of the party. I’m thinking something with the word ‘confederation’ in it. How about the Democratic Confederation Party?

Music Monday

Listen to the Old Hippie Show today 4-7 pm 91.5 FM WECI Radio Free Richmond

Epilogue on Feelings