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IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN BERNIE
The fact that there is no one able to take up his reins speaks volumes. This guy should have retired and be spending his golden years enjoying things …but no. This guy is still fighting the good fight.
I don’t know that that’s a problem entirely separate from Bernie. Successors don’t just spring from the ether, existing leaders need to help them get there. But while I can think of multiple politicians Elizabeth Warren has mentored and promoted, I don’t know who Bernie has tried to groom.
A few, like AOC, have been inspired by him, but it doesn’t seem like he’s doing anything to try to prepare a successor. He’s just going to be out there doing his thing until he dies, then who knows who replaces him in Vermont or replaces him ideologically on the left.
That may be part of the reason he is doing this is to inspire younger generations and find a successor? Just a theory, but I do find it strange he hasn’t done this already.
You won’t see Sanders become president. That will never happen. They, the bipartisan political establishment, robbed you of that forever, in 2016. But you do need to go and listen to this guy, learn from him, absorb his energy and regain hope. That is how a decent, intelligent American thinks, talks and acts. He is doing this because he sees something alarming happening from within the state and he is throwing a hail Mary to every decent people he can find on the streets. He knows change is outside the system.
Sanders makes too much sense to be president and americans are too stupid to have common sense.
I will always remember the theater of that night in the primaries 2020, when Biden entered the race and everyone around Bernie dropped. Biden, riding Obama’s name to grab the majority. It felt like I was watching them stab Caesar. Bearnie had the majority. He would have won that election. My faith in politics died that night as I watch a political maneuver that I had only ever seen play out in film happen in real life. That’s when I really knew we were doomed.
That’s sad. I truly believe if Sanders were a bit younger, he’d finally break through the system, but three more years will be harsh for his body to only campaign, and even if he could, you need someone like him in his prime.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz was the DNC chair at the time. She put her foot on the scale for Hillary, and set us on the current course.
100%
What’s crazy and I feel very shortsighted of the Democrats is that they aren’t doing this more often. There is a large population that will/would respond to this type of politicking from the “opposition”. They would generate tons of energy for more protests and put more pressure on the republicans to oppose shit.
instead we get:
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has garnered scorn for meeting with Silicon Valley executives to “mend fences” with the powerful tech sector—where numerous CEOs have signaled support for Trump during his second term.
Ken Martin, the newly elected chair of the Democratic National Committee, said last month that the party should continue to take money from “good billionaires.”
Democrats are the controlled opposition. It’s why they would never give Sanders a fair shake. He would upset them “good billionaires” because going further right is preferable than a single step left for the wealthy.
Under the proposed Trump tax cuts, I bet a vast majority of our Democrat leaders are looking at a big tax cut. From their standpoint, they need to put up just enough push back to get re-elected next election. Don’t rock the boat and get on Trump’s bad side.
We need to clump the corporate democrats with the Republicans. None of them work for us. We need more AOC, Bernie, Jasmine Crockett, Rep Maxwell Frosts.
From their standpoint, they need to put up just enough push back to get re-elected next election.
You just unlocked the D playbook going back to at LEAST 2000 and dubya.
a singular politician. he’s going to die on the job, in the middle of an impassioned speech on behalf of the working class. indefatigable. not even Lincoln or Kennedy had a fraction of the perseverance and consistency this man has demonstrated. a true public servant.
Three words:
A
O
C
- Signed, a very hopeful Canadian.
In an ideal world, but haven’t we learned that she’s too female and probably not white enough for America? *I don’t agree, but I’m being pragmatic
In case you weren’t aware, Biden, a straight white man (and about the same age as Trump), was running first. His numbers were really bad. Is it because he was a straight white man? No, we only blame women and minorities for the failures of circumstances. We don’t actually talk about the fact she wasn’t an appealing candidate regardless of race or color.
She ran on “you should thank us for how good you have it” instead of addressing real problems people have. You don’t win an election like that. It had very little, if anything, to do with her race or gender.
In an ideal world, but haven’t we learned that she’s too female and probably not white enough for America?
The entire point behind “Kamala lost because she’s a woman of color, not because she wouldn’t differ from her unpopular predecessor except to move to his right” is to shut out AOC in particular. The party is willing to hold back all women in order to stifle one person, and it’s gross.
The fact is that many Americans wouldn’t vote for a woman, and combining that with the ones who wouldn’t vote for a person of colour is a bad idea, especially when the alternative for president is so dire.
I do think that the fact she wouldn’t support Palestine/condemn Israel was a factor too, but if she had, that would have set Israel against her and lost more votes, especially due to all the media Zionists control and their lobbying power.
The Democratic president with the largest margin of victory in recent times was a black man and you’re still out here saying we need to court voters that won’t vote for a person of color in order to win. Maybe your read on the inherent unelectability of women is similarly flawed.
You again. There have been 2 women on the ballot and both failed, this latest with drastic consequences. So I’d say my read was 100% correct, unfortunately. I wish I was wrong.
More men have been on the ticket and failed than woman. The fact that both women failed is because of what they were running with, not because they were women. They were incredibly milquetoast candidates who ran basically on maintaining the status quo.
Obama won so handily because he ran on changing the status quo. Whether he actually did or not is a matter for historians, but that’s what he ran on.
Voters want someone who will fight for them. That’s what Trump, Obama, and Bernie are. They don’t want someone who sits back and talks about how grateful they should be.
Oh, well then let’s run a black man. They not only have 100% success rate, but massively outperformed all the white men. That must mean black skin (as long as it’s not on a woman) is an electoral benefit! Why take a risk with a white person? That’s the heart of your argument, right?
The fact is that many Americans wouldn’t vote for a woman, and combining that with the ones who wouldn’t vote for a person of colour is a bad idea
So long as a progressive is a possibility and not one femtosecond longer.
I do think that the fact she wouldn’t support Palestine/condemn Israel was a factor too, but if she had, that would have set Israel against her and lost more votes
So we have to (and you get to) support genocide forever too!
Not sure why I’m being down voted - I would have noted for kamala and I wish she was president. I’m saying that if there’s an option to take a risk now when failure means death then it’s best to not take the risk and wait for a time when the alternative is only pain. Trump was death, we all knew. Not a good time to take a risk. It would have been better to wait to take a risk in trying to elect a woman for the first time in a country of people who think its okay for a person held to the highest standards in the land to say ‘grab em by the pussy’, pay women for sex and be a rapist of women. Even aside from the racism. If you don’t see that then I’m shocked.
I’m saying that if there’s an option to take a risk now when failure means death then it’s best to not take the risk and wait for a time when the alternative is only pain.
It’s neat how quickly timidity develops when the party wants to shut out a progressive. That’s the only thing this has ever been about.
Let’s do racism and sexism, not because we’re racist and sexist, but because other people probably are. It may look like us and the bigots of unclear numbers are both having the same effect, but we’re not bad people just because our actions proactively support bad things. We’re just being pragmatic.
Let’s not live in the real world and run a black woman as candidate, which has never been done before… Why not?
Oh, that’s just coincidence.
As is the fact that even without racism, a woman lost to trump last time.
Nothing to do with the fact that racism and sexism exist and are actually very important to some people. /sCome on. Run a black woman at a time when the consequences of racism and sexism being expressed in the voting booth aren’t AS bad. Not when a dictator from day 1 is going to get elected in possibly the last ever election for the US. Then you run your most boring, conservative candidate who as few people have a problem with as possible until whatever passes for normality in the US returns.
What do you think that trump getting elected has done for women’s rights, or POC? Yeah, better to be pragmatic because getting a woman on the ballot paper was not worth it and probably set us women back by decades, at a minimum.
You’re making the entirely unfounded assumption that sexism was the cause for those women’s loss rather than them individually both being terrible candidates. And despite the Obama example showing you “racism exists, so only run white people” point is just completely bullshit. People literally made the same argument against Obama.
There were blaring warning signs that had absolutely nothing to do with sexism with both candidacies. Easy bad campaign choices and cultural movements that very easily explain the losses without diving into the dark heart of man, but somehow you just ignore those to focus on banning women and POC from running for pragmatism.
Whatever you believe about your non-racist internal beliefs, your actions are indistinguishable from racism. And I’m not sure you’ll ever think there’s an election so low stakes that we can select the best candidate if she’s a woman, because you don’t seem to have learned anything by the event that proved the whole philosophy as suspect.
My cousin told me yesterday that AOC isn’t left enough for her. That tells me that either we need a 3rd party, because clearly democrats are not even wanted by their own party. Or that women are extremely easy to make toxic. At the end of the day it’s a popularity contest and most people are not doing research. You will get put through the media spin cycle and people will choose to not like you because of your voice, or because you use too much head movement when you speak, or because their favorite comedian parroted a 10 sec tiktok clip about something you said on a social issue, or because of that one vote you made that one time. Women 100% get less leeway. Believing anything else is idealistic.
Run this exercise again like it’s 2008 and you’re taking about Barrack Obama’s blackness. People don’t want AOC to run because she’s just the next woman on the conveyer belt, they want her to run because she’s one of the best politicians in the Democratic party.
Sexism was a factor. Racism was a factor. As you know, surely? You do know that some people in america would say outright that they would never vote for anyone who wasn’t a cis man and would never vote for anyone who wasn’t white?
You’re saying that the proportion of those people who might have voted democrat is too small to matter. I disagree. I can’t remember exactly the proportions of the demographic which voted or didn’t vote for kamala but it was clear that more traditional voters (Hispanics were one subset maybe) weren’t voting for her exactly because she’s a woman.
Answer this - if the dems would have wanted to run a trans candidate, would you have said this was a viable candidate to win the presidency? I’m not asking if you would have personally supported them (assuming they were a decent person/tested politically etc, but could they have won?
No, not in america today. And that’s why taking the risk that a woman could win for the first time was a bad idea when the alternative was Donald trump and project 25, which is going to be a huge set back for anyone not a white cisman.
Also signed a slightly hopeful American
Or Dems could run a serious candidate this time. That would be a refreshing change.
No… Voters need to vote left. Voting left in primaries will yield better candidates.
If only Democrats would run fair primaries. Or primaries at all.
Eh, I don’t know. Lincoln was well aware that he was walking into a massively complex situation with nothing short of the future of the country 100% on the line. He knew he was doing it at great personal risk, and I am sure on some level he knew it could (and ultimately, would) cost him his life.
Lincoln’s life was cut short so ultimately we never got to see what the next phase of his life would look like, but he persevered in the face of the greatest struggle this nation has ever faced.
Trump and friends may well create as dangerous of a scenario as the civil war, especially if Thiel, Vance, and the other tech authoritarians achieve their goal of radically overhauling if not outright destroying the country.
The fact that it still has to be Bernie doing this is nothing short of a failure on the part of the American people.
The DNC could have let him win instead of cheating him out of the primary in 2016, we should have had a green new deal by now.
Pritzker is the only one even close to Sanders level, and he has the money to create a private army to hunt the gop traitors down like animals. I hope he does. File state level treason charges against Trump and his appointees, fly in some Ukrainian spec ops troops, a bunch of SAM’s and drones, and I’ll be one of the first volunteers help end the Russia problem
Long live the Khanate.
File state level treason charges against Trump and his appointees, fly in some Ukrainian spec ops troops, a bunch of SAM’s and drones, and I’ll be one of the first volunteers help end the Russia problem
Giggitygiggitygiggity GOO!
Well, I’m spent.
He’s one of precious few in office who have any credibility on the issue.
I mean yes, and that’s what I’m calling a failure on the part of the American people.
Or a success on the part of the two party hegemony.
This is the man that should be the U.S. president. Not the fucking fascist rapist felon who’s all cozied up to Russian Putin scum.
American political descisions are made so they rally behind politicans who keep the status quo or make their life worse. The fact that bernie has existed all this time and never even managed to get close to running while random nonames like hillary and kamala and biden get to run says everything.
Just imagine if he had been elected president in 2016 like he should’ve been
Get your families to go to this.
I haven’t had any luck so I’m hijacking this comment to ask: does anyone know where we can find dates for his speaking tour? I want to bring my family to hear him but I don’t know when he’ll be in our neck of the woods.
Da real MVP. He needs to be posting elsewhere though. People need to show en masse to show support.
They maybe advertising the dates on social media like bluesky and x? I’m on neither but probably a good place to look.
I’d love to get a few videos from his speeches to share with people to hopefully build more energy around this.
This is a good question. I honestly don’t see any announcements anywhere about next stops. Maybe they’re not advertising it…for obvious reasons.
Watched it live. Glad there are still some politicians fighting back.
And he’s always been fighting back. Dudes been an activist for what, the last 50 years or so?
What exactly has he done to “fight” back?
More than basically every lefty on reddit and lemmy combined.
Here he is getting arrested at a civil rights protest in the 60s for starters.
The fact that both sides of the aisle circle the wagons to prevent him all the while plagiarizing his talking points should tell you volumes.
I don’t understand what you mean. His entire activism history is on his Wikipedia page. He’s been fighting the good fight and influencing people in lower politics long before he became a senator.
He did a lot in the 60s as a university student during the Civil Rights Movement, a time when a lot of white people weren’t stepping up, and they really needed to.
“He became the chairman of the university chapter of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and merged the group with SNCC — the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Bernie literally helped lead the first known sit-in in at the University of Chicago, where 33 students camped outside of the President’s office — protesting segregating housing on campus.”
This is from this article: https://medium.com/@ShaunKing/you-dont-really-know-who-bernie-sanders-was-in-the-1960s-79628016125f
Feel free to read more if you like. He did a lot of protesting against police brutality at the time as well.
Just because somebody hasn’t fixed every issue doesn’t mean they aren’t fighting the good fight. Bernie is clearly a man who has always had his heart in the right place and knows that the good fight requires more than just him, but that doesn’t mean he’s ever gonna stop.
Fuck off with the disingenuous bullshit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders
What have you fucking done?
🤡🤡🤡
I’ve felt that Bernie should be president since 2015, but he never stood a chance in the US. You have a 0% chance of being elected president in this country once the label of “socialist” has been applied to you.
They called Obama a socialist.
Obama never embraced the label, though. Bernie did. Obama was a Democrat and a liberal, Bernie is an independent and a socialist.
Those who ran from the label and embraced the right just lost to trump.
Obama won two elections and Biden won one.
Oh, well at least nothing at all has changed. Running to the right and only the right always works, according to people who only want to move to the right.
You say that but articles like this don’t fit that narrative. There are Republican voters who like Bernie and they have been showing up to his rallies for years. I know several Trump voters who have said they would have voted for Sanders if they got the chance. The idea that progressives don’t appeal to conservatives is neoliberal propaganda. Progressives hit on alot of the same problems as conservative politicians they just have different solutions (and a lot less bullshit). Neoliberalism just pretends that the status quo is fine. Despite the name conservatives are largely unhappy with the status quo. That’s how we got Trump.
Brother, who the hell says they’re a fan of Sanders and then willingly votes for Trump other than chaos agents or racist who want to bury social issues?
More than you think. Trump is a fascist piece of shit but he’s not wrong when he says the system is rigged and drastic change is needed. Replace Trump’s Nazi rhetoric and egoism with workable ideas and genuine empathy and in simplistic terms you have Sanders.
Yeah, a not-insignificant portion of Trump’s voters are people who have been shafted by the system and are desperate for change, any change. Two out of three times, Trump was the candidate offering change. That he’s destroying stuff is, to them, secondary at best because they think their lives can’t get much worse anyway.
There are Republican voters who like Bernie and they have been showing up to his rallies for years.
Then Bernie should have run for the Republican nomination. He tried running for the Democrat nomination twice, and he lost twice.
I mean, he probably would have encountered less resistance from party leadership.
You can be flippant about the nature of first past the post voting systems if you like but it’s not a useful contribution to the discussion. If you want to be POTUS you run as an R or a D and Bernie is not an R. That does not mean there are not R voters who like his policies.
If you want to be POTUS you run as an R or a D and Bernie is not an R.
Did you miss the part where I said he ran for the Democrat nomination, twice?
That does not mean there are not R voters who like his policies.
I never said otherwise, but how does that help him win a presidential election?
My whole point is that Bernie could not win a presidential election in the US. How has anything you’ve said disproven that?
He’s not a D either, he’s an SD
Which is much closer to D than R
Yes
The DNC rigged it against him. He should have ran independent. The DNC is corrupt af.
The DNC rigged it against him
Yep.
He should have ran independent.
Nope. Wouldn’t have worked.
The DNC is corrupt af.
Yep.
It is surprising how many people don’t realise the spoiler effect inherent in first-past-the-post makes running as an independent an bad idea: you are more likely to split the vote with a candidate who agrees with some of your points, causing both of you to lose, than being able to bring change.
I know this is true. Bernie was one of the few I saw as possibly bridging the gap. I knew multiple people who were Republicans that said they would vote Bernie because he was a man of conviction. I think Bernie would have pulled a lot of Republicans in 2016 because of the climate. So many rural people voted Trump in protest of the establishment more than a love of DJT back then. 2020 was a different story, so was 2024. 2016 I think he would have had a real shot to take from both sides with how little enthusiasm Hillary and Trump had. Bernie’s rallies dwarfed either of them. He had so much momentum. But this will always be a what if…
Fair, though I don’t think rallies are a good indicator for enthusiasm in the general voting public. If you have access to polls you may be able to judge things somewhat better (even if polls have their own problems). I like to believe that a politician like Bernie is smart enough to have at least given the option a thought, and figured that running would guarantee a DJT win.
With hindsight, it may be easy to say that it would have been worth a try anyway (given who won in the end…).
Even so, even if he won, it would not be easy to be a president without backing in the US. The only reason DJT is not in prison is support from the other branches of the US government.
True. People need to learn what socialist actually means. Much of Europe is socialist.
no we arent. having social policies doesnt make a state socialist
I didn’t say communist, I said socialist. Socialism isn’t a monolith, there are different variants, but in general we have universal healthcare and good public services, support people with a financial safety net for those who need it, high taxes so wealth is shared more equally. I mean all this is relative and could be better but compared to America? Homeless shanty towns & workers living in cars for years? Was it Finland eliminated homlessness? Socialist paradise.
Thus demonstrating that people do indeed need to learn what socialist actually means!!
I got my mittens and knitted hat still…
I still have my official shirt from 2016
Hell yeah. One of the few good ones.
