2016 Postmortem

I never once said Sanders ONLY cares about economics. He just is not my cuppa when it comes to minority rights and concerns, something you seem to have serious issues over. Our base is simply not showing up to vote. I am in NO way saying white people are the slightest bit bad at all as a group, I am half (well more) white myself. Intelligent and fair white people will naturally support our side. But if the Democratic party tries to pander to actual racists and reactionary people we will further alienate an already disenchanted and disenfranchised huge bloc of people. Bernie's dismissive call to end identity politics sounds like a dog whistle to us minority folk.

We need to double, triple, quadruple down on the base,not go chasing some "never coming back" Reagan Democrat racists, rural or otherwise. People like me are the future, we have the demographics on our side, now the party needs to full invest in us, once and for all. We need to concentrate at state and local levels too. If we do not make gains in the 2018 and 2020 state legislatures races, we will not have a chance of getting back the US House before 2032 at the earliest (due to the post-2020 Census redistricting). The US Senate is probably lost to us until 2024, as 2018 is going to be brutal, perhaps the Rethugs go to 60 seats (the map is THAT bad, we have only one shot at a flip, Heller in Nevada, maybe maybe Flake in Arizona, whilst we have 11 to 13 hard, hard races), depending on how Trump and the 'Pugs do over the next 2 years. The 2020 and 2022 Senate map is just not enough if the Repugs have 57 to 61 seat post 2018.

Bernie's way is not the future, and yes I am aware of the deep systemic hole we are in. Women, PoC, LGBTQ don't give a toss about long term economics when you have direct threats from RW racists and xians who want to ERASE us NOW. The Republicans have won with racist white skin colour and fundie xian identity politics. We need to crush their numbers with our own brand on steroids. We have the numbers, but we need to truly instill the urgency of once and for all taking over the country via our majority minority soon-to-come status.


I have other issues with Bernie too, besides the fact he is once again not a Democrat as well. 2 huge reasons why Bernie would have been crushed against Trump in the GE:

Issue 1.

Taxes pure and simple

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/3/25/11293258/tax-plan-calculator-2016

I took the median (NOT average, so no artificially high number due to the 1%'ers blowing up the average) 2015 USA household income 54,462

I set it for a married couple with a child

and this is what you get



Under Bernie they would pay ALMOST 7000 USD MORE per year than under Hillary and 10,000 MORE than Trump

Now I do it for a single person making 25,000



2600 USD MORE per year than Clinton's plan and 4700 USD MORE than under trump


a poor single person 15,000 USD a year



1600 USD MORE under Sanders than Clinton, and almost 2500 USD MORE than under Trump


and finally an upper middle class family

combined household income of 125,000 (and THIS is millions of suburban voters of all races, etc) with multiple children



They would pay 16,500 USD MORE under Bernie than Clinton, and 23 THOUSAND DOLLARS more under Bernie than under Trump


THAT WOULD HAVE CRUSHED HIM IN THE GENERAL

No one can ever convince otherwise, those are a huge difference dollar-wise that the Rethugs would have rammed down the American collective gullet.




Issue 2.

He falsely labels himself a "Democratic Socialist"


This may seem a bit pedantic, BUT is ultimately massive in terms of impacting and framing the entire concept of the "left" in the United States.

Bernie SELF-LABELS himself as a democratic socialist. I go crazy when I see this, because he is NOT a democratic socialist and it automatically feeds the American culture's knee jerk, reactionary, stupid, thuggish tendency to equate communism with socialism through a totally sloppy, outdated Cold War prism. This gives every reactionary Rethug a huge target to blow him out of the water. This also feeds bullshit myths in the USA that everything that works for a democratic social good is by definition "commie" or "socialist." It is utterly false and self-defeating on a grand scale. It literally has corrupted and perverted almost all right-v-left framing of all political discourse in America.

I explain what I mean by a mislabel by cheating a bit and using that bane of serious academic rigour, Wikipedia. I will use wikipedia because it neatly describes EXACTLY what I am saying.

Bernie is a practitioner of SOCIAL DEMOCRACY, so he is a social democrat, so to speak, similar in many aspects to Sweden and other countries in the Nordic Model. He does NOT espouse a democratic form of socialism, thus he is NOT a democratic socialist.


Democratic socialism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_socialism

Not to be confused with social democracy.

Democratic socialism is a political ideology that advocates political democracy alongside social ownership of the means of production, often with an emphasis on democratic management of enterprises within a socialist economic system. The term "democratic socialism" is sometimes used synonymously with "socialism"; the adjective "democratic" is often added to distinguish it from the Marxist–Leninist brand of socialism, which is widely viewed as being non-democratic in practice. Democratic socialism is also sometimes used as a synonym for Social Democracy, although many say this is misleading as democratic socialism advocates social ownership of the means of production, whereas social democracy does not.

Democratic socialism is distinguished from both the Soviet model of centralized socialism and from social democracy, where "social democracy" refers to support for political democracy, nationalization of key industries, and a welfare state. The distinction with the former is made on the basis of the authoritarian form of government and centralized economic system that emerged in the Soviet Union during the 20th century, while the distinction with the latter is made on the basis that democratic socialism is committed to systemic transformation of the economy while social democracy is not. That is, whereas social democrats only seek to "humanize" capitalism through state intervention, democratic socialists see capitalism as inherently incompatible with the democratic values of liberty, equality and solidarity; and believe that the issues inherent to capitalism can only be solved by superseding private ownership with some form of social ownership. Ultimately democratic socialists believe that reforms aimed at addressing the economic contradictions of capitalism will only cause more problems to emerge elsewhere in the economy, that capitalism can never be sufficiently "humanized", and that it must therefore ultimately be replaced with socialism.

Democratic socialism is not specifically revolutionary or reformist, as many types of democratic socialism can fall into either category, with some forms overlapping with social democracy, supporting reforms within capitalism as a prelude to the establishment of socialism. Some forms of democratic socialism accept social democratic reformism to gradually convert the capitalist economy to a socialist one using pre-existing democratic institutions, while other forms are revolutionary in their political orientation and advocate for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the transformation of the capitalist economy to a socialist economy.


snip



Social democracy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy

Social democracy is a political, social and economic ideology that supports economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a capitalist economy; and a policy regime involving collective bargaining arrangements, a commitment to representative democracy, measures for income redistribution, regulation of the economy in the general interest and welfare state provisions. Social democracy thus aims to create the conditions for capitalism to lead to greater democratic, egalitarian and solidaristic outcomes; and is often associated with the set of socioeconomic policies that became prominent in Northern and Western Europe—particularly the Nordic model in the Nordic countries—during the latter half of the 20th century.

Social democracy originated as a political ideology that advocated an evolutionary and peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism using established political processes in contrast to the revolutionary approach to transition associated with orthodox Marxism. In the early post-war era in Western Europe, social democratic parties rejected the Stalinist political and economic model then current in the Soviet Union, committing themselves either to an alternate path to socialism or to a compromise between capitalism and socialism. In this period, social democrats embraced a mixed economy based on the predominance of private property, with only a minority of essential utilities and public services under public ownership. As a result, social democracy became associated with Keynesian economics, state interventionism, and the welfare state, while abandoning the prior goal of replacing the capitalist system (factor markets, private property and wage labor) with a qualitatively different socialist economic system.

Modern social democracy is characterized by a commitment to policies aimed at curbing inequality, oppression of underprivileged groups, and poverty; including support for universally accessible public services like care for the elderly, child care, education, health care, and workers' compensation. The social democratic movement also has strong connections with the labour movement and trade unions, and is supportive of collective bargaining rights for workers as well as measures to extend democratic decision-making beyond politics into the economic sphere in the form of co-determination for employees and other economic stakeholders.

snip


Bernie Sanders does NOT want to replace all private ownership of the means of production with government or social ownership! Therefore he fundamentally is NOT a Socialist.


He is committing political suicide in a reactionary capitalistic country like America by calling himself a democratic socialist. It is MADDENING to me, and almost all my fellow Europeans I know. The actual socialists, REAL socialists, I know shake their heads when he labels himself a socialist, especially when he is/was trying to win national office in RW red-baiting USA where 90 plus percent of the population doesn't even know the difference between communism and democrat socialism.