Or was it Biden’s victory and liberal’s exhaustion with politics in a Trump-era world?
I can’t help but wonder if the presence of a Democrat in the presidency just sort of pacifies liberal, left, and radical mass movements and mobilization.
that seems silly, like paint me an alternate timeline. theres no Bernie and the what? half of us wouldn’t be here. there is no “left” in america what other thing do you think would have filled that place? a labor movement? definitely not the current union boom can be directly traced back to Bernie and the dsa. the black lives matter movement never had revolutionary potential. you will never have another anti war movement in america, not one capable off effecting anything. fucking liberal “feminist” wont do anything but take selfies in pussy hats. frankly most feminist in this country aren’t feminist their racist murderous girlboss imperialist, including black women. not having Bernie wouldn’t have made any of this better. also the idea that most bernie suporter were nascent socialist seems silly, did you meet them? they are liberals who want healthcare. they want “scandanavian” stuff, are scandanavians any closer to being communist than us?
I thought we all were against great man history around here.
We are. Bernie running for president, and the galvanizing effect he had, were only possible by way of the material conditions of American capitalism in 2016-2020, and the social movements like Occupy, which preceded him.
That doesn’t make him not important.
i agree that he was important, but important and “ruining the possibility of mass movements” is a huge jump.
Oh, that I agree with. I disagree with OP that Bernie specifically “Ruined the possibility of mass movements”. We’re just in a liberal malaise where they’ve all gone back to brunch, while the world is still burning.
That Said, petite bourgois liberals are hardly the core of many social movements. We ought to be looking to the colonized and oppressed people’s in this country to take us anywhere.
agreed agreed, although i do think America specifically will be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.
Not in 2019 and early 2020, I was there I saw it happen EVERYONE went in for Bernie, he became the nexus of the American left, for over a year all conversations led back to him
Most of the lefties who went full communism in 2017 and 2018 drank that electoral seltzer, nobody wanted to hear any doomerism on the subject
Then March 2020 hit and suddenly blazing-eyed Lenins were everywhere
Where did that bring you?
spoiler
Back to me
Bernie was a social-democratic sheepdog, but I think the movement around his presidential campaign actually kick started the social, political, and intellectual development of a lot Americans, and pipelined them into more revolutionary left ideologies. So, no. I don’t think Sanders ruined anything, and in fact I think his impact was important, and a net positive, if sometimes overstated, and burdened by reformism.
If America is progressing towards a social revolution, Bernie represents the hazy and undisciplined strains of left-populist thought that manifests before a mass movement has found its footing. I could make analogies to earlier times and other countries, but I won’t, because I don’t think anything in the past quite perfectly describes the present, even if a few things here and there tend to rhyme.
Socdems like Sanders is still a weapon the bourgeoisie can wield if any Leftist movement has a chance to succeed. Socdems don’t threaten their status, they can ride it out. When socdem policies start showing improvements in the social/economic they will just start tearing it apart.
I don’t disagree at all
and pipelined them into more revolutionary left ideologies.
It’s a sad state of affairs if affordable healthcare, fair wages, and education are considered revolutionary ideas.
“pipelining” as in they realized social democracy doesn’t work because it is just crumbs from the table of the ruling class and therefore went beyond that
I think so, because he did radicalised and organized a bunch of people and then just led them back to the democratic party who are call by many the “graveyard of social movements” if he would have just broken with the Dems he could have used his huge support and his important allies and supporters to make a socdem labor party.
i always saw Bernie as a failed Obrador, both were socdems ignored by their lib party, but unlike bernie, Obrador was willing to pick fights inside his party until eventually he left and made his own party with his most loyal supporters and now he is the president and his party the dominant one. maybe bernie would not have been as successful but a small labour party you led is better than just being continue to be sideline by the dems and ignored.
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No, if anything Sanders demonstrated the limits of reformist movement in America.
It is the left who has failed to take this lesson seriously and use it to inform their approach accordingly.
In other words, without a strategy, the left will get nowhere, with or without Sanders. The Sanders movement, despite providing a tiny glimpse of hope for reformism, is always doomed to fail. It is what we learn from his failure that matters.
Yeah I’d also like to add that revolution doesn’t typically happen until reform has some success followed by failure
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It’s worse than that. Even leftists who are already disillusioned by electoral approach also don’t have any strategy.
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Kinda. If you look at past successful socialist revolutions, most often helmed by a far weaker party than the bourgeois establishment, you can see that they have actual strategy (informed by theory) toward success.
For example, Mao was absolutely obsessed with land reform. When the Chinese Communists were nearly wiped out during the Long March, Mao was insistent on land reform because he could see the revolutionary potential it could unleash from the rural peasantry. It wasn’t just building a power base after they had been banished to the countryside, he was absolutely convinced that land reform is where it will play a decisive role in the revolution.
Chiang Kai-shek wasn’t a bad opponent, you know. He was a brilliant military commander and given his vast military resources, could eventually overwhelm the communists. His greatest mistake was to underestimate Mao’s land reform, which cost him the ultimate victory.
What the American left needs today is to pinpoint - through theory - what would be the decisive factors in defeating capitalism and build an actual strategy around them. The problem is that they don’t even know how and where to begin.
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If one succdem losing a primary for president could shatter a mass movement, then that movement never had any revolutionary potential to begin with.
COVID is the beginning and the end of the story in 2020. Without COVID, the George Floyd protests would not have gained the mass movement and revolutionary character we saw. Maybe in black communities it would have, but the real truth is cases of police brutality happen every day.
The COVID lockdown was so impactful in the US for a number or reasons. First of all, it make naked the banal cruelty of the American system for everyone to see. It showed how little the government cared about its citizens when a disease was running rampant across the US. It showed how terrible our health system was.The counter protests showed how gleefully many people in this nation cheer on the suffering of others at their own expense.
The rent and eviction moratoriums were key here too: it pitted the interests of the owning class against the proletariat. A nationwide break from rent was something nobody could have thought possible, and it the relief it provided made alternatives seemed realistic.
Many people weren’t working as well, which gave them time to join protests and think about how the US operates. Work from home made it apparent how bullshit office jobs are, and the “hero workers” who couldn’t work from home were shown how expendable they were to the ruling class. Stimulus payments showed people the government could just send them money and it would immediately improve their lives. PPE loans showed how easily the government will bail out business owners instead of regular folk.
It was a convergence of many different things, both economic and social, that gave people in 2020 a revolutionary spark. BLM and anti police provided the most direct outlet for that rage, it was the most identifiable and obviously cruel institution of oppression. The 2020 protests and the state response were the collision of forces building for a long time, but it still centered around the unique circumstances of COVID.
And so when the lockdowns ended, when the COVID measures eased, when the effects of the disease were hidden behind the curtain the revolutionary energy faded. Trump could be blamed by liberals and the left, Biden could be blamed by the right. Why else would Biden campaign so hard against Trump’s COVID response, then undo COVID measures as soon as possible? Because he saw the summer of 2020 and Jan 6 and saw that unique circumstances gave a unique response. And now business is back to usual.
To do anything close to what happened in 2020, it will likely take a bigger crisis than COVID.
I think it’s really just because a democrat is in power now. You see it every time you try to criticize Biden. Libs froth at the mouth to tell you the alternative is worse. I think a lot of people out there who haven’t radicalized have internalized that message and so the idea of a large protest or mass movement under a democrat president would “harm election chances” and therefore isn’t worth it. I don’t know how to untangle those brain worms they’ve got, but we should keep trying.
No, I don’t really think that can be entirely blamed on Bernie. Bernie at the very least popularized a lot of left wing talking points and made Americans critical of the status quo. People were passionate about Bernie, and because of his campaigns and how he was demonized and colluded against in the primaries. Since his campaigns, it is much easier to talk about the flaws of our capitalist democracy now to liberals who are somewhat open to the idea.
Being a cheerleader for Biden is obviously bad, though. He could have handled shit way better. No more half measures etc
No, he’s proof that there was no possibility in the first place
His primary loss in 2016 really drove home the fact that the US political establishment would never tolerate even the milquetoast of socdems achieving high office.
Henry Wallace and McCarthy faced this before him. Libs still act like their precious elections are the key to achieving real progress. They’ll never learn.
I can’t help but wonder if the presence of a Democrat in the presidency just sort of pacifies liberal, left, and radical mass movements and mobilization.
This seems to always happen. It takes until the last half of a Democrat president’s second term for the left to mobilize enough to become a movement that puts pressure on the dems. Happened with Clinton and Obama. I would expect some type of growing and perceptible left movement in the last couple years of Biden’s second term.
And when the GOP is in power the left gets used by liberals as street pressure for their own goals by using their power as libs to access media and finances to organize people to “resist” The GOP and the left goes along thinking everyone is fighting for their goals but in reality the liberals just use them to further their own agenda and leave the left to suffer the consequences of trying to actually change things and not just get liberals back into power.
Mass politics in America is a sick game.
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That’s why the democrats are hoping that trump is the nominee again.
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I think it’s partially true but we can’t just pin it all on Barney Sandles. Obama did a good job of deradicalizing libs and pulling the teeth out of BLM.
Nope and every time a Bernie Sander runs, gets hopes high, and gets put down more and more people either politically check out (which isn’t great) or will be more open to those “unserious” lefty candidates.
All Bernie has ever done is try to help the American people, and for some reason they hate him for it.
His proposed corporate tax rates aren’t even as high as they were under FDR. He basically just wants to reform the corporate tax rates back to what they were before Reagan, while re-routing some of that absurd military budget into some basic social-democratic programs like free health care and free education. The funny thing is that Bernie’s ideology, Social democracy, gives capitalism a chance to save itself from revolution by going to the bargaining table and offering concessions to the working class right as their anger is boiling over. But they didn’t take that opportunity, so now they will continue to accelerate the suffering until there is no choice left for the people but to kill or die. It’s especially interesting that they didn’t chose to bargain with the working class, since there is so much surplus value that the United States takes from the “third world” through unequal exchange, imperialism, etc. and some of that surplus value can be used to pacify the working class and drown whatever revolutionary ideas they have while they’re still in the crib. But there is a total refusal to even consider bargaining.
The way things played out, yeah. He did. At least for a while.
But more mass movements will come with new events that happen. Hopefully we will have better leadership when that time comes.
Nah
It’s a really tough one. Speaking from personal experience I probably wouldn’t be here without him, but despite being more radical intellectually I’ve seen little possibility to plug into a movement with a speck of hope for doing good on a large scale since his campaign. Maybe he did exhaust a lot of us and burn us out from any serious activism, doomed to posting and depresso for the remainder of our days
Absolutely his defeat shattered the nascent new American “left” into a million pieces, We’re almost half way thru the decade and there’s no sign of even the barest recovery
And Ukraine added a whole new decade on top of it, the American left won’t enter a growth period again for decades, probably until climate change begins to collapse the state capacity to even mobilize at a national level, my educated guess is fifteen to twenty years
Similar to the length of time it took the country to get over 9/11
Antifa and the like spent all of 2015-2020 organizing against trump’s street thugs to protect minorities. And they were pretty successful. Just trying not to lose ground to fascists. And being encouraged and used/exploited by liberals to make trump/GOP look bad.
And arguably that anti-fascist organizing helped channel into and amplify and strengthen the BLM uprising after George Floyd’s murder. Which was one of the largest working class uprisings in America since the 1960s. Which is why it has been memory holed as much as possible by the media.
The left has not been in disarray since Bernie.
“were pretty successful” were being the operative verb tense
There’s no point in suger-coating it, the George Floyd protests were defeated, police expansion is at record levels, liberals and chuds alike have normalized neo-nazism at a national and global level, explosion of incel rhetoric among the youth, anti-homless sentiment, warmongering politics, complete and total collapse of pro-immigrant organizing under Biden, unprecedented anti-trans hysteria
We haven’t seen this level of rightward shift since the early 2000s and in some way it’s almost worse
2020, 2021, 2022, 2023; these four years have put the left in retreat in every aspect except in local union organizing, but even that hasn’t moved the needle in terms of overall union membership among the labor force
I think it would be way worse without all the anti-fascist organizing that happened from 2015-2020.
And BLM has resulted in better outcomes than would be the case if it had never happened. Which is why the right wing is engaging in a backlash against it currently.
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