How Bernie Gives Hope for the Future

A self-identified socialist won 22 states.

He did FAR, FAR better than any left-wing candidate has in years. Yes, he lost, but he showed very clearly that the country IS changing.

He won super-majorities of young people.

The model under which I have been operating for some time, following Stirling Newberry, is that the US doesn’t have a real chance at change until 20-24, because older cohorts need to die and younger cohorts need to replace them.

I am uninterested in “convincing” most people who voted for Clinton of anything. They are not reachable. To reach them, a candidate like Bernie would have to compromise himself so far that he couldn’t do the right things upon getting into office.

This is not the 2000s or 90s. This is not the age of compromise. The fruits of neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and oligarchy are being reaped; the youngsters have now grown up and never known a good economy. Many barely remember a time when the US wasn’t at war.

Clinton or Trump will have their time. There will be another socialist candidate and another, whether called that or not. Odds are that either fascism or socialism will win the US. The conditions in the US make that most likely.

As for Clinton supporters, they won. That is reasonable. Most Democrats did want Clinton. More Republicans did want Trump–and most Independents (now the most left-leaning group in America) wanted Sanders.

The Democrats are the conservative party right now. They are about the status quo: Keep neo-liberaling, keep bombing and invading brown people’s countries, keep shoveling money to the rich.

Republicans under Trump are the right-wing populist party.

Clinton supporters were not Sanders to win, because Sanders could not be Sanders and win them.

Most of the worst catastrophes are already locked in. Acidification of the oceans, loss of essentially all fish stocks, far worse climate change than the current consensus models, and the rise of fascism, men-on-horseback, and radical leftists.

The time to cut that stuff of was the 2000s. Obama was the last chance, and Obama chose to bail out oligarchs.

So now we play it out. But Bernie has been a hopeful sign, a sign that the youngs have had enough. Whether they will stay that way, we will see. But I think they will, because they have little choice: They are not the children of prosperity like the Boomers–their backs are against the wall. They win, or their lives are garbage. Those are the stakes for them.

So we wait, and we see. But Bernie lost in a genuinely hopeful way, showing that a socialist is now viable in the US and that young people are massively against the status quo.

That matters.

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