cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/22940159
Bernie Sanders caused a stir last week, when the independent senator from Vermont and two-time contender for the Democratic presidential nomination sent a post-election email to his progressive supporters across the country. In it, he argued that the Democrats suffered politically in 2024 at least in part because they ran a campaign that focused on “protecting the status quo and tinkering around the edges.”
In contrast, said Sanders, “Trump and the Republicans campaigned on change and on smashing the existing order.” Yes, he explained, “the ‘change’ that Republicans will bring about will make a bad situation worse, and a society of gross inequality even more unequal, more unjust and more bigoted.”
Despite that the reality of the threat they posed, Trump and the Republicans still won a narrow popular-vote victory for the presidency, along with control of the US House. That result has inspired an intense debate over the future direction not just of the Democratic Party but of the country. And the senator from Vermont is in the thick of it.
In his email, Sanders, a member of the Senate Democratic Caucus who campaigned in states across the country this fall for Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic ticket, asked a blunt question: “Will the Democratic leadership learn the lessons of their defeat and create a party that stands with the working class and is prepared to take on the enormously powerful special interests that dominate our economy, our media and our political life?”
His answer: “Highly unlikely. They are much too wedded to the billionaires and corporate interests that fund their campaigns.”
Unfortunately the only way to get enough signatures to get your name on a ballot can only be achieved via rich donors and mass advertising.
We would literally have an easier time killing the big pary canidates than working within the system.
This is just plain false, and also, like, aggressively defeatist. It feels to me, whenever someone says something like this, the intention is to kill off any hope in the people who aren’t terminally fatalistic about the prospect of any working class representation within the American politcal system, which makes you less optimistic than a Russian Serf in 1860, and the Wobblies and other trade unionists who were literally murdered and jailed.
Like, not to pick on you, because there are a lot of other people in this thread expressing the same opinion, but to whatever degree what you’re saying is true, it is only as true as the sentiment you are expressing is prevalent.
In my city there are hundreds of canidates that run for every position every election.
There are 2 names on the ballots when people go to vote
Call it what you want, but unless you get the R or D support or manage to get your own rich donor you will never get the signatures you need for your name to appear on the ballot next to their canidates, and the names on the ballot are who people actually vote for.
Acknowledging reality is not defeatist