Bernie and the Failed Revolution Eight Years Later

After eight years of witnessing the scuttled political revolution of Bernie Sanders, I can logically draw one conclusion: It was a failure. Taking over the Democratic Party and reforming from within was never going to work when varied interests are so entrenched that the party bosses would much rather go the way of the Whigs than halt its continued rightward drift. I am so happy that I gave my money to a short-lived art event known as the Ruby Slipper Festival instead of Bernie's campaign when he came to Winston-Salem.

Here's a list of all of the issues that I have with these progressives and why organizing outside of the two-party system is a much better solution:

• During the ’20 Senate race in Maine, most progressives were either silent on Lisa Savage or all in for Sara Gideon despite it being the first time the state used ranked choice voting

• The Force The Vote debacle

• The Squad foregoing fighting for Medicare For All in favor of committee assignments. Instead, AOC got kicked off a committee by a 46-13 vote in favor of a New Democrat that the NY delegation hated but national leaders liked

• A $15 minimum wage was also cited for skipping FTV but progressives did nothing to boost that issue

• Ayanna Pressley possibly sabotaging The Squad by saying that each member voted alone rather than as a bloc

• Progressives in Seattle tone policed former councilwoman Kshama Sawant when she called out progressive Dem members of the city council for being a roadblock to progress

• Congressional progressives ignoring the Marches For M4ALL, which were held in 56 cities in mid-2021

• Squad members and the Working Families Party conducting a sham rally on extending the eviction moratorium at the U.S. Capitol while failing to hold their fellow Congress members accountable

• PMCs finding ways to defend Squad members when they took indefensible positions—Iron Dome, breaking the rail strike, funding Ukraine unconditionally, the list goes on

• After The Squad came into existence, the Democratic Party establishment readjusted its strategy. After Nina Turner’s first congressional campaign, progressives didn’t

• Turner’s opponent, Shontel Brown, being allowed to join the Progressive Caucus two months after she joined the New Democrat Coalition

• AOC and Ilhan Omar pretending to be arrested at an abortion rally outside of the SCOTUS building in July 2022

• Progressives rallying behind John Fetterman despite his troubled past and his own declarations that he was a Democrat and not a progressive

• Ilhan Omar coming within two points (50.3-48.3) of losing her primary two years ago to a Minneapolis City Council member backed by the status quo because her fellow Somalis had a falling out with her over the congresswoman’s support of imperialist policies in their homeland

• The CPC folding on keeping the infrastructure bill and Build Back Better together and its letter to Biden urging a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine a year apart

• Marianne Williamson’s failed slate of candidates in the ’22 election cycle 

• Last year, AOC sneered at the House Freedom Caucus’s FTV tactic with Kevin McCarthy and said that The Squad doing the same thing to Nancy Pelosi would have caused “irreparable institutional harm”

• The Bernie movement created a lot of careers but not a lot of legislative success

• Now, the organizations that spawned from 2016 are in tatters. Justice Democrats laid off nearly half of its staff and are playing defense this year, taking on no new candidates. Our Revolution started out with dark money and began supporting non-progressive candidates as early as 2021. As for Brand New Congress, it’s out of business

• Kyle Kulinski let the cat out of the bag last fall about Justice Democrats’ true mission (fighting Trump, not the Democratic Party establishment), and it explains why Squad members rarely fought the establishment (unless they were named Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema)

• Ryan Grim’s new book was all about simping made easy as he consistently ran cover for the Fraud Squad (like that time all of them except Rashida Tlaib voted to block the rail strike)

• Progressives (except for Marie Newman—and look at what happened to her) didn’t end the rightward shift. If anything, they moved to the right themselves in some instances (*cough* foreign policy)

• In Nevada, a slate of DSA-backed progressives ran the state Democratic Party from ’21 to last year and got sabotaged by the Harry Reid Machine. Instead of supporting his proteges, Bernie actually condemned them

• Brandon Johnson’s in Chicago last spring was a stay of execution—not validation—of working within the Democratic Party. As his woes demonstrate, he’s already susceptible to losing in a rematch against Paul Vallas in 2027 or someone who’s actually worse than Vallas

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