“Sometimes people say, you know, you’re 78, all that stuff, and you’ve been doing this for a long time — But should I be quitting now? When you look out and you talk to these beautiful, beautiful young people who want to move this country forward in such a decent, humane way, it really does inspire me. And to the degree that I have gotten those folks involved in the political process, yeah, I am very proud of that. I don’t know that I’ve ever done anything in my life more important than that.”
Anyone who feels betrayed by Bernie is either hopelessly naive or very young. He was never going to be the one to break off and lead a vanguard party or spit in the face of the Democrats; his whole career is built on compromising and working with shitlibs while still maintaining his integrity. It’s a complete aberration in American politics he was able to grow any modicum of power at all. He was never going to throw that away just to tell the libs to fuck off, as much as we all wanted it. He made plenty of mistakes and we should criticize them, being far too nice a la Corbyn, my friend Joe etc. But make no mistake his rise to prominence has been a massive boost to the left.
The USA is not turn of the century Russia, there is currently no baseline broad support for even social democratic reform among the working class, there is no strong sense of class consciousness or solidarity. But we’re a hell of lot closer post Bernie than before and it’s up to us to keep that momentum going.
He sold out, but short of a miraculous victory he was always going to. And that’s fine, he’s on the inside, he’s been playing this game his whole career. But we’re not and we don’t have to.
It's definitely awkward because every time I think about Bernie endorsing Biden I can't help but think of how Tara Reade must feel, but I can't hate Bernie. If he hadn't run in 2015 I might've remained unengaged with politics and never moved left.
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It does feel like we are in the accelerationist timeline. We just have to be ready to capitalize on those moments to show people things don’t have to be this way. If America were to collapse into revolution today I’m not sure we’d end up with a left movement in power. We’ve come so far since the tail end of the Obama years though and as you say the BLM protests have been an encouraging sign.