If you look at the post, I didn't say the left will disappear. I said disappear "from discourse". There will always be those of us doing good work, helping people, trying to improve material conditions on the ground, or even electorally, working at the municipal level, attorneys and judges that are actually compassionate doing good for people within a shit system. Et cetera.
But media is a big deal, the corporate stranglehold on it is a BIG factor in shaping how people and especially Americans think, and our presence there, even in the 0.00001% way it existed from 2016-2020, really gets good ideas out into the ether. No one would be talking about M4A if Bernie Sanders had not become a viable candidate for president and gone on MSNBC and even Fox 150,919,248 times and shouted in his cranky old-man way about M4A.
So my big fear is that if Biden "becomes" the left, it will have the same chilling effect on left ideas as when Obama subsumed "the left" in this country... but worse, because Biden is even worse than Obama, and because the world is coming apart at the seams and in dire need of left ideas injected into the discourse, immediately, in a way that wasn't the case in 2012.
it will have the same chilling effect on left ideas as when Obama subsumed “the left” in this country
Obama credibly ran as a progressive, though. Clinton was the centrist in the 2008 primary. Biden can't subsume a left that was never even lukewarm on him, especially when that left has far more of a media/electoral/online/in-the-streets presence than it did 12 years ago.
If you look at the post, I didn't say the left will disappear. I said disappear "from discourse". There will always be those of us doing good work, helping people, trying to improve material conditions on the ground, or even electorally, working at the municipal level, attorneys and judges that are actually compassionate doing good for people within a shit system. Et cetera.
But media is a big deal, the corporate stranglehold on it is a BIG factor in shaping how people and especially Americans think, and our presence there, even in the 0.00001% way it existed from 2016-2020, really gets good ideas out into the ether. No one would be talking about M4A if Bernie Sanders had not become a viable candidate for president and gone on MSNBC and even Fox 150,919,248 times and shouted in his cranky old-man way about M4A.
So my big fear is that if Biden "becomes" the left, it will have the same chilling effect on left ideas as when Obama subsumed "the left" in this country... but worse, because Biden is even worse than Obama, and because the world is coming apart at the seams and in dire need of left ideas injected into the discourse, immediately, in a way that wasn't the case in 2012.
Obama credibly ran as a progressive, though. Clinton was the centrist in the 2008 primary. Biden can't subsume a left that was never even lukewarm on him, especially when that left has far more of a media/electoral/online/in-the-streets presence than it did 12 years ago.