Bernie Sanders is a demonstrably honest politician who is articulating a moral vision for the country. I support him because I have believed in his ideas since long before he started running. I voted for Obama in 2008 because I believed in BERNIE’S ideas even then. That’s why Obama was such a huge disappointment for me personally. I do not think of Bernie as a God. My devotion to him is not religious. To me, this fight is not even about him personally. That was a scummy insinuation to make.
Besides, who’s the religious one? Of the two of us, you’re the one blindly supporting an empty shell of a figurehead with no substance. Stop projecting your faults onto me.
As for your Washington example. I’m going to cut you a break and set aside the fact that it is anecdotal, unrepresentative, and misleading. I’m also going to avoid harping on the fact that it does nothing to prove your point. Seriously, are you really trying to say that, because people didn’t fill out extra paperwork to participate in the meaningless ritual that is the Washington Democratic Primary in May, they won’t respond to leadership and stand up for their interests when the situation actually matters? Thats a ridiculous link to try to make… anyway, moving right along…
Even if your example was irrefutably valid, are you saying that a single small scale example involving a situation of zero consequence is proof that the “political revolution” approach doesn’t work? Granted, people tend to be more alienated and individualistic today than they used to be, but that’s another trend in society that is changing with demographic shifts as well. You simply need a larger body of evidence to support your horribly defeatist theory (seriously, at a fundamental level you are just dumping on the notion of citizen participation in a democracy, at some level you just sound like a scab in a labor dispute actually trying to undermine workers).
I DO have a larger body of evidence supporting my theory: the Civil Rights movement, women’s rights movements, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the gay rights movement, the environmentalist movement, abolition, Gandhi, labor rights in most of the developed world, I could go on but you get the idea. Hell, you know who started the EPA? It was conservative Richard Nixon. Why? Because it didn’t matter who was in the White House when environmentalists made life difficult for the entire political establishment.
I have encountered about half-a-dozen Hillary supporters like you in the last week. I’m starting to develop a sense of “type” here. I appreciate that your thoughts on politics exist within a box in which circumstances can never change (despite the fact that history shows us that political circumstances change all the time). I will never concede the terms of our nation’s political debate to such a stark outlook, and I’m not alone. Watch the outlook on what is “politically possible” change over the next few years, it already happened just this week on Social Security, thanks in large part of Bernie and his supporters. Demographically, we will be the Democratic Party in a few elections.
