It is not 1972 any more

I am bewildered by all the references to 1972 as the reason Democrats should not nominate Bernie Sanders. I was 19 years old in 1972 and McGovern was the first presidential candidate I ever voted for. I knew he would lose, but I voted for him because opposing Nixon was the right thing to do.

In 1972 20% of the labor force was unionized. In those days minimum wage would pay for a one bedroom apartment and a decent lifestyle. Most people had decent health care insurance and premiums were not sky high. State university systems were either free or very low tuition. The vast majority of people graduated debt free or could pay off their loan in less than five years. It was a different world.

In 1972 most voters liked what they had and white voters saw hippies and minorities as a threat to their way of life. Bankers were admired and most voters thought that the rich got that way by being smart, or at the very least, were not a threat to their way of life.

The situation could not be more different today. Young people are laboring under a mountain of student debt, real estate is sky high, old people have lost our pensions, and the economy is in very bad shape, and our cities are being poisoned, our government is dysfunctional and the policies that would fix our problems are dismissed as being unrealistic. This is a classic pre-revolutionary society.

If you are old enough to remember the election of 1972, you are also old enough to remember the fall of Jim Crow and the 88th Congress. You are old enough to know that even in America, big changes all at once are possible. You are also old enough to remember the fall of Pinochet, Marcos, the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union, apartheid, and so any other dictatorships. There is nothing inevitable about the injustices of our present system, they can and must be overthrown.

Never forget what Toqueville said about the French Revolution: Never was any such event, stemming from factors so far back in the past, so inevitable yet so completely unforeseen. People will look back on the great Democratic wave of 2016 in exactly the same way.