Dear Bernie Sanders, On the Day You Quit the Revolution

April 8, 2020

Dear Bernie,

My heart broke today. I don’t mean that in a hyperbolic way. I mean today is the day that I lost all the last remaining hope and faith for this country and for the survival of our beautiful planet that I managed, reluctantly, to resurrect after your 2015–16 presidential campaign.

You see, I was done with politics. During the Obama administration, I learned that we have been lied to our entire lives. That my generation, Generation X, and those born after me have never benefited from Republicans OR Democrats and never will. I wasn’t even going to vote in 2016. And then you appeared in the race, and I started to believe that maybe change was possible. I let myself dip a toe in the electoral waters, just enough to vote for you and talk about you to anyone that would listen.

But the Democratic party establishment defrauded all of us in the most blatant crime against the American people ever committed and elected Donald Trump. You know it’s true. It was, transparently, the old Hegel’s Dialectic manipulation on full display, used in politics for a century. Trump was the “pied piper” candidate that the party wanted to obtain the Republican nomination as a foil for Hillary Clinton. It was Johnson vs. Goldwater all over again, played badly. I predicted her loss the moment they sabotaged your nomination.

I swore in 2016 I would never vote Democrat again, even if you ran this year. If you were running on the Democrat ticket, you weren’t getting my vote. But how could I refuse to fight for someone that spent his entire life fighting for me? So this time I got involved. I donated again and again. My social media turned into a 24/7 Bernie Sanders promotion machine. I took it upon myself to make up for the corporate media’s failings by sharing and informing voters at every turn about why you are the ONLY option for this country to have a future. I phone banked. I canvassed. I joined the Victory Captains teams. I hosted events. I BELIEVED.

Because, you see, the man that spent decades fighting this hard, that cared this much, would never dream of giving up the fight when the literal fate of the planet is at stake. By now, he surely knows the Democratic party is a graveyard for progressive policies, that they will never implement anything that threatens the bipartisan neoliberal consensus. I heard him over and over, saying that the global climate crisis is the single greatest threat to this country and the world and that we must implement a Green New Deal if we want any hope of survival. That man wouldn’t think of gambling our last chance at saving the planet away to the whims of the Democratic party establishment a second time.

That man was you.

All through your campaign, it bothered me that you continued calling your competitors your friends- over and over reassuring every media hack that badgered you about backing someone else as the nominee that you will continue to support the very cancerous rot of the Democratic party establishment that is killing us all- and saying things like “any one of these candidates could beat Trump.”

But I told myself things like “Bernie knows what he’s doing. He’s just playing politics. He’s trying to secure the base. He’s doing this because of Tom Perez’s mafia-like loyalty oath and the DNC rules so they won’t screw him at the convention.” I listened to people that were part of the party’s 2018 Unity Reforms Commission, like Nomiki Konst, assure us that the tiny concessions we obtained about automatic delegates meant the party had seen the light this time and would toe the line. I didn’t believe them. But I hoped they were right. I wanted them to be right.

Everyone knows that the Democrats would rather lose to Trump than nominate you. Too many careers in the Capitol Hill bubble depend on the corporate gravy train that is the party establishment. Too many party bosses have gotten rich off their positions in power. None of them lost a thing in 2016. If anything, they gained in wealth and legitimacy under Trump’s administration, benefiting from his giveaways to them and their 1% cronies while pretending to be an opposition party to maintain their charade with their constituencies. It’s not hard to figure out.

Now, I’m 41 years old and I just found out I don’t have a future.

I was born into this world at the tail end of Generation X- a generation you never seemed to even remember exists. You said over and over again that Generation Y, or the “Millennials,” are the first generation to do worse than their Baby Boomer parents. That is statistically incorrect. Generation X is. We have been hit the most times, and the hardest.

Here’s the life cycle of a Gen Xer that came of age in the 90s:

I graduated high school straight into the dot com bust. The “E” class savings bonds my parents bought from the time I was a toddler for my college tuition lost nearly 50% of their stated maturity value by the time we redeemed them to pay for my first few semesters. I was forced to drop out after two years. Immediately afterward, the economy crashed again with the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war invasion. Nobody was hiring. I scraped and struggled to build a life with partial college, no degree, and mounting debt as cost of living hiked and wages were puny.

By the time I had built anything for myself at all, the 2008 crash happened and took everything I had. Only by now it was not only back to square one, but back to square one with a generation of Millennials coming up right behind me that were cheap hires and fresh out of college with degrees. Meanwhile the Baby Boomers refused to leave upper management, leaving my generation stuck in limbo. To date, I’ve never been able to get far enough ahead to go back to college. Or to buy a house. Or to have children- which I did want to have, and now I am out of time. Now I’m staring down the barrel of retirement in 20 years with nothing. Social security will gone. Climate chaos will create a dystopian nightmare. All that will be left is eking out a meager existence while I watch the world end around me.

And I will ALWAYS have nothing, because I live in a country where neither my government, nor my fellow Americans- and certainly not the Democratic party- cares about me. Worse, I won’t even get to have a planet. The future I am looking at is one where I never have healthcare, probably will end up homeless as I continue getting priced out of the housing market to where I won’t even be able to afford being a roommate for much longer, have no family lineage, no savings, no retirement, and facing my last decades on Earth suffering from resource wars, civil unrest, food and water shortages, and constant natural disaster.

What kind of a life is that, Bernie?

I don’t want to sound ungrateful for all you have done. You have been my sole hero and inspiration. I have watched how you have tirelessly fought for the working class with patience, compassion, and humanity for decades. Where I can’t even muster 5 years worth of patience for the ignorant voters who feel we don’t deserve healthcare or a livable planet, you never stopped believing in their capacity to do the right thing and join our fight for a country that works for all of us. You have been far too kind to them, gave them way too much credit. It’s not your fault for believing in them, it’s theirs for not living up to it. They didn’t deserve you.

But it isn’t enough. Bernie, we need YOU. Not just your platform. Not just your ideas. Not just our movement. We need YOU. And it can’t be just on the periphery, like in the Senate, where you are outgunned and outmanned. It has to be the presidency. Nothing will ever change in this country unless the popular grassroots movements have unwavering, incorruptible support from the top. Nothing. And you were our last chance.

The largest, most unprecedented grassroots movement in modern history was the Occupy Movement, and where did it end up without electoral support? Gone. What changed? Nothing. Our movement is nothing without someone that can clear the path with supreme executive power, and that chance is gone because you dropped out of the race. Our last chance at the Green New Deal.

But it’s not just the Green New Deal we’re losing. We’re losing our last chance at any degree of meaningful reorganization of society to attend to working class needs. We’re losing our last chance at democracy at all.

The Democratic party knows that, and they engineered this on purpose. That is the level of sociopathy we are dealing with in our government. You were supposed to help us fight them.

HERE ARE ALL THE THINGS THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN IN THE USA BECAUSE YOU WON’T BE THE PRESIDENT:

1. Any end to the military’s decades of mass genocide against 1/6 of the known world for empire and profit

2. A functioning healthcare system

3. Labor rights or reforms of any kind

4. Our last chance ever to save the planet from extinction

5. Fair housing

6. Fair value for our dollar

7. Criminal justice reform

8. Women’s rights

9. An end to systemic racism

10. Sane immigration policy

11. An end to the concentration camps at the border

12. Basic Constitutional rights

13. Internet neutrality

14. Rights to dissent, free speech, or privacy

15. An end to Islamophobia

16. Transparency in government

17. Ending government corruption & exploitation

18. Regulations for transnational corporations

19. An end to the constant theft against Americans to bail out Wall St. and corporations

20. Any power to the working class whatsoever

21. Any policy that benefits the working class

22. Sane monetary policy

23. Progress in any form

24. Survival of democracy

The sheer absurdity of believing the Democratic party will ever implement one iota of progressive change after proving otherwise for 5 straight decades is mind-blowing to me. You, of all people, after the criminal conspiracy against you within the party, should know that. I can’t understand why you fell for it in 2016, and I will never understand why you seem to be falling for it again.

It doesn’t matter what they say. Of course they are going to pay lip service to you and say whatever they think they have to in their deceptive attempts to sheepherd progressives back under the “Big Tent,” like they have done for longer than I have been alive.

As Kshama Sawant said, “The Democratic party is a graveyard for progressive policy.” In short, it’s all a scam. We’ve been used over and over again for our votes while throwing our interests under the bus- and there is nothing anyone can say to make me believe it will ever be different. Only “receipts” count. And we have decades of receipts.

If the Democrats were behind your policies, they’d have backed your candidacy- full stop.

Bernie, the signs of an empire in collapse are all here. They have been here for decades, and now the red flags are so glaring a person has to be ignorant on purpose to pretend they aren’t.

In Sir John Glubb’s famous essay, “The Fate of Empires and the Struggle for Survival,” he measured the consistent patterns in the life cycles of empires throughout 3,500 years of human history.

The final stage, which he calls the “Age of Decline,” (also the “Age of Decadence”) is characterized thus:

1. Overextended military, fighting wars on too many fronts
2. Overexpansion into foreign territory, inability to defend their own borders
3. Hyperinflation & devaluation of the currency
4. Disappearance of the middle class
5. Increased political polarization
6. Increased civil unrest and dissent between demographic groups
7. Nationalism and scapegoating of ethnic “others”
8. Obsession with consumption
9. Bread and circuses galore to distract the proletariat

It is obvious that you know all this, and have known it for decades. You built your entire political career on combating these symptoms and curing the disease. This was your LAST chance, and there is no one coming after you to fill your shoes. The climate clock is running. We have <8 years to be off fossil fuels and you were the only one that was going to do it.

So Bernie, I have to know: WHY?

But it gets so much worse. The Democratic party is propping up a man who has clearly demonstrated all the signs of early onset dementia for over a year. My grandmother, in her last three years alive, had Sundown Syndrome. I spent 4 days a week with her when she was in assisted living. I took her random phone calls at all hours, as she panicked from forgetting where she was. My grandmother, in her worst conversations, was more coherent and lucid than Joe Biden.

Combined with his decades of corruption and moral bankruptcy; giving away the country to Wall Street; funding Nazi paramilitary to overthrow the sovereign government of Ukraine; violating the emoluments clause to enrich himself and his family in office; multiple allegations of sexual assault and abuses against women; racism; his contempt for anyone born after 1965; appetite for endless war; being bankrolled by fossil fuel, banking, and for-profit healthcare interests- in short, existing to serve the robber barons of oligarchy- Joe Biden is unfit to run for any public office ever.

AND YOU KNOW THAT.

How can you abdicate your moral responsibility to help us save this country from the sociopathic rot of neoliberalism to a party that will nominate a man like THAT? ?????????

Bernie, I can’t adequately express in words how very badly I want you to be my president. I’ve never wanted anything so badly in my life.

Not personally, not professionally, nothing. For months as I struggled in my personal life through losses and financial hardship, I tuned in every day to your various events across the country to inspire myself with hope that there really is someone fighting for me, and that there really are millions of Americans that care about me too, and that “Not Me, Us,” really does mean something. I tuned in and I believed we were really going to change the world. I cried- and I mean sobbed- listening to you speak because that’s how bad I wanted to see you win. Because any other outcome is simply untenable to me.

Because, above all, I want a good, honest man to finally be uplifted and celebrated for the tireless work he has done on behalf of humanity.

Above all, I just want to live in a society where we people care about each other.

It hurts my heart to know that for most of your life, you have fought this fight alone. Watching you be ridiculed, dismissed, scoffed at, blamed, condemned, and marginalized- along with all of us- and knowing this is what you have put up with for DECADES and yet you never gave up fighting for us. I raged on your behalf every time I watched you being scurrilously slandered by the media and your peers in the Democratic party.

I lost sleep night after night worrying what we’re all going to do without you if we don’t win this thing. But never- and I mean NEVER- did I imagine that you were going to stop fighting.

The overt corruption in the forms of election fraud, voter suppression, party conspiracy, and media rigging could not be more obvious over the course of the past 15 months since you entered the race this time. I know, because I never paid attention to a primary race like this in my life. Before 2019, I never so much as bothered watching a primary debate, much less followed every poll that came out, and every state race as it happened in exhaustive detail.

THIS WAS RIGGED, BERNIE. You have to know it was rigged. So why haven’t you said something?? Why aren’t you fighting this? Why are you letting them win?

I could not understand why you didn’t fight it in 2016, and I will never understand why you aren’t fighting it now. I waited and waited. Now I feel ashamed, because I have felt compelled to write to you for weeks and beseech you to stay in the race and fight for the nomination, but kept putting it off.

The fact is, with the global climate crisis in full effect, and with your own (albeit measured, polite) acknowledgment of Joe Biden’s failings, and the Democratic party’s nefarious agenda, I never imagined you would let our last chance at the Green New Deal fall into the hands of people that will throw it away. Now I am left wondering if I could have made a difference.

If I ran the world, none of these media hacks that have slandered you would have a job again outside of a Siberian labor camp for the rest of their lives. You don’t deserve the egregious abuse you have sustained, neither do your staff, nor any of us. It has infuriated me to watch the way my own countrymen and women treat the ONE man that has stood up for them for half a century.

It has wrecked any last shred of faith or hope I had for America. I cannot adequately articulate the unimaginable betrayal I feel by my own nation, my country of birth. I am surrounded by people that are for mass genocide. They don’t want me to have healthcare. They are fine with tens of thousands of their countrymen and women dying because they can’t go to a doctor. They celebrate bombing ⅙ of the known world out of existence. They support racism and misogyny. They love ecocide. They deny climate science and can’t wait to send us barreling to extinction, as long as their 401ks are increasing and they have their little fiefdoms intact.

How can we know they are for these things?

BECAUSE THEY KEEP VOTING FOR THEM, AND AGAINST THE ONLY GUY THAT IS FIGHTING AGAINST THESE THINGS.

People are what they will fight for- or, as it were, what they will not fight for.

And I don’t mean just Republicans. I mean the Democrats. ALL of them. The whole cabal of rich people, the Professional Managerial Class, and the Baby Boomers. I have never hated an entire generation more than I have the 87% of Baby Boomers that voted against you, the generation that cannibalized my future and the futures of everyone born after me, for voting against progress and for regress.

This year, I felt hope, inspiration, passion, optimism, aliveness. I felt a future worth living for.

Now, I feel contempt, hatred, disdain, nihilism, misanthropy, cynicism, helplessness, powerlessness, and heartbreak.

I’m never going to be the same again.

Bernie, I know you aren’t quitting to hurt us. I think you are doing this because you decided the global COVID-19 panic is more important. It’s not. We all love you for your enormous heart, and for how you think only of peoples’ welfare. But I feel you have lost the plot. One day, COVID-19 will be over, but the oppressive neoliberal regime of American empire choking this country will continue driving us to destruction. As Frederick Douglass said: “Power concedes NOTHING without a demand. It never has, and it never will.” In losing you, we are losing our last bulwark against this country being completely subsumed by oligarchy.

COVID-19 is just one of an untold number of disasters coming our way as capitalism fails worldwide and climate catastrophe accelerates. It’s nice that you care about that and are somewhat fighting to help people during this time of pandemic. But Bernie- and I say this with a deep love of who you are as a human being- you didn’t fight hard enough. You should never have voted for that bill. You should be using your campaign to call for a national strike. You should be calling for rent strikes, mortgage and utility strikes, loan payment strikes. You should have gone directly to the people of this country with your grievances about the giant bailout of oligarchy that just happened in lieu of helping the people and mobilized millions of us to the streets. Why didn’t you?

Tragically, none of your efforts matter if you aren’t going to be the president. They may matter in spirit, but they will never change a thing. The entire political establishment is one giant cesspool of neoliberal rot and corruption through and through.

They will never implement your policies. They do not care about us. Everyone but you hates the working class. They don’t care if we live or die, as long as they can continue to get rich off of us. We have a government- and a Democratic party- run by sociopaths.

You were the last hope we had of clearing it out, root and stem, and creating a new system apart from the neoliberal hegemony that has destroyed the world for decades. You can’t do that as a Senator. The Democrats aren’t going to do anything you request, no matter how stridently, no matter how much lip service you get them to give you during the rest of the primary- or even afterward. They won’t care how many rallies you do or how many times you entreat your loyal supporters to vote for their horrid neoliberal puppet.

No matter the outcome of the 2020 election, they will blame you for decades- along with all of us. You are the scapegoat of the malignant narcissistic Democrat party machine, and they will never let you win no matter how much you try to play by their rules. The only way you can beat them is by going directly against them.

You gave up all your leverage. And why? You could have told the party you are going to walk away, burn it all down, run third party and take all your support with you. If you had, you would have brought them to heel. You would have won. I am racking my brain for why you didn’t fight, and I can’t come up with a single reason that makes any sense.

Ultimately, while it may I sound like I am blaming you, that would be exceedingly unfair. The reality is that the Democratic party twice committed an unforgivable crime against the American people, and you took an unimaginable amount of fire just fighting as hard as you did.

I’m not blaming you for them. I’m holding you accountable for quitting.

The primary is far from over, no matter what the corporate media or the mentally deficient servants of plutocracy at The View and every other media propaganda factory says. 1,600 delegates remain up for grabs. Thousands of mail-in ballots from previous states are yet uncounted. There is a mere 250-some delegate difference between you and Joe Biden.

And above all, Bernie, as Marianne Williamson so aptly said, THIS WAS A COUP! Come on! We all know this was a coup. There is no way you don’t know that!

Exit poll discrepancies in every state exceed 11%, when the UN standard for election fraud is any discrepancy above 4%.

Three candidates in the race were complicit with buying the Shadow app that was caught changing votes in multiple precincts to them.

Polling places in working class, black, Latino, and young areas were inexplicably closed.

People were turned away for bogus reasons, or scammed into filling out provisional ballots.

Precincts with paper ballots overwhelmingly turned up numbers in your favor, while electronic voting machines- proven in 2016 to be hackable- turned up numbers for Biden and lesser candidates.

Then, Elizabeth Warren stayed in the race just long enough to siphon votes and make you vulnerable to their final plot: Two candidates that were doing infinitely better than Biden- Buttigieg and Klobuchar- inexplicably dropped out to endorse him, while the rest of the party enacted a straight-up heist against you at the height of your momentum.

It cannot be any more obvious that nothing about this primary race is any more legitimate than the last one.

I don’t know what is more excruciating: knowing I am surrounded by a country full of people that would let me die in the streets right in front of them, or that I put my faith in an organizer-in-chief that has decided to quit organizing inches away from the finish line.

So here is where I stand:

1. I need my ActBlue account to be canceled immediately and for all recurring donations to be immediately stopped. While I don’t wish to put you in any personal debt, I want all of my previous donations refunded as well. I refuse to have the money that I scrimped and saved to send to your campaign go to fund the evil psychopaths that just screwed me out of my last chance to have a life worth living in this country- or a planet to live it on.
2. I will not be voting Democrat in the 2020 election, or in any election in the future. I won’t be voting for Joe Biden, nor any other party nominee for presidency, nor any candidate down the ballot on the Democratic ticket. I don’t care what you say, well-meaning as you may be. Save your energy, Bernie, and your time. It won’t matter how many rallies you do for them, how much Trump fearmongering goes on, or how stridently you appeal to us. I can tell you right now that if the 7 million people that were Bernie or Bust in 2016 seemed like a lot, Democrats are about to be gobsmacked by how many of us are #DemExiting now. There’s nothing that you or anyone in this world can do to change our minds.
3. I am now a part of the movement that is actively out to end the Democratic party’s existence. I refuse to legitimize corruption or support an organization that actively wages war against my ability to live. Only with epic failures all the way down the ballot, and a complete crisis of legitimacy, will people wake up to the fact that the working class in this country is done being screwed over by their government and their fellow Americans. The Democrats will never change. Progressives will never be able to “take over” or “change the party from the inside.” That whole story is a farce, it is ignoring decades of evidence to believe otherwise. The fact is that millions of Americans are too selfish to want a country that works for everyone- and many of those millions are Democrat voters. The ones that aren’t selfish are too complacent to stand up and fight. They won’t learn until they suffer pain. My hope is that a Trump administration exacts from them the same price that millions of us have already paid from decades of neoliberalism. Perhaps then- if only out of enlightened self-interest- they will become interested in overcoming their sociopathic tendencies and caring about other people.
4. I stand with Kshama Sawant, Nick Brana, and other movements that are actively organizing to form a viable alternative party in this country and prepare to be on the ballots by 2022. I stand with the Green Party. I stand with whatever party that represents the tenets of your platform (and more) and succeeds at replacing the Democratic party first. I stand with finding an accelerated path toward a viable alternative party because the Earth is declining at an accelerated rate. I stand with doing WHATEVER IT TAKES to get our country off fossil fuels immediately. And I know that will never happen with the Democratic party, no matter what they say.
5. I will be expatriating the United States as soon as I can get the resources together. By “expatriating,” I mean replacing my U.S. citizenship with another, renouncing my American citizenship such that not another dollar of my income goes to this corrupt oligarchy, and never returning to this country again as long as I live. I will go as far away from the U.S-Britain-Israel neoliberal hegemon as possible, outside the influence of the petrodollar Ponzi scheme, and away from any economy dependent on America’s evil symbiosis of resource domination and empire. Let the Americans suffer the consequences of their own stupidity and selfishness. I’m done suffering with them.

Bernie, I can’t tell you how much this hurts my heart. Clearly, it is not your fault that the neoliberal machine steamrolled you. Not even I would expect you to bear the burden of saving the government on your shoulders alone.

But I don’t understand. You have all of us. Why didn’t you use that? We would follow you anywhere. We would fight for you as long as you keep fighting. We would do anything it took to get you into the White House. You may have spent decades doing this alone, but you’re not alone anymore. Why are you leaving us now?

I didn’t think I’d ever recover after what the Democratic party did to you in 2016. I took a leap of faith when you entered the race a second time and chose to believe it would be different. Now they have done it again, and you didn’t fight them. I didn’t believe I would have to live to see this day twice. I have thought of you and Jane as America’s Mom and Dad. You’re the only ones that ever cared about us, or ever will.

You have exemplified the kind of once-in-a-generation compassion, love, and leadership that few people ever get to see in their lifetimes. You were my Eugene Debs. Mandela. Gandhi. In your tireless faith in the American people, you made me re-examine my cynicism and misanthropy toward my fellow man.

And then you quit. Till the day I die, I will remember this as the day I gave up on America- and any semblance of a future- forever.

All I can end with is this: If you truly believe the working class needs your policies, if you truly believe climate change is the singular greatest threat to us all, will you abandon your misguided loyalty to the corrupt Democrat party establishment and keep fighting for us? We’re with you. Millions of us are with you. If you keep fighting, you will win. Howie Hawkins has already offered you his spot on the Green Party ticket. Will you take it?

I’m begging you, Bernie. PLEASE run 3rd party. You really are the last hope we have. No popular movement can survive without powerful electoral support against a corrupt establishment that will stop at nothing to crush us. We can’t do this without you. Please- PLEASE let us make you our president. Otherwise… well, I just give up on everything.

Whomever said this said it well:

“It is a circus. I’m glad no Biden supporters have tried to convince me to vote for him, but in the off chance you want to do so, here’s a convenient response I have pre-prepared for you to read:

I don’t care about beating Trump.

Trump is a clown. A funny clown.

Biden is a puppet of the rich and powerful chosen to remove the clown.

You can maybe remove the clown, but you can’t end the circus.

Palestinian children will die under President Biden.

Immigrant children will be deported under President Biden.

The climate will deteriorate under President Biden.

I won’t have healthcare under President Biden.

I won’t have a living wage under President Biden.

I won’t have my crushing student debt reversed under President Biden.

I will continue to live as a serf under President Biden.

My black and brown brothers and sisters will still be treated like cattle under President Biden.

And you want me to vote for this person?

Nah, man.

Bring on the clown.”

And you can tell this to the Democratic party- from myself and untold numbers of us:

Democrats have succeeded in engineering the final demise of their own party, and radicalized four generations of Americans. They will be wishing for the days of the mild, polite, patient, genteel, moderate Bernie Sanders. For many of us, you were the “compromise candidate.” There’s a revolution coming. As JFK said, “When peaceful revolution is impossible, violent revolution is inevitable.” No one wants violence in this country, least of all myself. But history has proven time and again that when wealth inequality exceeds the levels of the peoples’ tolerance, people rise up against their oppressors- and chaos ensues.

They should have learned while they still had the chance not to mess with millions of people that have nothing left to lose. #DemExit

With utmost regrets,

A Whole Awful Lot of Us