The Sinking “Progressive” Ship, the SS Bernie

I really hate to break it to many of you Bernie die-hards, but you are on a ship that has been sinking for years.

Actually, the ship has been sinking for almost 50 years. It started to sink in 1968, when some “college educated” white liberals decided to give up everything they had gained since 1932 and go off on their own. You may think it’s coincidence, but this decision was made at about the same time Republicans were denouncing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and openly recruiting the Dixiecrats into their ranks. Now, I would like to believe it’s coincidence, but listen to these people, will you? When I read the professional left and the far left Bernie Stans, their rhetoric sounds very much the same as that coming from what we have come to call the “alt-right.” You think I’m kidding? Consider last year’s election for a clue.

Hillary Clinton was selling hope and a continuation of Obama’s laudable work as president. Keep in mind, President Obama and Democrats worked their asses off to prevent a full-on depression and they did so. In the process created the longest and sanest growth rate we have seen since the 1960s.

On the other hand, to hear Donald Trump tell it, this country had actually gone into that depression and never recovered. He tried to sell us an “actual” 42 percent unemployment rate. He claimed that all of the economic numbers were fake and he sold the country as a veritable hellscape.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, with the full acquiescence and encouragement of the same groups of people who abandoned the Democratic Party in 1968, joined by clueless millennials who think the “hippies” of the 1960s were somehow politically successful (go ahead and name one success — even Vietnam continued for five more years and spread to all of Indo-China), was selling a vision that wasn’t all that different from Trump’s. To hear the professional left and the Bernie Stans tell it, everyone was starving, middle class families were destitute and the only thing that could save us was a vote for Bernie. Really; tell is the difference between the Trump and Sanders hellscape message. It’s harder than it looks.

Bernie Sanders and his most fervent followers spent two solid years trashing Hillary and trashing the Democratic Party and swearing that the vast majority of Americans were living hand to mouth and that the “one percent” had its boot on the neck of the “99 percent” and were about to crush us like a bug. I mean we were all living in hell and “Wall Street” was basically Satan. Hillary and Obama were essentially “corporate shills” and everyone who supported either one of them was a sellout. Please don’t tell me you never heard from these people what a “murderer” Obama was with his drone program and how Hillary wanted to bomb everything in sight.

These folks didn’t even seem to notice that Bernie was never very popular with most people. They also didn’t seem to notice that 90 percent of those who supported Bernie in the primaries happily supported Hillary in the general election and that the #BernieorBust idiots were a tiny-but-loud group that no one liked. They didn’t even seem to notice that Bernie himself gave his full-throated support to Hillary Clinton, albeit far too late. His supporters actually were allowed into the Democratic Convention, even though they weren’t Democrats for the most part and the Democratic Party even gave them a seat at the table. Yet, like the spoiled white children they are, they acted like little shits, demanding special treatment and special deference. And why?

Because they’re white and they think they are entitled to special deference.

That’s right; the professional left tends to be racist as shit. What else can you call it but that? They tend to be condescending and dismissive of People of Color. Does anyone else remember when Hillary did the leg work in the South and beat the living shit out of Bernie? I do. I also remember the Bernie Stans’ reactions — the dismissal of the losses because they were “in the Confederacy — and Democrats weren’t going to win those, anyway.” Most Democrats in the South are People of Color. They were dismissing People of Color as unimportant, even though they are the Democratic Party base and Bernie was running as a Democrat.

These same people obviously only voted for Obama because he was black and they thought they would “saddle” the right wing with him for a while. As soon as he was elected, they turned on him, in large part because of is tendency to try to build consensus. They misconstrued his attempts to “reach across the aisle” as something dirty. It was as if he was, I don’t know, reaching out to a hostile foreign country to rig an election or something. This is actually good politics. When he reached across the aisle and the Republicans slapped him down, that should have made progressives mad as hell — AT REPUBLICANS. However, these so-called “progressives” on the professional left, who think their shit doesn’t stink and who think they’re experts at politics, took Obama to task for reaching across the aisle in the first place. Because of the FAR LEFT, Democrats lost in 2010 and 2014 and it was only President Obama’s phenomenal political skill that prevented full disaster in 2012.

Of course, it goes back farther than that. These same assholes trashed Kerry in 2004 and Gore in 2000, to make two presidential elections close enough for Republicans to steal. They trashed Dukakis as much as the right wing did, thus prolonging the disastrous Saint Reagan reign of error and in 1980, they went after Jimmy Carter, the most liberal president in history, if we’re being honest, intheir quixotic quest to get Ted Kennedy elected president, in spite of the fact that Kennedy himself couldn’t articulate why he was running. Hell; he couldn’t even say he wanted to be president.

In other words, while wish I could blame this all on Bernie, this psychology has been around for a long time. These same assholes have been doing this since 1968. They demand perfection from Democrats, based on a definition of “progressive” that has no basis in reality.

Here’s the reality.

The Democratic Party is the “party of the people” these “progressives” claim they want. I mean, come on; the only people who don’t embrace the Democratic Party and its politics are white men, both very rich and very poor. Look over at the Republican Party. Never has the word “base” described any group of people so perfectly. These are the dregs of society. No, not all Republicans are racist, but most racists are Republican. Unless they’re independent. More on that in a minute.

Of course, many racists also occupy the “independent” space because they believe they’re too “good” to belong to a political party. Political “independents” live in a bubble so cordoned off from reality that they believe things that aren’t true. For right wing “independents,” they believe Donald Trump won the popular vote and that Lord Donny is doing an amazing job, even though he’s really done nothing, really. However, if you don’t think left wing “independents” don’t occupy much the same bubble, think again.

• NO — Bernie did not “almost win” the Democratic nomination. In a two-person race, he barely got 42 percent of the vote. He won almost no primaries, in which Democrats cast votes.
• NO — Bernie’s “free college for everyone” was NOT popular with most people. In fact, it’s a phenomenally stupid idea for many reasons. (Saving that for another column.)
• NO — “Single Payer” is NOT the issue. The issue is universal healthcare and “single payer” is not the only way to achieve that.
• NO — Hillary was not actually “unpopular.” In fact, if you would bother to look at the polls, the difference between Hillary’s and Bernie’s “unfavorables” was almost entirely based on name recognition. Everyone in the world knows who Hillary Clinton is. About 20% of the population neither knows nor cares who Bernie Sanders is.
• NO — Bernie Sanders is NOT a “front runner” for 2020. Not that it matters, anyway, since we have to start saving the nation in 2017 and 2018 before we even THINK about 2020. There are no “front runners” THREE YEARS before a presidential election.
• NO — Bernie Sanders is not more “pure” because he claims he only raised money from small donations. He lost. And if you know nothing else about politics, know tat not winning means you have no influence in the electorate.
• YES — If you call yourself a progressive, you have to be a Democrat. Not just vote for one once in a while, either; you have to BE one.
• YES — If you supported Bernie Sanders to the extent that you felt it necessary to trash Hillary Clinton, even though she was on the same side, you DID help elect Donald Trump.
• YES — If you are a white liberal and you don’t support the Democratic Party because they don’t kiss your ass, you are racist. That’s because the BASE of the Democratic Party is now People of Color. It is Latinos. It is first and second-generation immigrants. It is women. It is LGBT people. So, basically, when you demand that Democrats kiss your ass, you are demanding that Black Women, who are the Democratic Party’s core — kiss your white ass. Surely, you can see how someone might see that as racist.

Think about it. Bernie Sanders is done. As the latest figurehead to steer this “progressive” vessel, he is essentially sinking it. He’s telling professional lefties what they want to hear, without regard to whether or not it’s politically feasible. He’s telling Democrats how to win, even though he hasn’t won shit. His lickspittle followers claim they want all kinds of great things for the country, but they are not willing to do the work necessary to get it done. The ship is sinking under its own weight. That means, unicorn and pro lefties, you have two choices. You can either get on the Democratic ship and do whatever is necessary to make progressive things happen, or you can go down with the Bernie Stan ship.

Your choice.

Originally published at PCTC.