Everything changed with Bernie Sanders.
A movement had started behind him running for the 2016 election. A growing, unstoppable wave of hope and humanity.
No one thought he would win.
The millions of people that knew he would were only emboldened by this wishful thinking of the corporately owned mass media. The liberal and conservative talking heads that were just puppets for their corporate masters.
There was great hope surrounding the 2020 election. Finally, a candidate for the people, for the working class. Bernie promised to end the corporate reign in Washington. He promised to raise minimum wage, address affordable housing, reform the prison industrial complex, cancel student debt, make college free, address climate change, and finally provide universal health care for the people of the US.
These things were decried as radical.
Radical.
Bernie is too radical.
There’s no way he’ll win over the moderates and centrists and conservatives with all this talk of “revolution.”
He’s a socialist!
A communist!
There’s no way I’d vote for a communist.
This country is a capitalist country.
I’m not going to give up my freedom and watch this country turn into the next Soviet Union!
Radical. From Latin “radix,” meaning “root.” Forming the root. To seek a radical solution to existing problems is to address the root cause of said problems.
Wait, what? Isn’t that a good thing? Why are we throwing around the word “radical” as if it’s an insult? Shouldn’t we always try to solve problems by tackling the root cause?
Not according to liberal ideology and its adherents. The movement of bandaid solutions and half measures. Those that would fix capitalism with capitalism. Insisting that things “aren’t that simple” or “it’s complicated.” The group that claims to support the working class yet does nothing to improve its lot. Fights for them yet ensures they remain lesser than the elite group to which they belong.
College is too expensive, yes, yes. How about we throw them a little community college? Or technical school? Yeah, let’s make those affordable. I mean, do these people think they should be going to Berkeley on the public’s dime? My god! “Where would it end?” they wonder as they drive their Teslas and drink $7 soy lattes.
The Republicans, on the other hand, didn’t even attempt solutions. The party of fear, emotion, and tradition. Their platform had truly turned into ensuring that whatever the Democrats tried to do was not done. They talked big during election season, of course. We’ll bring back the jobs that have fled overseas! We need to be tougher on immigration — the lives of those already living here are the priority. Our military is of primary concern. Being the biggest and best and most free country in the world comes with a price — we have many enemies that want to bring us down, but we won’t let them! Why are we sending billions of dollars overseas while neglecting our own citizens? Let’s focus on the US for a while. Let’s Make America Great Again!
Leading up to 2016, people were sick of it all. Both sides were getting nothing done as far as the working class American was concerned. Liberal, conservative — it didn’t matter. Wages had been stagnant for forty years and the cost of living rose like the warming seas. Industries that were once sources of good work had diminished year after year, sending human jobs to third world countries and replacing as much as possible with better and better technology. Companies posting record profits laid increasingly unnecessary human workers off year after year.
Everyone spoke of the AI revolution that was sure to come, not realizing that the revolution had been going on for decades and that they were assisting it. People imagined little robots on factory lines, but the reality was less obvious and more insidious than that. With each software update, each new feature, each new version, people’s jobs were becoming easier. A single worker wielding a smartphone or tablet could get more work done in a day than an entire team of people could have done ten years before.
Workers praised the tech and how it was making the work day easier, less stressful. Wow! That new feature has turned what took me twenty boring minutes into an easy snap of a photo. They’d communicate directly with the software companies making these tools, telling them exactly how to take their human skills and convert them to software. They weren’t necessarily automating themselves out of jobs as the media would say; they were making themselves so productive that there were just far fewer people needed at all. Those that adopted and embraced technology were still necessary and sought after. They could even demand high pay in some cases. A single worker adept at putting a suite of applications to use would ensure a handful of others doing the same job didn’t even need to exist. A good investment for the capitalist.
With the need of human work on the decline, the labor market was saturated. People competed for minimum wage jobs that wouldn’t even pay their bills. Everyone was turning to gig work, monetizing every moment of the day. Minimum wage job by day, ride-sharing or delivering food for one of the many delivery apps by night. Time not spent making money was time wasted.
People were miserable. All day and night chasing money that was never enough. Even the lucky ones were suffering. The ones with good jobs that still couldn’t make a dent in their student loans. No one was buying homes or having children. Marriage was saved for the comfortable future that never came.
Republicans saw this misery and suffering and provided an explanation. The problem was The Other. Foreign countries were taking our manufacturing jobs. Immigrants were pouring into the country and taking the remaining jobs here. Gay and transgender rights and radical feminism and political correctness had taken precedence over the Christian values this country was built upon. Whatever the particular problem, The Other was to blame.
Democrats saw this misery and suffering and… Well, they didn’t really have an explanation. “It’s complicated.” The party of kind words and inaction, they acknowledged that people were miserable, but didn’t provide a story like the Republicans did. They spoke about improving healthcare, but never achieved anything. They spoke of reigning in Wall Street with better regulation and taxing the extremely wealthy, all while taking donations and funding from these same groups and individuals behind closed doors.
Wolves. All of them. At least the Republicans didn’t bother with the sheep’s clothing.
Both parties knew the reason for the misery of the masses, but they couldn’t name it, for their lucrative careers and comfortable lives depended on it.
Bernie Sanders and a handful of progressive politicians called the suffering by its name: Capitalism.
See, those in the US were taught to love capitalism. So much so that even saying the word aloud caused a tension, a gut reaction to defend as if one’s very freedom and well-being were under attack. A truly spectacular feat of selective US history and economics taught in school combined with biased media coverage that put a constant positive spin on the very thing responsible for the widespread misery. It all amounted to what some might call “propaganda.”
It may not be perfect, but it’s the best out there.
Capitalism is as American as apple pie!
Rugged individualism and healthy competition — it’s what made this country the best in the world.
Anyone can make it. All it takes is a good idea and some old fashioned hard work.
But Bernie was rare in this time of misery and blind love for capitalism. He spoke the truth.
Capitalism doesn’t just passively allow the economic suffering of the masses; it requires it. It’s not some unfortunate side effect of technological development and foreign competition. It’s not the result of individuals’ work ethics. It is the very lifeblood of capitalism itself.
Capitalism insists, no, demands that there are poor people. If there were no poor, desperate workers, then who would seek out the meaningless, minimum wage drudgery that one can barely scrape by on? The jobs that can’t yet be filled by robots or software or sent abroad.
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The United States of America. The land of billionaires and homeless people. Freedom and incarceration. CEOs walk on the same sidewalks that people sleep on. Trump boasts of multi-trillion dollar military spending while Democrats and Republicans lament that universal healthcare would bankrupt the country. Corporate executives fight against raising the minimum wage as they pay themselves multi-million dollar bonuses.
And what of the workers? What are the working masses up to as the rich get richer?
They’re fighting against each other of course. Another brilliant feature of capitalism. See, when life itself is so expensive, people will do anything for work. There was always someone squeezed just a little bit harder, that could tolerate just a little bit more hardship than the next person. These people accepted lower and lower wages. They worked in factories with ibuprofen in vending machines and they peed in plastic bottles on the line so they didn’t have to take a break and risk being labeled as lazy and getting fired. They piled as many people as possible into single apartments, splitting the ever increasing rent by as many heads as could fit. After their day jobs they’d come online for one of the many gig work companies. Sitting in their cars, waiting for a ping to go pick someone up or deliver some food.
That’s how it went for the fortunate ones. The ones in cities that still had factories and offices and gig work as an option. For those in rural areas and small towns, even these options didn’t exist. Here people turned to alcohol, drugs, and television. All forms of escape from the misery they called life.
This was the environment that led to Donald Trump being elected in 2016, and it had only grown worse in the four years leading up to the 2020 election. People took a chance on Trump because he seemed to be different than the standard politician that made promises every election season and then went about business as usual once elected, but he turned out to do just that and then some.
The people were even more frustrated than in 2016. The media called Bernie radical and socialist and some even falsely accused him of being a communist. The major players tried their best to portray him in a negative light and they succeeded, but their success had unintended consequences. The light reflected back on them.
The New York Times and The Washington Post and CNN and Fox News were so obviously triggered by Bernie that their hatred and negative reporting transformed into an endorsement.
Clinging to the status quo that kept them in their high rise lofts and tailored suits had turned pathetically desperate. Rich executives were brought on to talk about how socialism would erode society. Erode society? People are living in tents under the bypass and mothers are starting fundraisers to pay for their kids’ medical bills, and we’re supposed to believe some rich asshole that says socialism is a threat to society? Hillary Clinton — an extremely unpopular politician known for losing to Trump in 2016 — was being interviewed by her corporate media friends and saying that no one likes Bernie. A ringing endorsement.
The time for real change had arrived. Bernie’s popularity grew and grew with each pathetic attempt to discredit him or paint him as some cruel communist that didn’t care about America.
He was fighting for universal healthcare and increased wages and affordable housing and free education and environmental health and access to good, meaningful work. He was certainly bad for the rich Americans that had come to dominate politics and the media, but tell me again how he’s bad for America.
The night Bernie won was the happiest in the United States in a long time. Laughter, tears, fireworks, people running and dancing in the streets. Watch parties went on until the early morning hours.
In an era of what felt like constant doom and anxiety, this was the first truly good thing the public had experienced in too long.
The celebrators reveled in this victory. It was hope in action. Maybe there was time to right this ship; to preserve the environment and keep the species from spiraling into catastrophe and non-existence.
There were of course those that did not celebrate on that evening. Billionaires shuddered at the thought of paying their fair share of taxes and being lesser billionaires. Conservatives that somehow still believed the false rhetoric asserting that Bernie would usher in an era of neo-Stalinism were angry and scared. Hosts on Fox and CNN looked like they’d been punched in the stomach.
It took a surprisingly small amount of time for Bernie to start knocking the goals off his list once he entered office. The House had a Democratic majority and the Senate a Republican one, but neither party liked Bernie. Many feared that he would run into political roadblock after roadblock in an effort to render him ineffective, so that they could put some corporate crony back in the White House in 2024.
They did not anticipate just how active and engaged the public would remain after the election.
Normally the public’s excitement lasted through election year and then they went back to their normal lives, hoping that the new president would actually make things a little better over the next few years, and then they’d revisit the whole election issue again in the fourth year.
Not this time.
Bernie had truly built a grassroots movement. A movement that started to get a feel for how they — the masses — could organize and accomplish their collective goals. There would be no more empty political promises left to die on the campaign trail as a helpless public sat idly by, hoping for better luck next president.
The Bern app — the mobile app that helped volunteers organize for Bernie’s election campaign — underwent some updates after the election. Each issue that Bernie and his team were fighting for had a page. The status of the effort was closely monitored and shared. Roadblocks were listed and explained. If there were private interest groups or individuals attempting to block these efforts intended to make Americans’ lives better, well, they were listed too. Those standing in the way of improving the life of the working class American were now unable to hide. Their reasons for doing what they were doing were listed and explained on the app, along with their relevant contact information.
In early 2021 a Republican senator from Kentucky attempted to delay the raising of the minimum wage. People throughout the nation were made immediately aware. There was the usual calling of his office and plenty of Tweeting by those outside of Kentucky, but Bernie had encouraged people to focus less on online action and more on real life action. Through the Bern app the people of Kentucky were organized. They marched in Louisville, Paducah, Bowling Green, London, Fort Wright, and Lexington. They marched in every town and city that had informed people ready to fight for themselves, and this turned out to be a lot of people.
Due to the increased protections of the worker against unreasonable termination and the passing of universal healthcare, people were emboldened to march on a Monday, effectively peppering the state of Kentucky with small general strikes, tapping the pause button on these local economies. Businesspeople were forced into action as well. With boots on the ground and business on the phone, the Kentucky senator changed his position within the day.
An informed public made mobile. The democracy everyone in the US had forever talked about was finally being lived. No more voting and hoping. No more public promises and private deals. This was representative democracy at its finest. The masses weren’t directly calling the shots, but they were paying attention and unafraid to let their representatives know what they wanted.
This was the biggest accomplishment of Bernie’s campaign.
An accomplishment that could and would outlast a single president. The specific goals and policies were important and it took someone like Bernie to get them off the ground, but this was what mattered.
This is what would change American democracy once and for all.
A grassroots movement. An informed and active public putting technology and the internet to work for good rather than just profit and anger.
The masses had woken up. They now saw what had been hidden from them for too long.
Finally they realized the power that had always been theirs.
