Anarchistbear said:
Bernie didn't fail. He was hugely successful. First of all the idea that an old guy from Vermont who is not even a Democrat would have any success was laughable but he won 23 states. More importantly he created a grassroots organization all over the country and he changed the dialogue. Bernie's positions- universal health care, workers rights, free higher education are no longer fringe; they are now common policies among front runners for President and Bernie's organization will largely be responsible for who will be that nominee. Any nominee in 2020 will embrace these policies or will be ignored. Politics is about the future. Bernie's decision to run against Clinton unleashed a pent up demand for a change in our politics and our leaders. That change won't come from Republicans talking to Democrats but replacing everyone in the way
I agree with everything you say except for the last sentence, and except that I think you are missing something.
Had Bernie been capable of talking (realistically - easy to say, hard to do) about:
(a) how these ideas could actually be manifested,
(b) the ECONOMIC benefits (many close to at least stated Republican principles, e.g., fiscal responsibility, massive economic growth from un-leashing the creative possibilities of the massive numbers of people currently denied access to meaningful higher education - not to mention the great national power, virtue and benefit for all that comes with working together in real, actually funded and encouraged ways), and
(c) how people could actually overcome the fractures in our society (and there are so many ways . . .), I think now (in hindsight) that he in fact WOULD HAVE won.
AND, I think that many of his followers have the same blind spot, which, even if they win and get into Congress, will do much better as legislators by working all the time on how to get these ideas actually enacted - which, of course does in part mean getting more of our own kind into the institution. But, even with that, we all know that there is enough push-back from money to influence enough politicians to create enough problems to (by hook or by crook) take a lot of effectiveness out of the most originally well thought through legislation.
It's an interesting question as to whether going-for-the-throat and pushing a cultural wave to the max politics is more effective in actually actuating these salutary policies, than are politics which try not to hide from the electorate the real barriers to salutary change in our terribly imperfect and fractured country, but to talk more forcefully about how to overcome them. I'm inclined to think (contrary to my own argument and beliefs) that our political system is so clumsy and out of date that only such crude damn the torpedoes full speed ahead tactics are capable of moving the ship of state - but I do believe that they carry terrifically bad, backlash-type, consequences.
Indeed, it would seem that, among other things, the Constitution was set-up to avoid such see-saws by its notorious "checks and balances". But it also seems as though human beings are always capable of destruction.
So, maybe what I am slouching toward is the notion that care and carefulness not to throw the baby out with the bathwater should neither be nor be seen to be necessarily a conservative or right wing position; but rather as pointing towards a more-perfect, or say more benignly developed way of running a government which is of the people, by the people and for the people, in the organic way that its real-world necessity in human affairs demands - a thought that there might be some better ways as we go along of manifesting and achieving the goals set forth in this country's founding documents.