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Willow, very relevant thoughts. Just a response to one part:
Project Willow » Fri Apr 10, 2020 9:14 pm wrote:How is it Bernie was allowed to go even this far when others in similar scenarios past have been easily defeated or disappeared from political life or altogether?
Well, notwithstanding the probability of the answer you gave, it's not just him.
The coalescence around the Sanders campaign is the latest, not the only and not the last iteration of movements that have manifested and continue to manifest in the immigrant rights marches, Occupy Wall Street, the early days of the Wisconsin uprising, the eco-rebellions, Black Lives Matter, Fight for $15, the ongoing trade union organizing and strike waves, and to a lesser extent the anti-war movement. It is the latest expression of tens of millions of people and especially the youth awakening to all the lies of the system, a response to the crises of the times, just when the young (an age group that ranges from the teens into the 40s) have less and less and less to lose.
The systemic antagonists to this are neither all-powerful nor always and everywhere united, nor entirely unwilling to show toleration. When these movements combine and mutate and go electoral (or, in this case, to give him his credit, when Sanders provides that chance through the clearest, most militant and uncompromising expression of a social democratic platform in more than 40 years, something that is very far to "the left" on the American scene),
then the PTB or some of them may indeed understand the danger that it can spread and become more popular and conscious if they tolerate it;
but, at the same time, the structural set-up of the "democracy" also allows what we just saw transpire in early March: rapid coordinated shock-and-awe maneuvers on many fronts to suppress the movement's electoral expression and to make that look like its genuine endogenous failure to win a majority.
Here's what we as veteran observers fail to see or forget: that was incredibly close, the movement is large and mainstream and growing, there's been nothing to compare to it in size or potential in about 50 years and it's bigger, younger, and on the rise, also more diverse and less consolidated. Times are unusually and irreversibly unstable, and what happens next is unpredictable and contingent. The last is true in spite of all the different horror scenarios we can easily plot out. Everyone's got a short window emotionally, so we get these feelings of defeat when actually it's an unusual time and nothing's set in stone -- not even after the presumed reelection of the fellow trying to play the American Hitler. History is not on forced repeat.
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