this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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It's not really arguable, of course he is a liberal. He supports capitalism and its ideology.
He confuses people by saying that socialism is when you have universal government-funded healthcare and points to places like Norway, which is a capitalist country.
I see that as him stooping to their level to convey the idea of a better system using the concepts they understand.
As for him advocating Harris, party disunity can be a global win if the electoral system uses some kind of proportional representation, but in a FPTP system party loyalty is important before an election. The progressives should start to criticize their government once that government is in power (not a given right now), not before.
Bernie isn't playing a strategic game to offer a socdem vision. One could maybe argue that when he was getting the spotlight during his presidential runs. But after 4 straight years of being a sheepdog for the Democrats that are currently committing a genocide to prop up its settler-colonial asset in the Middle East, we know better. Bernie is to the right of basically anyone currently reachable with his 2016/2020 platform and literally nobody is hearing him provide such a vision because he isn't talking about those things. There is no plan.
The Democratic Party is a liberal party. Being in unity with a liberal party makes you a liberal. The voting system is totally independent of this. There have been non-electoral liberal parties and non-electoral socialist parties.
What you are describing is that Bernie thinks of his alleged principles as subordinate to liberal party interests.
If they want any pretense at influencing the political class they need to build and use leverage. Criticizing politicians is part of leverage, it is creating a way in which people could consider not voting for them if they don't change the thing that was criticized. In American bourgeoois electoralism, agonizing over individual votes is the only thing commonly understood as something akin to leverage.
Your logic here is the complete reverse. You are saying to not criticize or make demands when you have leverage (a vote you could cast in way you want) and to only try to push after you have given up your leverage (voted).
There's also plenty of recent history showing how Dem politicians, particularly presidents, 100% do not care what you think once they are in office. They don't have to, do they? You're going to hold your tongue, hold your nose, and vote for them anyways! All they need us to trot out the same PR lines every 4 years and stack up enough cash for campaigning or, in this election, not be noticeably senile.
I still see his actions as rational.
It's a two party system. If you want to get into a position where you can enact change, you pretty have much have to be subordinate to one party or another.
If your party is guaranteed a landslide victory (or hell, guaranteed no victory), then by all means feel free to state your true beliefs in a bid to drag them back to the left.
But this is going to be a close call election. Better to sleep with a tired donkey who might let you have a voice later, than a deaf elephant who will let you have no voice at all.
That us how the fairy tale goes, yes. The more accurate way to describe it is that if you want to join the political class as a member of one if the two major parties (which makes it easier to do so), you must not cross their red lines and you must fall in line.
There is more that could be said about that, but Bernie was elected as an independent and has a safe seat. As such, he could provide a vision and build a movement if he wanted to. Instead, he supports genocide. There is no strategem. It is just an old liberal supporting the system he has supported since the 80s.
This is the same false logic I addressed in my previous comment.
The opposite is actually the case. It was far easier to advocate left ideas under Trump than under Biden. Liberals go to sleep between elections when their party is at the helm. They become the defenders of the status quo rather than "the resistance" (lol).
The things you are saying are lines handed down by PR strategists hired by the party over decades. They are not true, just common and often repeated. Their purpse is just to keep you a reliable voter despite them not delivering for you.
If you are elected into a position where you can enact change, those who elected you have expectations of you based on the policy you supported during the election.
If, then, you turn around and do something completely different your actions no longer reflect the will of those who elected you, and you are not behaving in a representative manner and thus in an undemocratic way.
So ignoring anything specific to the American system, class interests, etc., it is a losing battle to try and be anything different from the status quo and getting elected by aligning yourself with the status quo.
A communist who gets elected by siding with a fascist is no longer a communist. A liberal cannot be a liberal if they denounce capitalism and side with socialists. They are fundamentally different ideas of who the political economy is designed for, completely contradictory ideas about hierarchy, property rights, human rights, and even what constitutes truth (liberal ideas are often utopian, like the "rational economic man", and socialist/communist ideas are often based in the reality of the current and past material conditions, like believing people need homes and food, and a wealthy society should be able to provide these for itself, so people get homes and food. In contrast a liberal society would let the "market" provide these things in whatever way is profitable.
Sanders is a capitalist?
Unless you’ve heard Sanders call for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, yes, he is a capitalist. At best he’ll say It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism. He’ll never call for an end to it, only mitigations of it.
He is a liberal, a supporter of capitalism.