Permanently Deleted
bernie was destroyed. he clearly doesn’t have another presidential campaign in him. the party said :bugs-no:. he bent the knee. let the poor guy rest.
at the less spectacular level of local politics, a bunch of DSA branches are involved with campaigns for demsoc candidates. turns out politics is actually hard, whether it’s elections, labor organizing, mutual aid, terrorism, whatever, it really does amount to slow boring of hard boards.
Buffalo, NY literally elected a socialist as the Democratic nominee for mayor last year. In a district where the Republican never wins and the Democrat always wins the mayoral race. After that, Buffalo considered abolishing the position of mayor. That didn’t happen, but what did happen is that the establishment stooge who lost the primary decided to run as an independent in the general, got millions upon millions in funding from corporate donors, got the full support of the Democratic party, and ran a huge propaganda campaign against the socialist insurgent. The socialist lost. Propaganda works! Especially when the media is created, controlled, and funded by capitalists.
So, people can be excused for being a little bit hopeless for democratic socialism in America.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/11/buffalo-new-york-india-walton-mayoral-election-byron-brown
Three things (1) Bernie was defeated (2) after his defeat, lots of DSA people poured energy into BLM/George Floyd protest. BLM was defeated. (3) The pandemic. This disrupted organizing (which was already weak). Some people were comfortable organizing or had more time to organize, this was disrupted by the pandemic “ending” last year.
DSA in my area is still doing shit, but from what I understand they have greatly reduced capacity from what they had in 2020.
I’m cautiously very optimistic about what happens when the pandemic ends (meaning it becomes endemic, aka less deaths than the flu)
The left is the most suppressed by the pandemic, because they’re the least willing to murder people.
There might be a lot of in person organizing pent up
Here I was thinking the BLM protests were possible in part BECAUSE of the plague shutting things down and causing economic strife.
That’s true, but the BLM protests were a new organizing. Whatever organizing was happening before the start of the pandemic was disrupted.
Covid had a mix of seemingly contradictory effects; like I stated in (3) covid both disrupted organizing and gave some more time/motivation to organize.
The Bernie shit fizzled out and died because Bernie lost, but plenty of people are still doing things - see for example all of the labor organizing. Bigger things will take a long time and a lot of work to materialize, and will only attract mass appeal when the circumstances become more desperate.
The Bernie campaign was never “everything”.
Giving a shout out to Therednation.org bc Indigenous people have always been resisting the amerikkkan empire.
COVID happened, everyone went inside and never came back out.
