...or a Democratic majority.
It just stood outside of the party as if it was an outside interest, when the party is actually a coalition of myriad concerns and interests from diverse and often disparate regions of the nation which coalesce together to advance what they agree on and work to effect the rest of their ideals.
What Sanders appeals to is a false notion that there's some other force that's preventing them from advancing their initiatives that's not the republican party.
It's messaging operates in a void where there isn't a concern for the actual numbers needed to obtain a Democratic majority (the ONLY realistic legislative vehicle for ANY of their concerns raised), but tilts against the entire system because, as I believe, they find it too hard to do the actual work of compromise, especially at the end of the primary process where it's essential that we defeat the actual barrier to all of our aims; the republican opponent.
Instead they rely on this navelgazing sophistry that the party isn't doing enough to convince THEM to do the one thing that would animate all of the democratic action they purport to pine for - show up at election day and vote for the leading Democratic candidate - and when we fall short of the votes we need, they blame the system for that fecklessness of theirs.
As a voter who makes that compromise for Democrats each and every election, I loath the apathy that masquerades as virtue and sits on its hands or uses elections to 'send a message' which only enables republicans.
And here's the thing. Sanders has never owned up to his responsibility to the ultimate fate of the party that he so opportunistically uses to drape over himself in presidential elections, but discards the minute he fails to wedge enough support away from the majority candidate (and their supporters).
If he wants to do something monumental, then take responsibility for a Democratic majority; the same way other political forces unify their own coalitions in other democracies. Don't just lead people outside of that process and deliver little in the end except apathy and pique.
Did his rallies lead people to vote for the Democratic nominee? Lead them to vote for a Democratic majority?
I ask this because, it should be clear by now that the utopia that is conjured in every instigation of his 'movements' of a transformation of the political landscape - which is a binary choice between a party that's trying to end or own us, and one that regularly advances progressive initiatives when in the majority- is an ephemeral one that doesn't last past the election cycles as generations come and go from the electorate.
Politics is transient, and our lives are more immutable than the political games people play, ostensibly on our behalf. It shouldn't be too much to ask that they take responsibility for obtaining a majority first, and argue the finer points along with the rest of us in a process that WE control as a COALITION.
The democratic system accommodates both dominance and compromise, and voters regularly tug it back and forth to achieve compromise that feels like a balance between those forces.
It doesn't make any sense to pretend as if the ideals that Sanders expresses and gets support for represent something apart from what most of the party wants in the ideal, but is actually engaged in achieving what's possible.
Likewise, if you take time to look at the polling, ALL of the issues that Democrats represent, to the exclusion of almost all of the republicans. are overwhelmingly supported by the vast majority of the country right now. So this notion that people don't believe in the government should be easily understood by that same majority as the fault of the idiot acting like a maniacal megalomaniac right in front of them who's actively taking things away from them.
So what's the political genius in trying to portray our Democratic coalition as splintered; or the efficacy in making like Sanders has a patent on progressive aspirations, apart from the actual Democrats who produce landmark progressive advancements in the majority, and are still there standing up as best they can without the tools voters neglected to provide them with to actually do more than vote 'no' on republican initiated bills.
Some people seem to think elected Democrats are there to convince THEM to show up on election day and take responsibility for a Democratic majority against a quasi-dictatorship. That's what Sanders supposed in each of his presidential runs, and he got the response he asked for; his way or the highway.
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