The trouble is that the commie take on Bernie - that he would ultimately prove to have his biggest impact in pushing left wing voters to vote for Democrats, rather than in "pushing Democrats left" - has proven to be indisputably true. The sheepdog allegations may not be kind or useful, but they are simply factually correct.
Well I don't know that it's indisputable. The Bernie campaign wanted and tried to attract a big wave of disaffected nonvoters to the cause but it never materialized. So given that his support in the primaries came mostly from the traditional Democratic base (i.e. people who would've voted for some other Democrat had Bernie not been around) I'm not sure who he's supposed to have sheepdogged. A couple dozen people like me who registered as Democrats to vote for him in the primary then went back to hating the party once they ratfucked him?
Sanders “ratfucked” himself a loooong time ago. The guy is a russiagating con-man that never gave a speech that didn’t come from his ass. Rehearsed, canned and devoid of personal conviction. And as far as that cutesy title of yours, you flatter yourself. Because you once spoke in canned platitudes hardly means you were once “radicalized.” This whole column is as filthy and delusional as the man himself.. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need a shower..
I was pretty all-in on Bernie around 2016 but as the years have gone on, I've cooled towards him. Watching him shill for Harris on CNN's election night coverage this past year was...a moment.
Of course he supported Harris. The Democratic party is a PARTY. You have internal differences in the primaries, and then you coalesce behind the candidate. If Bernie had won, should Harris have refused her support?
He's not a Democrat though, he's an Independent. He only caucuses with th Dems because they were at one point closer to his beliefs than the Republicans were, but I don't think that's true anymore.
The idea that socialists vote for Democrats because primarily Bernie Sanders told them to and not because voting is pretty low effort and in the vast majority of elections Democrats are closest to that view seems pretty unsubstantiated to me.
Exactly — and I’m not saying this in the tone of some disgruntled tiktoker; it’s more so a pragmatic realization about the “organization” Jen is talking about here. When there’s no third option or dirty break, where do the hopeful socialists go when their only options left are establishment dems & will be again and again because they’ve proved they own the Democratic Party and will not let a socialist switch up the whole game, like over their dead donor-funded bodies?
Again I’m not even being mad or mean, I’m genuinely asking and genuinely wanting us to get clear about this and focus on a solution, because I think the pattern will continue this next election cycle. This is why I think Bernie is the one to shepherd us into a labor party in alliance with labor organizers but … you know cough cough, here we are.
We need a third party, but those can never get off the ground in our current electoral system. On election day, third party votes become protest votes, and we never find out, for example, how many Democratic voters would have voted Green if they thought Green could win. In the 2000 election, the Green Party was accused of giving the election to Bush, by "siphoning off" Democratic voters; yet probably the siphoning went the other way, with many Greens voting Democratic because a Green vote was a vote for Bush. The Greens then, and third parties in general, can build up during campaigns but then crash on election day.
I ran into the same problem in the primaries, when campaigning for Bernie in 2016. People supported Bernie's platform, but we're worried that Clinton was more likely to beat Trump, so they voted for her. People cannot vote their true preference.
That's why we need ranked choice voting. If Bernie could have run 3rd party, and people could vote #1 Bernie, #2 Harris, then people could freely vote their true preferences, we'd see how much support Bernie really had, he could support the Democrat for the #2 choice without appearing to compromise his positions, and the Democratic party internal shenanigans would become irrelevant to him.
In his two runs as an insurgent within the Democratic Party, Bernie got a million times closer to the presidency than any socialist third party in HISTORY. He also inspired tens of thousands of young people who are now DSA members, winning down-ballot races etc. Amazing to me that because he lost twice and suggested that people take five minutes to vote against Trump that some ostensible socialists want to give up and go back to the bad old days of symbolic protest votes for Jill Stein. Imagine if the far right had this kind of loser mentality— they would never.
Kind of a silly allegation. People put too much on an 80+ year old man. Bernie did what he could and there is really nowhere to go right now. The last serious attempt at making a third party was the labor party in the 90s and that didn't pan out because the labor movement began to decline.
People are upset about "sheepdogging", but what are the other options? To make something viable would require more than just withholding support for Democrats. They're at an all time low in terms of approval ratings, but an alternative needs to actually be built for that to mean anything.
Bernie will never run for president again. His apparent successor, AOC, lost her nerve once she got a taste of the good life. Unless Lina Khan runs, things are looking pretty bleak for at least the next decade.
What is that big DSA doing, though? A genuine question, if you’re a member of a local DSA chapter, what’re you doing as a chapter? I’m a member of my cities DSA— and I certainly appreciate their work— but it feels big tent to the point of nothing specific. And what is the makeup of those 70 thousand members? According to the 2021 survey data:
-85% of DSA members identified as non-Hispanic white
-60% are millennials
-15% are unemployed, disabled, retired. 13% are white collar. 10% are teachers, scholars, academics. (These are the 3 largest labor demographics)
-52% attend chapter meetings, 34% organize with chapter WG/committee, 20% attend training events hosted by chapter
(All verbiage lifted verbatim from the survey document; most data excluded for sake of brevity)
This is of course when the DSA was at its peak of 91k, so a bit different, but I cannot find more recent data.
perhaps a better question to ask yourself is what you're doing as a member of your local dsa. if your chapter isn't active enough or not taking up a campaign that you think it should, only your participation can change that
Individualism will only get you so far, though. My participation in the DSA has fallen behind, but my point is not so much about individual participation, as it is about the organization at it's core. I don't think organizations have "essences" in an absolute sense, let alone large, national ones, but I do question the effectiveness of the DSA and whether organizational efforts are better spent elsewhere. There are organizational restraints to any group, and so how are the DSA's restraints carving out their politiking space and how does it limit their usefulness? There are things that you, in the most literal sense, cannot do from within the DSA.
I appreciate the invitation for self-reflection, and it certainly makes me reflect on my own organizing, but I would ask yourself: what *can't* participation in the DSA change? What does specifically the DSA being the center of organizational mass signal about the American Left?
Bernie Sanders’ role is to deradicalize people and keep them from moving further left. He is the “acceptable” opposition presented to us by the Democratic establishment. He’s also a Zionist meaning he’s fine with global systems of exploitation as long as they have a liberal facade to them. People will always lose under capitalism, and Bernie’s politics try and hide this fact from us.
I think a lot of us have been De Tocquepilled recently by a growing appreciation that the deliberative institutions the younger vanguardist versions of ourselves sneered at can easily disappear. The theoretical possibility of mass politics seems like something worth preserving, but who knows? Maybe we've gone soft.
The social conditions for mass politics as we knew them have been so thoroughly disrupted by all kinds of technological alienation and worker atomization. I’m not even sure what we mean by mass anymore. Nobody works at the same big factories, and try as he might Trump will not bring that condition back
No. I DONATED money to his campaign. Ugh, I still feel dirty.
For that, I got Joe Biden, the worst trade down in history, and a trillion calls begging me to give that feeb more, More, MORE. There can be no forgiveness for shepherding all the remaining populists into Joe Biden’s slaughterhouse.
I think some people missed the point of your post (or at least what I see as your point): that Bernie, warts and all, created a space where tens of millions of people could vote for a democratic socialist, for universal healthcare, for taxing the rich, etc. Full stop. Which meant for you and others on the left, you had to get serious about how actually to organize to get some power.
Forty-five years ago (that dates me) Michael Harrington talked about “the left wing of the possible”. If a younger politician with a social democratic platform emerged…
Now do a "Trump, warts and all, created a space where tens of millions of people could vote for" list. Full stop.
The idea that the American electoral system has the capacity to transform the USA in the direction of socialism is the same one that "illuminates" the old joke about looking for the dropped coin under a streetlight even though it wasn't dropped there because it was bright enough to see there.
At what point do we STOP being social democrats, though? yes, being a social democrat in the short term is sensible, but thinking only in the short term is, just as thinking only in the long term, needlessly nihilistic. There is a time and place for both policy work and radical reimagining: if we reach our social democratic brink, we will have nothing beyond it without such imagination, and shifting the social imagination is important for shifting the social unconscious, and *that* is important for lasting structural change. Even in this writing you reproduce social unconscious age biases (“we were in our twenties and therefore idiots”). You can hold both writing new policy and destroying old policy in tandem. Otherwise you risk stacking your bills on the paper shredder.
Yes! The older I get the less radical liberation politics becomes and the more radically extreme and exploitive and wrong capitalism seems. The world is truly upside down.
“These ideas aren’t radical” fucking exactly. There is no need for radicalization. What we need is a group we can point to, with an agenda all can understand, that ostensibly represents both in earnest and reality the interests of the american* people
Social democracy is a fantasy that needs to be retired. It’s for people who still believe a decaf capitalism is possible, who can more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Those nostalgic for the Bern are 2016 Larpers.
Absolutely agree with this. The real obstacle hasn’t been ordinary people—they’re more open to left economic ideas than we’re often led to believe. What holds us back is the political establishment: a party infrastructure designed to smother any challenge to the status quo, backed by a donor class that sees even modest social democracy as a threat to their profits and control.
Bernie proved that when we speak clearly and organize around working-class interests, people respond. But the party apparatus, corporate media, and billionaire-backed institutions closed ranks to stop that momentum. The problem isn’t a lack of public support—it’s a rigged system that exists to preserve donor interests, not public needs. That’s what we’re up against—and that’s where the real fight is.
If you’re tired of being told that real change isn’t possible—when it’s the gatekeepers, not the people, standing in the way—The Overwatch Journal is for you. We cut through the noise, follow the money, and name the names.
👉 Subscribe to The Overwatch Journal for independent reporting that exposes the machinery of power and fights for a politics grounded in working-class reality—not donor-class illusion.
I don't remember this piece but yeah, I get it. Since I'm an old lefty, I first started following Bernie when he won in Burlington. We read The NY Guardian back then & a socialist mayor in the NE city gave us the power to keep plugging along. We still have issues with white leftists who are too Che tee-shirt & not enough strategic planning, but at last they are beginning to listen to working class voices. So much is about framing: instead of abolition, start by working on getting non-violent prisoners out of jail and into job training.
In my city, I have been working along Bernie’s original Burlington lines of ward based neighborhood planning assemblies and participatory budgeting etc. The tools are as important as the message. Our work will continue through our neighborhoods. Burlington 100% green city of 45k since 2014 with these models.
The trouble is that the commie take on Bernie - that he would ultimately prove to have his biggest impact in pushing left wing voters to vote for Democrats, rather than in "pushing Democrats left" - has proven to be indisputably true. The sheepdog allegations may not be kind or useful, but they are simply factually correct.
Well I don't know that it's indisputable. The Bernie campaign wanted and tried to attract a big wave of disaffected nonvoters to the cause but it never materialized. So given that his support in the primaries came mostly from the traditional Democratic base (i.e. people who would've voted for some other Democrat had Bernie not been around) I'm not sure who he's supposed to have sheepdogged. A couple dozen people like me who registered as Democrats to vote for him in the primary then went back to hating the party once they ratfucked him?
Sanders “ratfucked” himself a loooong time ago. The guy is a russiagating con-man that never gave a speech that didn’t come from his ass. Rehearsed, canned and devoid of personal conviction. And as far as that cutesy title of yours, you flatter yourself. Because you once spoke in canned platitudes hardly means you were once “radicalized.” This whole column is as filthy and delusional as the man himself.. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need a shower..
Surely it was possible to make the same critique of Sanders without attacking the author in such a vitriolic and personal manner.
A little over the top
Bernie should have started his own Labour Party of America in 2016. It was his one window of opportunity to be a Mélenchon figure
I was pretty all-in on Bernie around 2016 but as the years have gone on, I've cooled towards him. Watching him shill for Harris on CNN's election night coverage this past year was...a moment.
Of course he supported Harris. The Democratic party is a PARTY. You have internal differences in the primaries, and then you coalesce behind the candidate. If Bernie had won, should Harris have refused her support?
He's not a Democrat though, he's an Independent. He only caucuses with th Dems because they were at one point closer to his beliefs than the Republicans were, but I don't think that's true anymore.
Harris, like Clinton and Obama, would NEVER truly and honestly support Bernie. Au contraire. . .
The idea that socialists vote for Democrats because primarily Bernie Sanders told them to and not because voting is pretty low effort and in the vast majority of elections Democrats are closest to that view seems pretty unsubstantiated to me.
Exactly — and I’m not saying this in the tone of some disgruntled tiktoker; it’s more so a pragmatic realization about the “organization” Jen is talking about here. When there’s no third option or dirty break, where do the hopeful socialists go when their only options left are establishment dems & will be again and again because they’ve proved they own the Democratic Party and will not let a socialist switch up the whole game, like over their dead donor-funded bodies?
Again I’m not even being mad or mean, I’m genuinely asking and genuinely wanting us to get clear about this and focus on a solution, because I think the pattern will continue this next election cycle. This is why I think Bernie is the one to shepherd us into a labor party in alliance with labor organizers but … you know cough cough, here we are.
We need a third party, but those can never get off the ground in our current electoral system. On election day, third party votes become protest votes, and we never find out, for example, how many Democratic voters would have voted Green if they thought Green could win. In the 2000 election, the Green Party was accused of giving the election to Bush, by "siphoning off" Democratic voters; yet probably the siphoning went the other way, with many Greens voting Democratic because a Green vote was a vote for Bush. The Greens then, and third parties in general, can build up during campaigns but then crash on election day.
I ran into the same problem in the primaries, when campaigning for Bernie in 2016. People supported Bernie's platform, but we're worried that Clinton was more likely to beat Trump, so they voted for her. People cannot vote their true preference.
That's why we need ranked choice voting. If Bernie could have run 3rd party, and people could vote #1 Bernie, #2 Harris, then people could freely vote their true preferences, we'd see how much support Bernie really had, he could support the Democrat for the #2 choice without appearing to compromise his positions, and the Democratic party internal shenanigans would become irrelevant to him.
In his two runs as an insurgent within the Democratic Party, Bernie got a million times closer to the presidency than any socialist third party in HISTORY. He also inspired tens of thousands of young people who are now DSA members, winning down-ballot races etc. Amazing to me that because he lost twice and suggested that people take five minutes to vote against Trump that some ostensible socialists want to give up and go back to the bad old days of symbolic protest votes for Jill Stein. Imagine if the far right had this kind of loser mentality— they would never.
Saying actually highly disputable things as indisputable is pretty much the preface for saying things that are just dogmas.
Kind of a silly allegation. People put too much on an 80+ year old man. Bernie did what he could and there is really nowhere to go right now. The last serious attempt at making a third party was the labor party in the 90s and that didn't pan out because the labor movement began to decline.
People are upset about "sheepdogging", but what are the other options? To make something viable would require more than just withholding support for Democrats. They're at an all time low in terms of approval ratings, but an alternative needs to actually be built for that to mean anything.
Freddie is correct, and that sucks. Bernie failed us in the end.
We are not at “the end”.
Bernie will never run for president again. His apparent successor, AOC, lost her nerve once she got a taste of the good life. Unless Lina Khan runs, things are looking pretty bleak for at least the next decade.
well, i don't know, there is that 70k-member dsa as well
What is that big DSA doing, though? A genuine question, if you’re a member of a local DSA chapter, what’re you doing as a chapter? I’m a member of my cities DSA— and I certainly appreciate their work— but it feels big tent to the point of nothing specific. And what is the makeup of those 70 thousand members? According to the 2021 survey data:
-85% of DSA members identified as non-Hispanic white
-60% are millennials
-15% are unemployed, disabled, retired. 13% are white collar. 10% are teachers, scholars, academics. (These are the 3 largest labor demographics)
-52% attend chapter meetings, 34% organize with chapter WG/committee, 20% attend training events hosted by chapter
(All verbiage lifted verbatim from the survey document; most data excluded for sake of brevity)
This is of course when the DSA was at its peak of 91k, so a bit different, but I cannot find more recent data.
perhaps a better question to ask yourself is what you're doing as a member of your local dsa. if your chapter isn't active enough or not taking up a campaign that you think it should, only your participation can change that
Individualism will only get you so far, though. My participation in the DSA has fallen behind, but my point is not so much about individual participation, as it is about the organization at it's core. I don't think organizations have "essences" in an absolute sense, let alone large, national ones, but I do question the effectiveness of the DSA and whether organizational efforts are better spent elsewhere. There are organizational restraints to any group, and so how are the DSA's restraints carving out their politiking space and how does it limit their usefulness? There are things that you, in the most literal sense, cannot do from within the DSA.
I appreciate the invitation for self-reflection, and it certainly makes me reflect on my own organizing, but I would ask yourself: what *can't* participation in the DSA change? What does specifically the DSA being the center of organizational mass signal about the American Left?
"DSA Realism: Is There no Alternative?" :p
Hmm…how did you measure “biggest impact”?
A lot of people would rather keep on their performative activism and self-victimization than read something like this, and it hurts.
mhm.
Bernie Sanders’ role is to deradicalize people and keep them from moving further left. He is the “acceptable” opposition presented to us by the Democratic establishment. He’s also a Zionist meaning he’s fine with global systems of exploitation as long as they have a liberal facade to them. People will always lose under capitalism, and Bernie’s politics try and hide this fact from us.
I think a lot of us have been De Tocquepilled recently by a growing appreciation that the deliberative institutions the younger vanguardist versions of ourselves sneered at can easily disappear. The theoretical possibility of mass politics seems like something worth preserving, but who knows? Maybe we've gone soft.
The social conditions for mass politics as we knew them have been so thoroughly disrupted by all kinds of technological alienation and worker atomization. I’m not even sure what we mean by mass anymore. Nobody works at the same big factories, and try as he might Trump will not bring that condition back
No. I DONATED money to his campaign. Ugh, I still feel dirty.
For that, I got Joe Biden, the worst trade down in history, and a trillion calls begging me to give that feeb more, More, MORE. There can be no forgiveness for shepherding all the remaining populists into Joe Biden’s slaughterhouse.
His intention was not to lose
How’d that work out, long term?
Then it was a grave miscalculation of the state of American politics and society. That’s completely on Bernie.
I think some people missed the point of your post (or at least what I see as your point): that Bernie, warts and all, created a space where tens of millions of people could vote for a democratic socialist, for universal healthcare, for taxing the rich, etc. Full stop. Which meant for you and others on the left, you had to get serious about how actually to organize to get some power.
Forty-five years ago (that dates me) Michael Harrington talked about “the left wing of the possible”. If a younger politician with a social democratic platform emerged…
Now do a "Trump, warts and all, created a space where tens of millions of people could vote for" list. Full stop.
The idea that the American electoral system has the capacity to transform the USA in the direction of socialism is the same one that "illuminates" the old joke about looking for the dropped coin under a streetlight even though it wasn't dropped there because it was bright enough to see there.
Agreed. It would take a combination of local grass roots organizations and an electoral strategy to move the dial.
Another Substack™️ post brought to you by the CIA. “Not your father’s Alphabet org.”
Keep crushing it(actual socialism)!
At what point do we STOP being social democrats, though? yes, being a social democrat in the short term is sensible, but thinking only in the short term is, just as thinking only in the long term, needlessly nihilistic. There is a time and place for both policy work and radical reimagining: if we reach our social democratic brink, we will have nothing beyond it without such imagination, and shifting the social imagination is important for shifting the social unconscious, and *that* is important for lasting structural change. Even in this writing you reproduce social unconscious age biases (“we were in our twenties and therefore idiots”). You can hold both writing new policy and destroying old policy in tandem. Otherwise you risk stacking your bills on the paper shredder.
Yes! The older I get the less radical liberation politics becomes and the more radically extreme and exploitive and wrong capitalism seems. The world is truly upside down.
“These ideas aren’t radical” fucking exactly. There is no need for radicalization. What we need is a group we can point to, with an agenda all can understand, that ostensibly represents both in earnest and reality the interests of the american* people
yes jen pan
Social democracy is a fantasy that needs to be retired. It’s for people who still believe a decaf capitalism is possible, who can more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Those nostalgic for the Bern are 2016 Larpers.
Absolutely agree with this. The real obstacle hasn’t been ordinary people—they’re more open to left economic ideas than we’re often led to believe. What holds us back is the political establishment: a party infrastructure designed to smother any challenge to the status quo, backed by a donor class that sees even modest social democracy as a threat to their profits and control.
Bernie proved that when we speak clearly and organize around working-class interests, people respond. But the party apparatus, corporate media, and billionaire-backed institutions closed ranks to stop that momentum. The problem isn’t a lack of public support—it’s a rigged system that exists to preserve donor interests, not public needs. That’s what we’re up against—and that’s where the real fight is.
If you’re tired of being told that real change isn’t possible—when it’s the gatekeepers, not the people, standing in the way—The Overwatch Journal is for you. We cut through the noise, follow the money, and name the names.
👉 Subscribe to The Overwatch Journal for independent reporting that exposes the machinery of power and fights for a politics grounded in working-class reality—not donor-class illusion.
She almost certainly would have. Also, he's supposedly an independent.
I don't remember this piece but yeah, I get it. Since I'm an old lefty, I first started following Bernie when he won in Burlington. We read The NY Guardian back then & a socialist mayor in the NE city gave us the power to keep plugging along. We still have issues with white leftists who are too Che tee-shirt & not enough strategic planning, but at last they are beginning to listen to working class voices. So much is about framing: instead of abolition, start by working on getting non-violent prisoners out of jail and into job training.
In my city, I have been working along Bernie’s original Burlington lines of ward based neighborhood planning assemblies and participatory budgeting etc. The tools are as important as the message. Our work will continue through our neighborhoods. Burlington 100% green city of 45k since 2014 with these models.
Let’s go!
when im cruel but i don’t even know it