When I first read this Rolling Stone op-ed in June, I had a sinking feeling in my gut.
I wish with every fiber of my being that it was not as prophetic as it turned out to be.
Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie
Please read the article, and don’t just make assumptions about its content based on the headline. I don’t have the energy summarize right now, and any attempt to paraphrase will quickly turn into block-quoting the article.
We can’t allow ourselves to turn into the same sort of echo chamber the right wing has.
I’ll just leave you with the conclusion, but PLEASE read the rest. A lot of what happened today will make a lot more sense.
The maddening thing about the Democrats is that they refuse to see how easy they could have it. If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world, they would win every election season in a landslide.
This is especially the case now that the Republican Party has collapsed under the weight of its own nativist lunacy. It's exactly the moment when the Democrats should feel free to become a real party of ordinary working people.
But they won't do that, because they don't see what just happened this year as a message rising up from millions of voters.
Politicians are so used to viewing the electorate as a giant thing to be manipulated that no matter what happens at the ballot, they usually can only focus on the Washington-based characters they perceive to be pulling the strings. Through this lens, the uprising among Democratic voters this year wasn't an organic expression of mass disgust, but wholly the fault of Bernie Sanders, who within the Beltway is viewed as an oddball amateur and radical who jumped the line.
[...]
This inability to grasp that the problem is bigger than Bernie Sanders is a huge red flag. As Thacker puts it, the theme of this election year was widespread anger toward both parties, and both the Trump craziness and the near-miss with Sanders should have served as a warning. "The Democrats should be worried they're next," he says.
But they're not worried. Behind the palace walls, nobody ever is.