Bernie spoke to his legion of followers last week, telling them he is committed to the ambitious goal of reforming the Democratic Party. It was a clear signal that he is not at this time entertaining any thoughts of simply walking away from it in disgust.

This, of course, is not likely to cheer a good many of his supporters who have come to view the Democratic Party's centrist-dominated establishment with revulsion. And who can blame them?

But there are a number of reasons why I believe Bernie is right to focus The Revolution's efforts on an attempt to reform the Democratic Party and "drive the money-changers from the temple" (if you'll forgive the analogy).

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Crucial Political Reality #1: getting our agenda discussed on the national level and significantly expanding the number of people who are defending it is the absolute key to turning Bernie's ambitious economic agenda into the law of the land.

It is quite true that the Democratic Party is currently corrupted by corporate donor money and by the Centrists' cynical political philosophy of Professional Disingenuousness.

But as corrupted as the party currently is, it is nevertheless filled with people who have largely identified with a basic expressed sympathy for the interests of average Americans as opposed to the blatant shilling for The Corporate Cause that we see in the Republican Party.

Because even Corporate Dems have embraced this public identity, they are forced by their own words to listen to us and to try to defend their rationalizations from our pointed criticisms.

They want to continue to mislead millions of low-information Dems about what can and can't be done for average Americans? Then they'll have to go through us to pull off such schemes and when they do we're going to rip their arguments apart.

Compare that challenge to an effort to debate both parties on the national stage from an independent Third Party perspective, knowing full well that the MSM would ignore us and that the Republicans would simply ridicule our efforts and try to define us as bomb throwers on the fringe who can be casually dismissed.

Surely it would far better for us to fight out a Civil War within the Democratic Party with the MSM paying attention to it than it would be for us to set out on the path of setting up a new political party, which would be ignored/marginalized from day one.

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In order for us to arrive at the place where we want to end up (our political movement embraced by the majority of voters) I think it's important that we achieve some clarity re: where we are within the political universe.

Crucial Political Reality #2: The ultimate truth about our Movement is that Economic Progressives only comprise a rather small minority of the total electorate. There are a lot of people we need to persuade to see things our way if we want to achieve any of our lofty goals.

It has always been easier for us to find ears willing to listen to us within the Democratic Party, mostly because our economic vision is 100% consistent with traditional values that the party once used to identify with.

It is also a place where we have wielded quite a bit of influence over the years: comprising as much as 30%-40% of those who have identified with Dem Party politics over the years. (Other reasons: we are willing to spend our $$ on political causes we believe in and many of us are willing to invest our time on them as well.)

Bernie Sanders' campaign was able to take off last summer only because our narrow slice of the electorate responded to his message with enthusiasm. We were indeed the low-hanging fruit that was available; we were 'born' receptive to his message of hope.

This core of Bernie Sanders' support is a group that is much more informed re: economic issues and re: political news in general compared to the majority of voters. We are, by and large, 'high-information' voters, many of whom have advanced levels of education (see college students for Bernie).

Once the movement began to achieve some momentum, it became easier to win over many of the 'lower-information' Dems out there who aren't very well informed about economic policy discussions. They began to hop on his bandwagon because they could see that they would clearly benefit from his proposals but also because the campaign's growing momentum allowed their 'herding instincts' to kick in.

But that was when desperation within the Clinton campaign convinced her strategic team that they had to 'go negative' on Bernie and his followers in a more direct fashion in order to stop the bleeding of Hillary's support to Bernie's enthusiastic following.

The goal of these artful smears was quite simple: they needed to create a negative image of the Bernie Sanders campaign within the minds of low-information Dems that they would not want to identify with. Modeling disgust for Sanders's supporters did a lot of damage to our cause for it convinced many of the uninformed that there was something 'bad' about Bernie and his people.

The method they employed was simple: use expressions of negative emotion---harsh criticism, outrage, scornful assessments of Sanders' proposals/supporters---to create a negative image of Bernie Sanders and us that 'loyal [low-info] Dems' would feel hesitant to identify with.

It ultimately did work in that it did stop the bleeding enough to keep her campaign in the running vis-a-vis Sanders, close enough for her minions within the institutional party apparatus to swing several primaries into her official win column. But unfortunately for her, it did also at the same time guarantee that she will be losing the general election in November.

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Crucial Political Reality #3: Ours is primarily an educational campaign that needs to 'grow the numbers' in the coming months and years in order to achieve the success we desire.

We may be a thin slice of the electorate but we need to become a much bigger slice. That is to say, we need to increase the number of people who are 'high-information' representatives of the movement. People who can go toe-to-toe with the Corporate Dems (minions of The Oligarchy) and defend our economic vision from their specious arguments.

The simple truth is that we are not going to find any people more 'qualified' and receptive to our fundamental message than in the Democratic Party. Indeed, I expect most of the people we need on our side are currently bashing us and our inspirational leader in a fevered state of partisanship, having dedicated themselves to the extremely dubious goal of making Hillary Clinton the next POTUS.

So yeah, at the current time, my proposition may seem like an exercise in futility, given the level of vitriol they are still pumping out at the Bernie Sanders Movement. But I predict that in nine months time, we will find ourselves in a completely different political environment, one that will give us fresh opportunities to expand our influence within the Democratic Party.

Right now, many so-called progressives with a strong Dem Party identity have echo-chambered themselves into a highly partisan state of Him-Bad. Much of that will melt away in the weeks and months following Hillary's defeat in November.

Defeat/failure will lead them to extended periods of navel-gazing. Only then will they be able to allow themselves to entertain the possibility that Hillary just wasn't that good of a candidate and that her decision to split the Democratic Party into partisan factions was a really, really stupid idea.

This will be our window of opportunity to expand our influence within the Dem Party. The Centrists within the party will be properly tagged as LOSERS, and it will ultimately discredit them in the eyes of the low-information Dems who trusted their [perfidious] leadership.

We need to be ready at that time to provide clarity to those who want to understand what happened. Sure, the Centrists and the Corporate Dems will continue with the finger-pointing, but they will no longer enjoy the benefit of the doubt that so many are giving them at this time.

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Crucial Political Reality #4: We must do the very thing Hillary and her operatives have been trying so hard to get us to do for several months: abandon any and all efforts to help her become POTUS.

Their fundamental political calculation since January has been that they can insult us and misrepresent us and defame us for weeks and months and then after she has secured the nomination, we will all feel such terror at the thought of a Trump Presidency, we will still end up giving her the votes she needs to win the GE.

But what they failed to account for was the fact that most of us are not able to see anything in the prospect of a Trump Presidency that is more frightening to us than what we can see in the prospect of a Clinton Presidency. I quote one of my comments from the other day:

She is so far to the right (war & peace & corporate power), and he is sufficiently 'leftish' (supported abortion before he was against it, less hawkish) that it really doesn't matter so much this time. We're screwed no matter which of them wins.

For that reason, because she has made it such a toss up for us, we are actually free this election season to show our resentment at how we were treated by fully depriving them of any of our support, no matter what Bernie has to say to us.

Why 'go nuclear?' Because this time, if Hillary loses, the Clinton 'empire' within the Democratic Party will be severely discredited. The Centrists would be forever damaged by the stupidity/foolishness of their tactics, their desperate willingness to assassinate the character of a true friend of the party.

It could very well give us the opening we need to begin radically transforming the Dem Party into The People's party. If she loses, those institutional Democrats who liked what Bernie was saying would be given the political cover they need to break away from The Losers.

That is really what is at stake for us this Fall. Yes, those stakes are very high indeed.

So high that, if Hillary is competitive in late October due to the support she is getting from warhawk Republicans, I will in all likelihood go from writing in Bernie's name on the ballot to voting for Trump outright.

Trump may still say something that truly terrifies me between now and then, but there is at least one scenario in which I would do the unthinkable---vote for a Republican---simply because of the good it would do for the future of the Democratic Party and the prospects of defeating the Oligarchy in the long run.

Given the reprehensible behavior of the Clinton operatives who have gone out of their way to defame the good name and character of Bernie Sanders within the Democratic Party, we should accordingly do everything in our power to make sure that these individuals pay the ultimate price for their political sins.