Finally! WashPo allows a response to the "Bernie Bros are racists" meme they created
It only took roughly 18 months, but the Washington Post has decided to allow some facts to get in the way of slandering Bernie supporters.
The excellent article was written by Symone D. Sanders, the former national press secretary for Bernie Sanders.
Last spring, a Harvard-Harris poll found Sanders to be the most popular active politician in the country. African Americans gave the senator the highest favorables at 73 percent — vs. 68 percent among Latinos, 62 percent among Asian Americans and 52 percent among white voters. It wasn’t a fluke: This August, black voters again reported a 73 percent favorability rating for Sanders.
Then Symone makes an excellent point that everyone should remember.
So why does the myth that black voters don’t like Sanders persist? It certainly isn’t because black voters can’t relate to his focus on the working class. According to the Economic Policy Institute, people of color will form the majority of the American working class by 2032. In other words, the white working class does not have a monopoly on economic marginalization.
...The senator’s message still resonates — perhaps now more than ever. Just look at the fight to expand health care: Poll after poll shows that Americans across the board are ready for “Medicare for all” — something the senator championed when it wasn’t politically popular to do so. Indeed, Pew polling found this year that 85 percent of blacks and 84 percent of Hispanics support single-payer health care — while whites are split on the issue roughly 50-50.
Minorities are painfully aware that they are over-represented among the working class.
So Sanders was speaking to them and their concerns far more than Hillary was.
Which is why the WashPo worked so hard to create a black-is-white/up-is-down narrative.
In an unrelated WashPo article, Howard Dean makes a surprisingly astute observation...and then draws the wrong conclusion.
“They see in Trump the destruction of the United States as they have been taught that it was going to exist,” he told me. “The Trump election was essentially a negation of every value that young people have.” Dean believes “those kids” are the “core base now” of the Democratic Party. “The most reliable demographic of our voters are the young people across the board, across racial and ethnic lines,” he said. There’s just one big problem.“These people are not Democrats.”
“They’re very independent-minded. They don’t like politics. And they mistrust institutions,” Dean said in his characteristically matter-of-fact style. “I think our problem as Democrats is, we’re the head of the oldest party in the West, and this party is an institution that looks incredibly unattractive; not because of our ideology, ’cause that is attractive, and that is why they always vote for Democrats. But the Democratic Party means nothing to them because it’s an institution built by people like me who’s 40 years older than them.”
Yes, young people are not loyal partisans, and that's a good thing.
No, it isn't because you are old. (see Bernie Sanders)
Comments
Snowden: Where's the proof?
scary russia
Well Billary is a patriarchal princess after all.
Seriously. She'd fuck the world with a strap-on given the opportunity. She was the embodiment of the worst aspects of what feminists defined as patriarchy. Yet Gloria Steinem and other old guard feminists backed her anyway.
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
They are not Democrats? WTF is?
Democrats were the party of FDR. They cheer Bubba as he threw the New Deal under the bus to push Reagan's Raw Deal. They didn't have a problem with the DLC being NOT DEMOCRATS. They need to open their primaries and protect their ability to morph into the peoples party.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
Bombing Afghanistan hits 5 year high
link
Thomas Frank lesson lost on many progressives via video link
As Thomas Frank says in the interview, the centrist/corporate wing of the democratic party HATES the left and progressives. Saw this big time on TOP where I was following the primaries. I was shocked at a certain point how the Hillary camp started smearing Sander supporters. Having worked as a democrat in many elections, I was shocked at the attacks and ugliness not against Sanders, but his supporters which went beyond anything I have seen in other primaries which were contentious. Part of Hillary's book tour is in fact the continuation of those attacks on progressives.
But this in fact is in the tradition of the democrats since Clinton--ravage and burn any progressive movement within or outside that party that threaten that power: Jackson, Nader, Sanders, OWS, BLM, Dean.
Yeah, I noticed this too.
I've only really been politically aware since the late 80s, but I can't think of a time when I've seen the kind of vitriol aimed not just at a political opponent in the same party but that person's supporters specifically. I've seen people disagree in a way where you know these two don't like each other, but it always seemed like supporters were off limits in a tacit acknowledgement that we're all supposed to be on the same team. Only thing I can even relate to was Obama vs. the PUMAs in 2008 and he bent over backwards to calm them down. (Of course, it probably helped that the biggest differences between Obama and Her were style, not substance...)
It's just baffling to me that they still seem to alternately think they don't need us or they're going to shame/berate us back in to the fold. I've just never seen this kind of naked contempt for voters, especially from a Democrat to Democratic voters, in the time I've been paying attention.
Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.
@Dr. John Carpenter
Homeland Security has taken over all of the electoral infrastructure, including the voter rolls, under Top Secret control, so now they really do not need the voters, just plausible enough optics that the people won't outright riot.
Of course they have contempt for those they have conquered and control by the theft of their power and resources. The Non-Billionaire-American people are there to be used by their betters, but they should just shut up and do as they're told.
I wish people would stop referring to the pathologically greedy and destructive Psychopaths and Parasites That Be as 'elites' or in other flattering terms implying that 'they know/are best' and, as Those Who Matter, have some right to do as they please to everyone else.
In their venal view, there is no concept of intrinsic human worth; if you're worth anything, you're worth real money and can buy the policy and politicians you want. If not, you're just one of The Disposables.
TPTB are not 'the best of the best' or 'born to rule over their lessers', merely among those typically ruthless enough to accumulate much of everyone else's share of power and money and isolated from reality enough to poison the well from which they drink, the air which they breathe and the ground on which they stand, in order to maximize their collections of those symbols which represent wealth only within the economy they're destroying as well.
Language defines concepts which have been PR-warped in order to distort perception and confuse once-common understanding and I firmly believe that we have to quit letting propagandists do that to us, by simply going along with it and abetting our own 'socially engineered' perception-shaping.
This conditioning is required to prevent the people from taking back their delegated power from their abusers.
It can be done or they wouldn't be going to this much trouble to try to prevent us from realizing it, using it toward the common good and the salvaging of what remains of the poisoned, greed-wracked and dying ecology forming our life-support system while sufficient of its components still exist to be nurtured back to sustainability.
They do not value reality and therefore have nothing real; they do not value humanity and have none themselves.
We are - and have - humanity and our reality must win over the propagandists and their 'optics' while there's anything left to save.
Weird, the preview had loaded, but after a moment the page vanished, with the message that the site had timed out. I hope this computer holds out until my brother manages to come into the city to take it to reload the corrupted system...
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Brilliant post, EN
"there is no concept of intrinsic human worth; if you're worth anything, you're worth real money and can buy the policy and politicians you want. If not, you're just one of The Disposables."
and
"They do not value reality and therefore have nothing real; they do not value humanity and have none themselves."
Aside from a few rare exceptions, analysis at this level seems utterly lacking elsewhere in the media. Perhaps because being able to metabolize it demands years of finding out how to get hold of what being real means.
Color Me Dumbfounded
There is no trace of a rational thought process in the Democratic party. The complete political and electoral disaster created by the DLC/Third Way/New Dems Centrism has them convinced they are pragmatic winners!
How the analysis laid out by Thomas Frank and Reality Asserts Itself, among others, is devastating, accurate and irrefutable.
I was not aware that state barriers to forming third parties was a direct reaction to The Progressive Party's success. Damn!
"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn
Yah, noticed that also
After close to a decade of losses, these people think they are electoral geniuses. Well, except in this last election, Putin has been whether democrats know it or not, the electoral genius of American elections if all the interference bullshit is to be believed. Hell, Putin unlike every American pundit knew the Rust Belt states were in play. Or could leverage an unspecified $100 FB ads into a Trump victory.
Fundraisers got to fundraise
How else can they do that without an identity politics message? "We're not corrupt enough" probably won't work so well. Bernie raised hundreds of millions of dollars on the internet. I hope that was the beginning of the end for corporate candidates.
Beware the bullshit factories.
Heh
There is no trace of a rational thought process in the Democratic party.
Whooda thunk.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.