From the article:
The Long March of Bernie’s Army - Where it came from; where it’s headed. - By Harold Meyerson

they can recite all the reasons why Obama for America never got off the ground; some of them even worked for the Rainbow until they realized there were better places to make social change. Most of them are painfully familiar with the tragic-comic history of the American left, a largely marginal tendency in American politics that has often squandered its moments of opportunity with displays of purity and rigidity that have only left it more marginal.
...
The challenge of creating an enduring left out of Sanders’s young supporters, who have brought the passion, energy, and numbers to his campaign, is particularly daunting. “Presidential elections generate excitement unlike any other,” says a veteran union leader. “They ignite a level of energy and self-activity that’s hard to capture and transfer. We can’t assume that 100,000 young people who have self-organized in the campaign are going to respond to being told, ‘Here’s the next big thing.’ They won’t come over if it’s presented that way.”

Above quote (the underlined part) tells me that there is quite a bit of self-hating attitude in it, considering that the author is a Socialist.

Later on the author quotes some German, who wrote about why the US had never Socialists. Now all of the sudden, he asks us to wonder about why the US has Socialists.

IN 1906, GERMAN SOCIOLOGIST Werner Sombart wrote an essay entitled “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” Sombart was just the first of numerous commentators—among them Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset—who sought to explain why the United States, alone among industrialized democracies, never developed a major socialist movement. (Sombart’s answer to this conundrum was that the upward mobility and higher living standards that European immigrants found here meant that socialism in America was stillborn.) - - - [I wonder if that is the correct explanation. Of course I remember the fifties when the dollar was 6 - 8 Deutsche Mark, care packages to the Germans included nylons and everybody was in awe of NASA and the man on the moon. The US propaganda worked really well, America was supposed to be most advantaged, rich and on the leading edge in science and technology. - that was then and it ended with the Vietnam War, not only inside the US, but also in the view of many then young Europeans. Just saying]
...
In the wake of the Sanders campaign, however, we suddenly need to pose quite a different question: Why are there socialists in the United States? Who are all these people who now not only flock to Bernie’s banner but deem themselves socialists? What do they even mean by socialism?- - -[Oh, yeah, what do they mean by socialism, I always ask myself what do they mean by being progressives. Even worse, what do the mean by liberal, when HRC is very authoritarian in her way she conducted her foreign policy - Never mind.]

Funny. My guess is the US always had Socialists, but they were so much attacked and silenced, that nobody knew about them anymore. Could that be? Now, as Sanders comes along and for the first time doesn't budge and stubbornly continues to self-declare himself a Socialist and his basic political points are "ringing" in American ears as some what real and truthful, ... uh, oh, now we have to ask ourselves why does the US have Socialists. Really sounds like a zig-zag tricky way to make an 'interesting argument'.

The author goes on to give an account how many Americans now favor Socialism. Apparently that's new.

This is something new under the political sun. At no time in U.S. history have so many Americans supported a socialist presidential candidate, much less called themselves socialists. The apogee of socialists’ electoral performance came in 1912, when Eugene V. Debs won 6 percent of the vote running for president on the Socialist Party ticket. What’s more, the mystery of this socialist emergence is deepened by the fact that there is no visible organization in the United States that is recruiting people to socialism. The Democratic Socialists of America (of which I’m a vice-chair) [oops, sorry, didn't know that, but what the heck I still say what I want]has just several thousand members, and is almost entirely absent from many American cities. At first glance, this new socialist presence just seems to have sprung up, unsummoned, unannounced.

Ok, it was a surprise to the author apparently. Why?

Still, Americans on the left have almost always overwhelmingly preferred the liberal to the socialist label. Why, then, this sudden shift? One reason is the collapse of Soviet communism, that ferocious pretender to the socialist throne, has allowed younger Americans to identify socialism with the social democratic policies of Western Europe.

In other words, before the Sowjet Union collapsed all Americans were afraid to support anything related to Socialism or Social Democracy, because... heck, I guess they were afraid, right? How dare could one believe there is something worth in Social Democracy and Socialism. Never mind.

But the prime mover of millions of Americans into the socialist column has been the near complete dysfunctionality of contemporary American capitalism as it affects all but the top. Where once the regulated, unionized, and semi-socialized capitalism of the mid-20th century produced a vibrant middle-class majority, the deregulated, deunionized, and financialized capitalism of the past 35 years has produced record levels of inequality, insecurity, a shrinking middle class, and scant economic opportunities (along with record economic burdens) for the young.

Ok, but I guess those youngsters, they don't know anything else than they have now, they are younger than 35 and they only could have learned about the better "good times" from their parents.
Never mind.

But the forces that Sanders’s candidacy has nourished face a more fundamental challenge than the anti-war young of the 1960s confronted: transforming not just a party or a foreign policy, but the economic and political order of the past four decades. The Sanders campaign has called the young to the barricades, but what will they do when it ends? “All these people who are starting to question capitalism and the role of the super rich,” wonders Stephen Lerner, who led the campaign that successfully organized thousands of big-city janitors in the 1990s, “how do they dig into campaigns that substantively address those problems?”
...
Some in the Sanders generation will surely turn to electoral politics. “Environmental justice activists will run candidates for city council,” Wong predicts. “Housing activists will do the same; so will racial justice activists. That’s all going to happen in the next four years. This is a guarantee.”

That's good, if it happens.

“There is a political culture clash,” says one labor leader who’s worked closely with the People For Bernie activists. “They would open-source this whole project and have individual activists do what they wanted. We believe in everyone marching together. It’s like the anarchists meet the Stalinists.”
...
“Political change happens slowly until it doesn’t,” says Working Families Party National Director Dan Cantor. “Bernie has changed what it’s possible to say.”- - -[so, Americans are not any more afraid to "like a socialist", nice, it's about time]
...
It’s precisely because the limits of the possible have so suddenly expanded, in ways that make possible the construction of a genuine democratic left, that the discussions on how to build that left have become so intense.
...
Cantor has a clear sense of the challenge, at once electoral and doctrinal. “What we have to do is create a program that shows the contrast between what most working people want out of their government and what more corporate-minded Democratic members of Congress are willing to do,” he says. “It’s not conceptually complicated, but it’s a lot of work.”
...
That challenge would grow steeper if the most left-wing (or just most intransigent) Sanders supporters declined to support Hillary Clinton in a general election against Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, thereby estranging the vast majority of progressive institutions and individuals. It’s inconceivable that Sanders himself or any of the traditional organizations that have backed his campaign would take that position, but some Sanders supporters have argued that Clinton is no better than the neo-fascist or extreme right-winger against whom she’ll likely face off. (The one historic antecedent for such lunacy is that of the German communists of 1932 and 1933, who argued that their rival left party, the Social Democrats, were a greater danger than the Nazis. That they were proven wrong was small consolation.)

And here is the problem. I don't understand why the author uses this comparison. Those who refuse to support HRC against Trump in the GE, are again the real villains, right? They are at fault for the chaos of a Trump Presidency, right? So, nothing has changed.

The Socialists and Social Democrats who don't support the "authoritarian and established Democrats in the Democratic Party", because they happen to have betrayed everything they could with regards to their foreign policies AND domestic policies, are again at fault. Did I misunderstand something here?

Those policies were NOT supporting the working class and the poor. And all those, for whom identity group policies are more important than the overall all-inclusive social policies of equality (that include all identity groups), those, who claim otherwise (see DOV diary on TOP for example), are now the ones who throw the "chaos loving leftist Sanders supporters, who don't want to throw their vote behind HRC, under the bus". I guess because they saw their own little privileges to be member or on its way to become member of the establishment Democrats fading away. Oh no, if they would give in to those god-awful left-wing Sanders supporters, who decline to support HRC, that's the beginning of the end of total chaos and anarchy. Sounds somewhat familiar.

Well, thanks God, Sanders has some nerves. At least I believe he knows where to start and which things have priority, one of them to get money out of the campaigns, change the electoral system and brake the neck of "too big to fail" corporations.

I don't like to diss the Sanders supporters or those, who don't support anyone and even don't want to vote anymore. They have all the right to decide that for themselves without being attacked for it. At least it would be nice if that would not happen here.

Will they come over at all? Are all these experienced activists even right in hoping that this time will be different, that this time a powerful social democratic left might just take root in America’s political soil?

I think they are. Chiefly because Bernie Sanders’s campaign didn’t create a new American left. It revealed it.

ok, hopefully, I don't hold my breath though. Oh my, I guess I forgot to stop talking.

I absolutely WILL NOT vote for the Shrill. I have planned on writing in the Bernster, and changing to an Indie for years! Now, I'm gettin' 'er done!

I've been lurking '99 for a while, and just signed on.

I, too, am a refugee from TOP. I actually disengaged from commenting or posting there when DK5 went live. I've logged in three or perhaps four times since that day, but had been returning to lurk with ever-growing horror as I saw the true nature of that site coming closer to the surface, culminating in the March 15 edict. Your post and conversation here, particularly with GeeBeeBee, inspired me to sign up.

Geebeebee - I'm also really glad to see you here. I always loved your diaries. IIRC, you're from Brownbackistan as well? I'm in South Central Kansas.

Sorry to be so disjointed in my first post. I'm just happy to be here.