A few days ago, on March 4, Ralph Nader posted at the Huffington Post, posing the question “What Will Many Bernie Sanders Voters Do After July ? Now, I know mentioning Ralph Nader will cause some to cringe, and some of us may even relive the horrible nightmare of the 2000 presidential election. The mention of Nader seems to always be followed by the point that he cost Vice-President Gore the 2000 election, although the bigger cause may well be the 308,000 self-described Florida “Democrats” and 191,000 self-described Florida “Liberals” that crossed party lines and voted for W.

In any event, Nader summed up his thinking in the following paragraph;

The energetic Sanders supporters, including the Millennials who voted so heavily for Bernie, could form a New Progressive movement to exercise a policy pull on the establishment Democrats before November and to be a growing magnet after November with the objective of taking over the Democratic Party starting with winning local elections. This will have long-term benefits for our country.

I bring up Nader’s article, because it brings to mind two blog posts I made at the “Great Orange Satan”, the first in 2010, the second in 2012. I had just spent a number of months immersed in material on FDR and the New Deal, which if I could make a living studying and writing on, I’d do in a heartbeat ! In the first post I made and sourced the argument that FDR himself intended that the Democratic Party become the party of Progressives, and that it would become the embodiment of the Progressive Movement. You can read this blog entry here.

The second blog entry I made in 2012 was to re-inforce the earlier point, but also to point out that PBO had already turned his back on progressives, and had by the 2010 mid-term election, October 27, 2010 to be exact, thrown progressives under the bus. It seemed at the time, that as progressives, we had once again been marginalized, hence the title Lost Between Welcoming Their Hatred and the Cold Truth. While I received a fair number of positive comments, there were also those who predictably reacted negatively to the idea that progressives needed to part ways with the Democratic establishment, as represented by DLC / Third Way.

Senator Sanders has now made this idea come to pass. My big mistake in writing in 2010 and 2012 was thinking “small”, that merely forming a Progressive Party would be sufficient to begin to effect change. Senator Sanders has clearly articulated building a movement, the goal of which is to reclaim the soul of the Democratic Party, and fulfill FDR’s vision that it would in fact become the party of progressives and progressive ideals. We can certainly debate Senator Sander’s assessment of whether PBO and the demobilization after the 2008 election was a “mistake” or a cold cynical power play, but Senator Sanders has said he will not allow this mistake to be repeated. He has advocated for building the movement. Ralph Nader’s call only serves to reinforce this notion. Hopefully there will be opportunities for the future as the movement coalesces regardless of what the outcome of the 2016 election might be.