- Bernie is making a revolution
- People are still confused about the choice between politics as usual and a new system
- The Iowa caucuses are flawed
- democracy is an ideal that is hard to achieve in reality
- Bernie is definitely “electable”
- Democratic Socialism is beginning to be understood by more and more people
- “Pragmatism” is in the eye of the beholder
- The Democratic Party needs drastic reform
Clearly not everyone will agree with this, but that’s what makes politics. We see what what we look for and we always will. Nevertheless the spectacle in Iowa last night raises some serious questions about the way we govern ourselves.
Our system began in a time that was very different from the present yet we cling to it tightly. As a result we are forced to fight for things that should be an integral part of a true democracy. We fail to see this system for what it is because we are trained to deal with it in fragments and to ignore the essential connections that make the system what it is.
What Bernie is doing is to awaken people to the inconsistencies in the system and to mobilize them as force for revolution. That revolution can not be defined in advance because it has to come from the people.
Our political process has no place for such happenings and it became even clearer last night. Last night’s events were forced into a framework from the past that has no mechanism for incorporating a new paradigm. Therefore we are forced to try to achieve change in a very clumsy way.
Given that, last night the revolutionary forces equaled the establishment’s results in spite of things being heavily stacked against them.
The meaning of this can not be spun away. The people who cast their votes for Bernie are very different people than they were before Bernie came on the scene. The people who cast their votes for Hillary were participating in another election. The difference is profound and needs to be seen for what it is without losing its meaning in the stale context of our system and its narcotizing elections.
No one has a crystal ball worth anything so the future will be what people make it be. That sounds trite but it has to be interpreted in context. If Bernie could equal the establishment candidate in the context of the old system and its constraints, we are seeing the tip of the iceberg.
I don’t know about you, but I really do not need a weatherman to see the way the winds are blowing. The times they are a changin’.