A Look Back at Bigger Than Bernie: Can the Democratic Party Be Reformed From Within?

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

56% : There is a fundamental mismatch between the artificial resetting of these goals (medical care or college education goes from being basically affordable to unaffordable over the course of a few decades, for example) and the kind of steady electoral competition Day and Uetricht advocate.
54% : At the moment, with a greater Wall Street bailout than the one in 2008 having been approved (with no real dissension, or even withholding of votes, by the same avatars of "socialism" the book's authors uphold as idols), the movement's leader is busy encouraging everyone who supported his "socialism" to get in line behind a reactionary opponent who couldn't possibly be a greater antithesis of socialism, as evidenced by half a century of political action.
54% : In fact, the "socialism" expounded in this book resembles nothing so much as market socialism in certain Eastern European countries before the fall of communism.
53% : In a country where trillions of dollars can instantly be made available to Wall Street, while workers and those who need help the most are left stranded -- to the point where many of the immiserated are now out on the streets demanding to be allowed back to work in order to continue a semblance of functioning life, even at the cost of potential contagion and death -- the idea that a decades-long project of educating workers about the benefits of socialism needs to be mounted by way of elected representatives who will somehow inject the political party with their continued advocacy of socialist reforms seems nothing less than parasitical.
53% : The most likely long-term result of the coronavirus panic is a strengthening of the oligarchy, and further suppression of individual liberty and workers' dignity, rather than any movement in the opposite direction, because in the absence of electoral and political reforms that reset the rules, and make the threat of an alternative to the two-party system palpable under strong guarantees of individual liberty, each crisis will be used to weaken whatever the authors of this book understand by socialism, not strengthen it.
53% :I searched everywhere in this book for some realization that it will be more difficult than anywhere else for socialism to make inroads in the U.S., because of the factors complicating class consciousness that are more evident here than in other countries, but I saw no recognition of this blatantly exploited exceptionalism, which has laid waste to the dreams of socialists for more than a century and a half in this country and is about to mete the same treatment to this new generation.
51% : Free college, a living wage, affordable housing, health care that didn't bankrupt the beneficiary, and of course the absence of crushing student or other debt were all more or less realities as late as the 1970s and for much of the 1980s.
51% : But to agree with Sunkara today -- that "the route to a more radical socialism will come from the crisis of social democracy our very success initiates," and that "class-struggle social democracy...isn't a foe of democratic socialism...
50% :Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht, staff writer and managing editor respectively for Jacobin magazine (which since 2015 has been a major Sanders propaganda medium), insist in Bigger Than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism (April 28, Verso) that there is a democratic road to socialism and that it lies straight through the heart of the Democratic Party.
50% : In part this explains Sanders's insistence on calling himself a socialist much more so than he did in 2016, when he sounded more like a traditional progressive reformist, because the 2016 ideas (like campaign finance reform) would have sounded positively acceptable to the corporate mediasphere, whereas in order to maintain a form of brand distinction and even enhanced glamorization the language of socialism espoused by Jacobin magazine and its ilk seemed more appealing.
49% : The writers they rely on are not ultimately looking for an actual revolution of any kind but an incremental reform of capitalism from within, and from inside its most compromised bastions no less, accepting each concession as a marvel of activist victory, when, as mentioned earlier, much of this spectrum of concessions existed in reality in the U.S. and most Western countries as late as Reagan, Thatcher, Clinton, Blair, and the neoliberal ascendancy.
49% : A large part of Bigger Than Bernie -- written before primary voting commenced this year -- builds on the expectation that once socialism in this country starts becoming successful, the elites will step in heavy-handedly to tear down the revolutionaries.
48% : Socialism has suddenly, over the last five years, become the precinct of glamorous video talk show hosts who presume to speak for the "working class" -- and not just for New Deal reformism maintaining capitalism in its essential outline but for some ill-defined "political revolution."
47% : Wouldn't the pressures to conform, and ultimately legitimize capitalism, be even greater at the lower levels?
46% : This reading of American political economy is patently false, because during the 40-year heyday of the New Deal we had in fact attained most of the social welfare goals Day and Uetricht lay out, and in some cases even exceeded them to the extent that we had become a society oriented toward leisure and the afflictions of affluence, rather than gross serfdom and bondage.
45% : From the start of the New Deal until 1973, and sometimes even later, we did have universal programs, but the confusions surrounding class positioning often made the beneficiaries of these programs complicit in their own political demise.
42% : Strikes and direct action to demand wage continuation, and rent, mortgage, utilities and debt cancellation?), anything other than voting for the right candidates, then there's no evidence of it.
34% : So Bigger Than Bernie bypasses electoral reform, third party viability, ballot access rules, and an end to various forms of voter suppression altogether, in essence seeking Medicare for All and the Green New Deal in the visible presence of a post-constitutional Orwellian state, which does not seem philosophically consistent to me.

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