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I don't think the list has ignored the Sanders campaign. It's just that there's very little new to say about this. Many of us who are not supporters of his campaign have been watching it with interest and a great deal of gratification for his level of support says about the political possibilities. I want as many people inclined to support it to enter into it. Invest your blood, sweat and tears in the effort. The more who do so, the more the Democratic Party will persuade them--as it did me and many like me in 1968--that our views have ultimately never mattered to it. And I do get the theoretical objections to supporting any party of the class enemy . . . But I have been primarily concerned with the practical questions the campaign raises. I've posed these here, on North Star, on Facebook continually and they remain entirely unaddressed. In the last half century, the Democrats have never--not ever--picked the most progressive candidate running. This includes candidates who outpolled in the primaries the candidate who ultimately gets the nomination. In the past, when a progressive candidate starts showing strength, we have seen the media give them less coverage and to make the lion's share of that coverage quoting other people about how terrible they are? Hasn't that happened more and more? What they did wheeling out the relics of the civil rights movement to serve as slanderers and liars against Sanders was just the beginning. Then they can always Howard Dean him. And--again as predicted by the skeptics--they've dealt out the delegates in way to minimize the will of the Democratic voters. Does no one else remember 1968? Even in 1972, when McGovern got the nomination (he wasn't nearly as progressive as Chisholm, btw), the powers in the party stepped back and let the campaign crash so that they could rebuild it into what they wanted it to become. Good grief, people! How oblivious are we to the history through which many of us actually lived? Conversely, how eager are we to embrace a faith-based willful ignoring of that history? What reason do you have for thinking that will change? Do you think the party of Patriot Acts and drones and oil spills and militarization of the police has become somehow kinder and gentler than it was in the 1990s or earlier? I've heard no coherent response other than that I shouldn't be such a big old cynic spreading the blue meanies among the cherubic youth. But certainly none of the very real support Sanders has gotten--which he and his supporters have worked terribly hard to earn, I know--begins to answer those concerns. Cheers, Mark L. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
