I mentioned some time ago when it didn’t go without saying that Bernie Sanders stands a real chance to win the US Presidency. It goes without saying now. What’s also clear is that the One Percent establishment – both Democrat and Republican – now fear that Bernie Sanders may win any given election he enters, culminating in a potential 50 state Bernie Blue-Out.
That’s why the establishment is sweating bullets over the Joe Rogan endorsement, the union endorsements, the teacher endorsements, the women-of-color “Squad” endorsements, surging polls for Bernie, and the “Not me – Us” movement that helped launch and power the teachers’ strikes that have swept the country, the movement that is now causing new organizers to say they want to learn how to organize not only for this election but for post-election actions and movement building too.
Well beyond a national strike, Bernie Sanders has been leading a National Call to Action: a movement building “political revolution,” as he describes it. People have responded over the course of several years now, nationwide, locally, and globally. The call and push for a “political revolution” has been an inspiration, and in many ways effective. Bernie has done the unthinkable: he has helped make the left much more real, in the sense that it can now be better seen, some of it, and be seen to be growing, in myriad places where it was non-existent before, or if existing, often less visible, or less active, less powerful. Which is all to say, in some real part, Bernie has helped. It may even be infinitely crucial help. “Not me – Us.” Bernie, as electoral phenomenon, exists because the left existed first, Occupy Wall Street not least, and Bernie’s movement has helped to feed one popular progressive push after another. These movements themselves feed back into his “Not me – Us” candidacy.
The establishment is at real risk now of getting blown-out by Bernie’s “Not me – Us” Blue-Out, even by the “threat” of it. People are becoming more fully human in this movement, and not a moment too soon in face of the staggering imminent threats to human existence, nuclear and in multiple ways environmental.
Are there drawbacks, limits, problems to the ‘Not me – Us” movement? More than a few. Some have been addressed. Others can be. Must society change at many levels, including governmental and electoral, for the risk of further and final disaster to be lowered? Absolutely. To this end, the bigger the potential Blue-Out, the better.
After Bernie, it looks to be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and in the meantime, until AOC ages in, there will need to be a potent pick for Vice President, if the Democrat nomination is secured. Movements find people. People find movements. Some people elevate into government and other offices. Everyone, literally everyone, finds an important role, which provides the power of it all.
Bernie has found his role. Others have found theirs. More are pitching in all the time as things grow, as need be. The One Percent Establishment is increasingly unnerved and apoplectic over the possibility, the specter, of a 50 state Blue-Out, and progressives should be troubled by the potential lack of one. It’s not about Democrats or Republicans, never was. It’s about progressive waves overcoming both, in part through the Democrat offices themselves, a progressive takeover and victory, one party at a time, or both at once.
Con Don Trump is the defining liar, bigot, marauder, and me-first con artist of the One Percent, an outgrowth of both the Democrat and Republican Parties. Trump’s neon malignancy further clarifies the inhuman priorities, predatory methods, and boundless destructiveness of One Percent rule. The figure of Con Don reveals the institutional depravity of both the Republican and Democrat One Percent establishments, and the predatory economic system known as capitalism.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders stands in opposition to both parties including much of the Democratic Party as he steps through it (and on it) to try to capture its nomination, and in so doing further clarifies the sheer destructiveness of the Democratic Party (wildly misnamed) and its One Percent establishment and virulent economics. Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are predatory capitalist parties, One Percent corporations essentially, that it will take a political revolution to overcome and replace with something humane. The “Not me – Us” movement goes in that direction. So the One Percent establishment of both parties fears the great potential of a Bernie Blue-Out, as they should. “Not me – Us” is the specter that haunts the One Percent.
And it’s the movements behind the movement for a potential Bernie Blue-Out that the One Percent fears most. Bernie’s call to action has helped tilt the battlefield. A Blue-Out would tilt it even more.
