Sanders doesn’t rule out 2020 White House run

Instead, I want to focus on a peculiar absence I’ve noticed in the aftermath.

Bernie Sanders by contrast was a progressive Independent-Democrat which made him a politician in a party that many blue-collar workers saw as bowing and scarping to those same minorities, women, and immigrants that supposedly were snatching jobs away from suffering whites. This is not, thank God, a Ralph Nader situation.

Moreover, her campaign had the support in the general election not of only the kingpins of the Democratic party but also many leading Republicans, including most of the politically active denizens of Wall Street and the top executives of America’s largest corporations, and even former Republican president George HW Bush. While Trump received nearly the same amount of total votes as the 2013 Republican candidate Mitt Romney, Democratic support fell by over 6 million votes between 2012 and 2016. Do I think that’s why she lost?

We can’t replay history, but one what-if haunts me: what if Bernie had made a greater bow to identity politics by selecting a distinguished woman or person of color as his running mate, say, last March, and what if President Obama, himself a cautious corporatist Democrat, had chose to endorse Sanders. But it is also irrelevant to the question that confronted us in the Democratic primary: Which candidate was most likely to secure the election? What happened to the revolution?

He also doubled down on his beliefs that Election Day should be a national holiday, so more people would be able to vote. President-elect Donald Trump has suggested Clinton should be the target of such a probe by a special prosecutor. Younger voters might not realize that these areas were once Democratic strongholds, thanks to high union rates and traditional support for the party among those working in manufacturing. Asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer whether he would’ve brought Democrats to the White House, Sanders smiled before bellowing.

So let’s re-consider his decision to back Clinton in light of Tuesday’s result. Either the country will face a constitutional crisis at some point in the next four years, or Trump will scrap campaign promises, angering many of his supporters. And so it was a lot to try to attain in one election.

In 1993, Bill Clinton worked hard to peel off a enough reluctant Democratic representatives to pass NAFTA, which his predecessor failed to do for his own corporate donors. He would have neutered himself, and his cause, for pride. If she followed through, great, and if she didn’t, he’d be there to call her out and rally his powerful base. The most important of these is the economy.

“We should hear the message loud and clear that the American people want Washington to change”, Warren is telling them, according to her prepared remarks.

Sanders told the Associated Press Clinton’s loss was embarrassing, saying the “Democratic message of standing up for working people no longer holds much sway among workers in this country”. There was much talk of “Clinton Republicans” who would, in the spirit of the Reagan Democrats, cross party lines to oppose Trump. In victory Trump reminds progressives especially that political expediency is sometime the least practical path forward. If anybody blames Bernie, their arguments are gaining no traction. The far left is ascendant, and two years ago, that was unthinkable within the party’s neoliberal framework.

Clinton’s loss to Trump created a leadership vacuum in the Democratic party, rocked by the release of its emails by hackers who turned them over to WikiLeaks. Both speak in a vaguely oppositional manner about living standards, but both have nothing to say in opposition to the capitalist system or the American war machine.