Democrats? Acting more aggressively? Probably a pipe dream, but worth a post at least.

This is a slightly rosy assessment of policy options, especially in imagining there'll be a transition as we've known it; again tonight Donald Trump trolled the country about not going away peacefully. 

And all my white Republican friends were silent like tombs. I believe categorically that what we're witnessing at the present time is (a) the cancerous decay of late-stage capitalism; (b) the equally malignant pathology of decadent capital accumulation; and (c) a fanatical determination on the part of white America to remain the dominant caste, come what may.

I've no firm idea how I can help those in need, given that the bulk of you insist on identifying with the abysmal, corrupt two-party system.

But I'm open to suggestions.

Republicans will replace RBG but Democrats hold the trump cards – no, really, by David Litt (The Guardian)

Progressives should not worry about what will happen if they mimic McConnell’s constitutional hardball. Their representatives need only act with a little less restraint

... For one thing, America’s political institutions are currently biased – in many cases quite aggressively – in favor of conservatives. Restrictive voting laws make casting a ballot disproportionately difficult for lower-income, non-white and young Americans. Unprecedented gerrymandering gives Republicans a built-in advantage in the race for the House, and according to FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, the Senate’s bias toward rural states makes the chamber about seven points redder than the nation as a whole. Thanks to the electoral college, two of the past five presidential elections have been won by Republicans who lost the popular vote – one reason why even before Justice Ginsburg’s death, 15 of the past 19 supreme court justices were appointed by GOP presidents.

The conservative movement, in other words, already had it pretty good. The average American disagrees with Republican orthodoxy on every major issue: healthcare, climate change, gun violence, immigration, taxes, Covid response. Yet thanks to the biases embedded in the American political process, Republicans have not just remained viable, but secured extraordinary amounts of power. We can’t know for certain who would benefit from upending the status quo that existed at the time of Justice Ginsburg’s passing – but we do know which party has the most to lose.

Walk On By.

Whatever Democratic voters think — and most of them like Bernie Sanders and his platform — the dominant bulk of Democratic officials oppose them both with an organized vigor they seldom bring to combat with Republicans.

This strikes me as a detailed and balanced assessment. Long, but essential.

If you cared not for Bernie Sanders as a Democrat, you should read the essay anyway; there's plenty there for you. If you were a Sanders backer, as I was, it's very important to absorb this.

Bernie Sanders’s Five-Year War, by Matt Karp (Jacobin)

How he lost and where we go from here.

... First, (Bernie Sanders' campaigns) demonstrated that bold social-democratic ideas, well beyond the regulatory ambitions of Obama-era progressives, can win a mass base in today’s United States. An uncompromising demand for the federal government to provide essential social goods for all Americans — from health care and college tuition to childcare and family leave — stood at the heart of the Sanders project from beginning to end. Starting at 3 percent in the polls and conducting two presidential campaigns almost entirely on the strength of this platform, Sanders built the most influential left-wing challenge in modern history.

Yes, candidates from Jesse Jackson to Dennis Kucinich also supported single-payer health insurance, but their campaigns did not end with polls showing a newfound majority of Americans backing Medicare for All, let alone massive supermajorities among Democrats and voters under sixty-five. Yes, leftists from Michael Harrington to Ralph Nader had long declared that a bipartisan corporate class rules America, but they did not turn that insight into a political movement capable of winning primaries in New Hampshire, Michigan, or California.

Nor is the partial success of the Sanders campaigns merely a hollow “discourse victory.” It has presented concrete evidence for a proposition that mainstream political observers scoffed at five years ago, and that the American left itself had grandly announced rather than demonstrated: that “democratic socialism,” driven by opposition to billionaire-class rule and dedicated to universal public goods, can win the support of millions, not just thousands. Across the last half century, any activist with a bullhorn could proclaim this to be true, but Bernie Sanders actually fucking proved it.

Of course, as Bernie’s defeat makes clear, there is a vast gulf between winning exit polls and winning power. If the Sanders campaigns illuminated American social democracy’s unknown political resources, they also revealed, in a dramatic fashion, the determination of their opponents. This is the second practical lesson of Bernie’s five-year war: the unanimity and ferocity of elite Democratic resistance, not only to Sanders himself, but to the essence of his platform.

It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday.

In an article this long, it's hard to find a pull that summarizes the gist, but I've chosen a single sentence. It's a long read, and worth the extra minutes.

‘The President Was Not Encouraging’: What Obama Really Thought About Biden, by Alex Thompson (Politico)

Behind the friendship was a more complicated relationship, which now drives the former vice president to prove his partner wrong.

Biden aides acknowledge that Obama didn’t do nearly as much for Biden in 2020 as he did for Clinton in 2016.

Joe Hill.

When the Kamala Harris announcement was made last week, one of the first tweets I saw (Twitter being my de facto news feed) was from Bernie Sanders, in support.

My view is that after we elect Biden, what we’re going to do is everything that we possibly can to move his adfarm-near-me/">ministration in a progressive direction. Biden has told me, and I would not say it if he hadn’t made the same statement publicly, that he intends to be the most progressive president since FDR. That’s a noble ambition, and our job is to hold him to that goal. I think millions of people are prepared to do that.

This week or next, maybe I'll be able to finish a particularly vexing, ongoing ON THE AVENUES column draft, in which I've been trying to sort through the arguments and counter-arguments running through my brain with respect to my choices in this year's presidential election.

I'm not there yet. But you can see where I'm headed.

Bernie Sanders on How He’ll Rally Progressives Tonight, by John Nichols (The Nation)

In an exclusive interview with The Nation, the Vermont senator says backing Biden/Harris is the start of their work, not the finish.

JOHN NICHOLS: When you were campaigning for president, you spoke quite frequently about the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt’s “Economic Bill of Rights.” It was part of your effort to frame the 2020 election around fundamental issues and the need for structural change. Obviously, you didn’t know at the time that Covid and mass unemployment, and a rising demand for racial justice, would heighten the sense of urgency. But even before the crisis unfolded, you saw a need for a politics that was focused on transformative change.

BERNIE SANDERS: Absolutely. Absolutely. It is imperative that we not only deal with all of the injustices and inequalities that exist in our society today, which of course have been made worse by the pandemic and the economic meltdown, but it is also imperative that we start, in the 21st century, to rethink our value systems.

What Roosevelt did in his State of the Union speech in 1944 was really quite extraordinary. For whatever reason—we were in the middle of a war then and, of course, he died a year later; the media was not particularly sympathetic—what he said back in 1944 has been largely forgotten. But what he said was extraordinarily profound and revolutionary.

What he said is that, yes, our country has political freedom. We have a Constitution. We have a Bill of Rights. We have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, etc., and that’s all great. But what we have to do is go beyond just political rights and into economic rights.

In other words, it’s not good enough that you just have the constitutional right to vote (that’s good!), to protest (that’s great!), to assemble (that’s wonderful!), and freedom of religion (great!).

What we have got to be talking about, Roosevelt said in 1944, is that economic rights are human rights, and that means you are entitled, as an American, to decent housing, to decent health care, to a decent job, to a decent retirement. Economic rights are human rights, and you’re not going to be a really free person unless we guarantee those rights. That was an extraordinarily profound statement!

What I tried to do in the 2020 campaign is talk about Roosevelt’s 1944 speech and how we make it relevant to the year 2020 ...

Thomas Frank: "I came here to understand the Biden mystique, not to bury it."

How can self-styled progressives overlook Joe Biden's long legislative career of anti-progressive measures?

Because his name isn't "Donald Trump," and of course the usual left-wing delusion that leads to all genuine precepts being thrown away so the common threat can be met head-on, and then unceremoniously appeased owing to neoliberal donor cash.

The author Frank is no fan of Biden, but he gives it the good old (non)college try.

What's behind Joe Biden's mystique?, by Thomas Frank (The Guardian)

It was once a no-brainer among DC pundits that, in an electoral match-up between a friendly centrist and a bitter polarization-machine like Donald Trump, the guy who was closer to the middle would automatically win. And in the presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, that conventional wisdom would seem to have found its man: he stands on behalf of no great causes, just a return to the consensus days of yore.

The flaw in this viewpoint is that the consensus days of yore were a dreadful time. What bipartisan centrism meant, in Biden’s heyday, was deliberate, state-sponsored cruelty on a scale so vast it is difficult to comprehend. It meant baked-in racial discrimination. It meant imprisoning enormous numbers of our fellow citizens for using drugs – especially crack cocaine, whose users (disproportionately African American) were singled out for horrendously harsh retribution. It meant three-strikes laws. Mandatory minimum sentencing. Unlimited funding for police departments. A boom in prison construction. And, as it pleased Joe Biden to say on the worst of these occasions, “the truth is, every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress – every minor crime bill – has had the name of the Democratic senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, on that bill.”

Biden has tried half-heartedly to walk back the decades he spent transforming America into a penal state. He may succeed in persuading voters to forgive him. But he’s not going to win because the old centrist strategy has worked and Republicans are fatally outmaneuvered by his clever triangulations. These days even the Charles Koch Institute is to the left of where Biden was back in the crackdown era.

You can say something similar about Biden’s famous rapport with the working class: it is badly compromised by his actual political record ...

So, how does Biden do it?

 ... Catering to society’s well-educated winners is no way to run a party of the left: Biden seems to be one of the few mainstream Democrats to have grasped this. He recalled in the interview being told by a Hillary Clinton operative in 2016 that he “had to make a distinction between progressive values and working-class values”.

“I said I’ve never found a distinction,” Biden claimed he replied. “Never found them hard to sell.” He told the Times about white working-class enthusiasm for gender wage equality and some other issues, and then he took this shot at the very heart of modern-day liberalism: “We treat them like they’re stupid. They know they’re in trouble, and nobody’s talking to them. Nobody’s talking to them. That’s what we used to do. That was our base.”

It is a point in Biden’s favor that he understands this problem. But is he the man to resolve it?

Will it work?

Frank concludes: "My own hope – and it is merely a hope at this point – is that somewhere in the soul of that tongue-tied, old-school Delaware pol flickers the forgotten core value of the Democratic party: solidarity."

"Progressives don’t trust Biden. They trust history. History proves Biden isn’t one of them."

The 1117 E. Spring Street Neighborhood Association tallies two Indiana primary votes for Bernie Sanders -- and against the prevailing inanity of the local DemoDisneyDixiecrats.

If Trump Wins Again, Don’t Blame Progressives, by Ted Rall (CounterPunch)

The corporate conservatives who control the Democratic Party are suffering from cheaters’ remorse.

The DNC and their media allies (NPR, CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Vox, etc.) subverted the will of primary voters, undermining initial frontrunner Bernie Sanders in order to install the worst candidate of the 20 centrists in the campaign.

Now the power brokers are worried that the befuddled Biden, whom they touted as the Most Electable Against Donald Trump, will lose to him. Rather than take responsibility for their idiocy and force Biden to pull out of a race for which he is obviously physically and mentally unprepared, the corporatist sellouts are preemptively blaming the progressives who warned them about this exact scenario.

Sorry, right wingers. Biden is on you. You made him the presumptive nominee. If Trump wins again, it’s your fault.

Just as it was last time ...

Sow's ears, silk purses, and devising a way to make Joe Biden palatable.

I might be able to get drunk enough to vote for Biden, but caution is merited, because if I begin drinking too soon, it won't be easy staying drunk enough to vote for Biden.

I Literally Wrote the Case Against Joe Biden. But I’ve Got Some Free Advice for Him, by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

Pundits are panicking about whether the Left will help Joe Biden defeat Trump. The former vice president probably doesn't want it, but here's some advice for him from the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.

For at least the last two years, the Left has been imploring the Democratic Party and its loyal voters not to choose Joe Biden as their nominee. I even wrote an entire book about it. The argument against Biden is well known and easy to find, and I’m not going to bother repeating it here.

Unfortunately, Biden is now indisputably the Democratic nominee, and will be facing Donald Trump in the general election. As inadequate as Biden and the conservatives who are propping him up are to handle this moment in history, no one reading this wants to see a second Trump term. But despite what polling currently shows, it is far from assured Biden will deliver even that result, and he is entering the race in a weaker position than Clinton this time in 2016, after she had already weathered months of criticism and press scrutiny — the kind to which Biden has so far not been treated.

Already, some members of the liberal pundit-sphere are calling for a moratorium on criticism of Biden. Besides being a repugnant idea for any journalist, this is not sustainable: though liberal news outlets might view their top priority for the next seven months as getting Biden into the White House at all costs, there’s no guarantee mainstream news outlets will see their jobs this way, and they will almost certainly start applying serious scrutiny to Biden again now that Bernie Sanders is out of the race.

So as someone who literally wrote the book on why Biden would not be a great nominee or president, let me give the Democratic Party and Biden’s campaign some free advice ...

ON THE AVENUES: #VoteEwwNoMatterWho, or when being realistic means being radical.

155 years ago today in the front parlor of Wilmer McLean’s home in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, a nattily attired Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to the commander of all Union armies, mud-splattered Ulysses S. Grant.

Lest there be any doubt, Grant was the genuine military genius of the two. Grant saw the whole of the strategic picture and effectively used the resources at his disposal, applying them remorselessly along the pathway to an outcome he foresaw quite clearly.

Grant was not without flaws as a human being, but he was mercifully immune from self-aggrandizing bull’s excrement. Tellingly, if reincarnated in 2020, Grant wouldn’t have a chance whatsoever of making a difference.

McLean, a wholesale grocer by trade, lived in Manassas until Bull Run, the Civil War’s first great battle in 1861. McLean’s house was used as headquarters by the rebel commander General Beauregard and damaged during the fighting, so subsequently he moved his family 120 miles west to a place he reasoned would be safer.

It was, right up until it wasn’t. Immediately upon the conclusion of the surrender conference, Union officers denuded the parlor in short order, pressing money into McLean’s hand (hundreds of dollars, in fact) as they carted away tables, chairs and bric-a-brac as souvenirs.

McLean moved away after the war, unable or unwilling to capitalize on his house’s singular legacy by converting it into a roadside tourist trap. Maybe this was because no “authentic” furniture remained, or more likely, owing to the hostility of defeated Virginians toward northern visitors.

Shortly thereafter, the utter fabrication of “Lost Cause” mythology provided the necessary value in memoriam, although too late for McLean. It is alleged that McLean conjured one quotable observation from his personal Civil War: "The war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor."

Today he’d be on all the late night shows and probably practice punditry on one or more of the news channels.

---

Meanwhile, a distinctive feature of that first Battle of Bull Run in 1861 was the crowd of groupies it attracted.

Union troops bound for certain glory were accompanied on their march toward the enemy positions by wagon loads of Washington picnickers, sure of a wonderful day in the countryside watching their favorites dispense with the confederates. It all came to a premature and unpleasant end when the visiting team was ignominiously routed, sweeping the party goers along with them, straight back to the safety of the capital’s fledgling fortifications.

The victors were content to snack on the leftovers.

Indeed, war is hell, and the scene in 1861 reminds me that so are most of the elections of our lives in postwar L’America. The COVID-plagued primary in Wisconsin earlier this week was merely an extreme example of the norm. Chads are left hanging, voting is suppressed, courts are rigged; the pillage of oligarchs and evangelists proceeds as we binge-watch dystopian drama.

Like those hangers-on making for Manassas with their watercress sandwiches and cider, we keep coming to the polls in our dashing finery, hoping for a miracle of political intelligibility -- outright statesmanship obviously lies beyond the pale -- and if we’re lucky the reward is dull, plodding mediocrity, but usually our reward is garish spectacle at the expense of substance, the sheer underachievement fixed as if by constitutional mandate.

Paraphrasing H.L. Mencken, we get exactly what we vote for -- good and hard. Not unlike Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., we pay our money, take our chances and spin the DemoDisneyDixiecratic wheel of ill fortune … and every second Sunday, Biden remembers exactly how many grandchildren he has.

---

That’ll show those horrid Bernie Bros; Sanders is out, and my new "choice" is Biden's dementia versus Donald Trump's depravity.

Red or blue?

I say: #VoteEwwNoMatterWho.

“In reality (Bernie Sanders’ campaign) it gave voice to the voiceless, raised people’s sense of what’s possible through collective action, and refused to accept that exploitation and the fear of economic devastation should be the lot of millions.”

Ah, of course the soulless right-of-center “Democrats” have their answer at the ready: it’s all about being realistic, or at least as it pertains to their selective, generally white-washed version of reality.

That nasty too-damn-left Bernie was selling a bill of make-believe goods to the guileless youth, the wooly radicals, the blue-wing’s version of numb-Trump-skulls; those naïve neophytes just need to abandon their idiotic hopes and dreams, get realistic and embrace reality.

As if their lives weren’t realistic enough already.

And what exactly is being realistic in this context? It’s beating Trump, of course, even if every other office in the country from Senate to dogcatcher remains in Republican hands, just so long as we have no ambition grander than assuring money and power remain the exclusive province of two political parties, each taking their turn suckling the teat.

When the centrists wag their finger at me and pontificate about shutting up and accepting what’s realistic, it kills me as dead as Sullivan Ballou, a Union officer who lost his life at Bull Run.

I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans on the triumph of the Government and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution. And I am willing — perfectly willing — to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt …

Yes; that was different. We could debate the remainder of the pandemic about the specific circumstances of Ballou’s death as a soldier, and how they vary substantively from those of a voter in the 2020 presidential election, but to me the divergence is striking in terms of the concept of sacrifice.

Ballou was willing to make one. Most of the purported Democratic centrists dispensing holy writ about reality aren’t.

If they were, they’d not be so flippant about everyday REALITY on the part of the voiceless, who have seen in the Sanders campaign the possibility (reiterating) “of collective action, and refuse to accept that exploitation and the fear of economic devastation should be the lot of millions.”

They’d not be supporting the prevailing kakistocratic, catastrophic socio-economic “realities” with their wallets, every single day, only pausing from the endless consumerism when it’s time to denounce what Republicans are doing to wreck the system, although most of the “opposition” is as fully invested in its disproportionate excess as the MAGAtites.

When are any of the faux “left” centrists going to risk any aspect of their well-ordered existences, cease fluffing and buttressing the forces that oppress others more so than them, and make a sacrifice of any appreciable magnitude as a downpayment?

Be realistic, they repeat over and over like a mantra. Now’s not the time for pie in the sky, Roger.

Really? When the hell in human history has the time been "right" for aspiration?

How realistic was the Magna Carta, the Reformation, or our own American Revolution, even as imperfect as these milestones were?

How realistic was it to break the four-minute mile, to cure polio or route sewage underground rather than let it flow through ditches in the street?

How realistic was it for sensory-deprived Helen Keller to be an author, former slave George Washington Carver to be a scientist, or dirt-poor Abraham Lincoln to be president?

When are the centrists going to withhold assent from American-style injustice, go on strike, hit the streets -- show some effing solidarity for something and someone else apart from their own scolding virtue-signaled ostentatiousness?

Sullivan Ballou? He actually stood FOR something.

Sarah my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me unresistibly on with all these chains to the battle field.

Listen up, centrists. You've slain the Bernie dragon, now here’s the reality. If you want to be rid of the orange menace, it’s time to dismantle his habitat, and commence some adaptive reuse of your own decaying political worldviews.

Take your eyes off Red Bernie and listen to what he actually says … and observe who else has been listening to him. If learning is truly the objective, there’s a chance you might, and still be able to speak with people who are extremely disappointed in disgraceful timidity. You're now being paternalistic with regard to the people who suffer most, when their preference is to DO SOMETHING.

Notice I wrote "speak with," not "speak to."

Our system has been made gloriously efficient for the haves, the accumulators of capital, and the hoarders of corporate profits, but it’s not resilient at all for ordinary human beings. The coronavirus is proving this abundantly, right now. It’s bigger than The Donald. Democrats are complicit in it as well. Shouldn't one of the two political parties articulate a viable alternative in terms of programs and policies?

There’s yardage to be gained, and there’s no turning back to the halcyon days of Obama for the simple reason that they weren’t.

Sacrifice something, centrists -- anything will do -- and instead of blaming the phantasmagoric imagined Bernie Bros for your own distemper, muster the grace sufficient to credit those principled people on your left for having the hopes, dreams and cojones to be FOR something, rather than merely against, and who see power in the realism of good ideas, not capitulation to capitalism in the throes of cancer.

Ah, but I’m so forgetful. You centrists are going to need someone to blame if it doesn’t end well this November, and Bernie’s supporters can be so very easily scapegoated. After all, you're already quite proficient at the practice.

Shaddup, already. Are we on strike yet?

---

Recent columns:

April 2: ON THE AVENUES: Pandemic, pornographic, pecksniffian. Just three random words until the booze kicks in.

March 26: ON THE AVENUES: It's a tad premature to sing the healing game.

March 19: ON THE AVENUES: If it's a war, then the food service biz needs to be issued a few weapons. We need improvisation and flexibility to survive the shutdown.

March 12: ON THE AVENUES: Keep calm and carry on.

Democratic primary coverage is why WE cancelled OUR New York Times subscriptions.

Given the results on Super Tuesday, the following critique -- published almost a month ago -- obviously doesn't take the most recent Democratic primary evolution into consideration (read: it preceded the DNC's recent "Dim-pire Strikes Back" pro-Biden shenanigans).

However, as an explanation of why I recently severed our household's ties with the New York Times after more than a decade of subscribing, this essay does a fine job, indeed.

We're just one of many, and I really enjoy reading a tactile Sunday newspaper, but I could no longer in good conscience give money to a newspaper prone to running "hit pieces" (the author's term) against Bernie Sanders. One can only speculate about the newspaper's activities behind the scenes.

The author appears to have had a digital subscription. Our was Sunday delivery with digital access included. That's $12 a week, or a honking $624 a year. I can think of far better things to do with that kind of money than pay Thomas Friedman to write his dirtbag bilge.

For now, here's David Blass: Why I just cancelled my New York Times subscription: Democratic primary coverage as “fit” to print as Trump is to serve.

... Unfortunately, though some of the examples I’ve cited are particularly transparent, this type of reporting is the rule rather than the exception for Sanders in both the press and in cable news coverage. I used to think the New York Times was above the journalistic chicanery I saw elsewhere in the media, but the facts speak for themselves.

Coming to terms with this made me a more cynical person. Perhaps that’s a good thing; seeing grays between black and white can make us more tolerant and empathetic. But for now, my biggest unanswered question is for the Times’ board of directors: Is this your best attempt at self-preservation? ...

... I’ve subscribed to the New York Times since 2016. That might not sound like a long time, but it’s most of my adult life. As of today, I’ve lost my trust in the Times and have neither a use for its coverage nor a desire to support a thinly veiled purveyor of the propaganda Noam Chomsky described in Manufacturing Consent. In fact, in a 2010 interview, six years before the New York Times would all but write off Trump’s chances at the presidency, Chomsky offered the following:

If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? […] [That enemy] will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. […] I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.

Before abandoning all hope, our clairvoyant also had some thoughts about Senator Sanders:

Well, Bernie Sanders is an extremely interesting phenomenon. He’s a decent, honest person. That’s pretty unusual in the political system. Maybe there are two of them in the world, you know. But he’s considered radical and extremist, which is a pretty interesting characterization, because he’s basically a mainstream New Deal Democrat. His positions would not have surprised President Eisenhower.

And in the wake of the 2016 election, he offered an antidote:

[If] the Sanders movement offered an authentic, constructive program for real hope and change, it would win […] Trump supporters back.

Dunman nails it: Bernie Sanders' agenda is "pretty much just 'catch us up to where Western Europe has already been for 40 years.'"

More steaming turds from the screaming skull, but first, you may recall Joe Dunman as one of the attorneys who worked on a fairly important case involving same sex marriage. For those of you doing Twitter, he's a great one to follow.

Here is a typically incisive tweet from Dunman, which needs to be repeated again and again.

“Amazing to me about the anti-Sanders panic is that he’s only slightly center-left, globally-speaking. His agenda is pretty much just ‘catch us up to where Western Europe has already been for 40 years.’”

Yep. Dunman's comment is occasioned by yesterday's good news.

After the Nevada Blowout, It’s Bernie’s Party Now, by Dustin Guastella and Connor Kilpatrick (Jacobite)

Bernie Sanders’s decisive victory in Nevada today shows that he has a working-class base committed to fundamentally transforming our radically unequal political and economic system. He’s on his way to not just the nomination, but the White House ...

... The New Deal was made possible with a new electorate. And just as the mass entry into politics of first- and second-generation Eastern European immigrants brought Roosevelt (and the CIO) to power, Latinos — who are solidly behind Sanders — could very well be the force that helps bring social democracy to America.

Bernie’s staunch anti-establishment outsider appeal and his platform focused on workers’ issues is winning non-partisans, new voters, young voters, and working-class immigrants. That’s not just a savvy coalition for winning the Nevada caucuses, it’s how Bernie Sanders becomes president.

Face it, establishment Democrats — it’s his party now.

Maybe this time we can get the Sanders post-primary (Indiana) victory meal at Pints&union.

Bernie Sanders is "the only authentic voice for change."

The morning's Economist Espresso e-mail provides this update of yesterday's New Hampshire primary on the Periodically Democratic side.

Democrats voting in New Hampshire’s presidential primary picked Bernie Sanders as their favourite candidate, giving him more than a quarter of their ballots. Pete Buttigieg, who pipped him in Iowa’s caucuses last week, took nearly as many and Amy Klobuchar finished a respectable third. Joe Biden trailed badly, again. Andrew Yang and Michael Bennet dropped out of the race.

Time, then, to dispense with the Twitter-driven "BernieBro" myth and focus instead on reality?

Why does the “BernieBro” myth persist? Because pundits don't understand how the internet works, by Keith A. Spencer (Salon)

A misunderstanding of social media is driving media elites to keep pushing an easily disprovable stereotype

... Why do some myths persist, or remain uncorrected by the media, while others dissipate? The short answer seems to be that when they serve a media narrative, or play on existing stereotypes, they grow to possess a power that goes beyond fact or truth. To this list of indefatigable myths, one might add the pernicious "BernieBro" — so ubiquitous a concept that it has its own Wikipedia article. The self-explanatory neologism was coined by Robinson Meyer in an Atlantic article in 2015 before being distorted by the Twittersphere and the punditry — something that Meyer later came to regret, as he felt the term he reified suffered from "semantic drift."

But that was five years ago, before we had as much data on Sanders' support base — which, as it turns out, should be sufficient to debunk the stereotype that Sanders' support base consists entirely of a mythic tribe of entitled, pushy young millennial men. To wit: young women make up more of Sanders' base than men. He polls especially high with Hispanic voters, far more so than with white voters; Hispanic voters also donated more money to him than any other Democratic candidate. Polls consistently show that nonwhite voters prefer him over the other candidates. Notably, the demographic group that likes Sanders the least is white men.

Moreover, of all the candidates, Sanders has taken in the most money from women. Many of Sanders' female supporters bemoan how they are ignored by the mainstream press. "The 'Bernie Bro' narrative is endlessly galling because it erases the women who make up his base," writer Caitlin PenzeyMoog opined on Twitter. "To paint this picture of sexism is to paint over the millions of women who support Sanders. Do you see how f**ked up that is?"

Of the three, only Sanders follows the money to show how the Money defeats ordinary Americans every single day. Time yet to stand for something, DemoDisneyDixiecrats?

Three Old White Guys: Bernie, Biden and Bloomberg, by John Davis (CounterPunch)

... The DNC itself has inaugurated a kind of junior league plutocracy whereby its presidential hopefuls must be validated by their supporters sending them cold hard cash. Money as a proxy for voting is the oligarch’s foundational gambit and the anti-democratic forces of the DNC have now substantiated it in their farcical presidential primary process.

Just as the elite in Britain use the emotional ballast of royal regalia to deter rebellion, the wealthy ruling class in the U.S. call upon the trappings of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the flag – all conflated in the notion of American democracy – to quash radical action that might challenge them. Even as its universality has been squeezed hard, the sop of voting – the lure of having one’s voice counted – has been remarkably effective in guaranteeing the quiescence of the people.

The bastion of capital, which affords a dictatorship of the rich and the immiseration of its subject population, is supported by the twin pillars of neo-liberalism, the Republican and Democratic parties. Its walls are battle-hardened against rogue outliers such as Bernie, while the likes of Biden have spent their careers augmenting its fortifications. But there have been moments in that dictatorship, when chinks of humanitarian light have shone through its fortress walls. Its hostility to the wellbeing of its subjects is not necessarily guaranteed. Enter our third old white guy, Mike Bloomberg, flying the standard of the Democratic Party, but refusing to play by the DNC’s rules.

At least since Jackson, America has been built on just enough democracy to ensure that the masses retain their Horatio Alger dreams – believing the myth of equal opportunity and the chance to strike it rich – but never enough to challenge the power of the wealthy. Hard work has been replaced by education as the base material of these dreams, but the latter obscures the debt peonage its achievement often requires and the low-level work it typically enables. Trader Joe’s, the supermarket chain, requires all of its staff to have a college degree. Hard work counts for little in an age when the buying power of minimum wage has atrophied into insignificance. Voting, despite the purging of the rolls and other impediments to its practice, remains for many a feel-good way to connect to the grand mythos of America, inflating the self-worth of those who are otherwise victims of its deceits.

Material wealth, first as stolen land, then as industrial capital, and now as control of information (which today drives the forces of production through algorithms fed by real-time consumer desires, or clicks) is at the heart of the American pathology of exploitation, extraction, subjugation, oppression and the devastation of the natural world. Our putative democracy has been entirely enfolded into this ongoing historical project. It is an enabler of these crimes against humanity. It is an ideological co-conspirator.
His is the only authentic voice for change.

Reich: "Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement."

"I was part of a Democratic administration that failed to fix a rigged system – I know our current president is a symptom of our disunion, not its only cause."
-- Robert Reich

I'm confused. Reich's analysis appears to be broadly correct, but nonetheless, I still feel the pressing need to take a shower. I asked Jeff Gillenwater for his thoughts.

Yes. A few quibbles - marking the erroneous white working class bit again - but generally correct. An overwhelming majority of “professionals” are complicit, hoarding opportunities and not standing up while outwardly claiming to be very liberal just as long as the financial and social order favors them. As a country, we’re not in overall possession of the self-awareness, intelligence, and fortitude to own up to that. While actual discrimination remains a serious problem, much of the virtue signaling lately serves the same role as “but I have a black friend” did previously. It’s more cover than impetus for genuine self-reflection within realistic social and economic frameworks.

Reich says: "Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement."

And, as I write, these same Democrats are frantically undermining radical democratic reform in a desperate attempt to install a fully complicit nitwit like Joe Biden as the party's candidate.

The Democratic Party's engorged elites never learn; on second thought, that's a redundancy.

Why Democrats share the blame for the rise of Donald Trump, by Robert Reich (The Guardian)

... In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri and North Carolina, for a research project on the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the people I had met 20 years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as with some of their grown children.

What I heard surprised me. Twenty years before, many said they’d been working hard and were frustrated they weren’t doing better. Now they were angry – angry at their employers, the government, Wall Street.

Something very big happened, and it wasn’t due to Sanders’ magnetism or Trump’s likeability
Many had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession following the financial crisis of 2008, or knew others who had. Most were back in jobs but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before, in terms of purchasing power.

I heard the term “rigged system” so often I began asking people what they meant. They spoke about flat wages, shrinking benefits, growing job insecurity. They talked about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, soaring CEO pay, and “crony capitalism”.

These complaints came from people who identified themselves as Republicans, Democrats and independents. A few had joined the Tea Party. A few had briefly been involved in the Occupy movement ...

"The establishment fears having a democratic socialist in the White House."

There's an interesting article at Vox: Bernie Sanders leads Donald Trump in polls, even when you remind people he’s a socialist.

This doesn't seem to be troubling Republicans as much as it makes Democrats absolutely frantic. Maybe this has something to do with following their money.

Why, yes.

I think it does.

The “Stop Sanders” Movement Is Worried That Bernie Can Actually Win, Not That He’ll Lose, by Luke Savage (Jacobin)

“Electability” is the public rallying cry of the Stop Bernie campaign. But look a little closer, and the real issue becomes clear: the establishment fears having a democratic socialist in the White House.

Bernie Sanders’s recent rise in the polls has elicited an entirely predictable reaction from all the usual suspects who make up America’s op-ed pages. But, personally offended as the chatterati are, there are signs that the prospect of a Sanders victory in the Democratic primary contest is awakening an altogether more vicious beast that’s long been in the Vermont senator’s crosshairs.

This week, NBC, the Associated Press, and Politico all reported on the emerging anxiety within elite Democratic circles about Sanders’s ascent in the polls and nascent efforts by operatives to arrest his momentum. As journalist Andrew Perez noted, all three reports cited one Matt Bennett, cofounder of the organization Third Way, who issued boilerplate warnings about the supposed dangers of a Sanders nomination. In a pattern that is almost certain to be repeated in the coming weeks and months, Bennett’s intervention was framed as an earnest expression of concern by a moderate Democrat mindful of taking what he believes to be a major political risk.

But it was actually something else, given Bennett’s job at a self-identified “think tank” that has received extensive contributions from corporate patrons, including health insurance company Humana and Koch Industries. Washington is packed with groups like Third Way and others in the same mold, the function of which is to provide a layer of institutional sediment separating corporate interests from the mouthpieces they fund to advance their interests. In the gelatinous mass of lobbyists, megadonors, corporate spokespeople, and political operatives resulting from this arrangement, it can often be difficult to tell where the private sector ends and the public sector or party apparatus begins.

Nonetheless, Bennett’s anguished intervention is a telltale sign that panic about Sanders is starting to spill outside the op-ed pages and into the boardrooms of corporate interests — from pharmaceutical companies to Wall Street investment firms — who have an immediate pecuniary interest in opposing his program. If Sanders’s performance in the first round of primaries and caucuses matches current expectations, big business will undoubtedly intensify its efforts to stop him — likely aided, as in this case, by centrist Democrat operatives who sit at the noxious juncture of party politics and corporate agitprop ...

"Barack Obama is using his post-presidency to attack the Left and protect the status quo."

In the beginning, I was a fan, but in the end, one must allow facts to be facts. It isn't always easy. Maybe we learn something, maybe not. Barack Obama disappointed while in office, and continues to do so amid his post-presidency.

The Real Barack Obama Has Finally Revealed Himself, by Luke Savage (Jacobin)

Barack Obama is using his post-presidency to attack the Left and protect the status quo. The historical myth believed by so many liberals that Obama was a progressive leader who was hemmed in by the presidency's political constraints is collapsing fast.

... Equipped with fame, wealth, and a vast reservoir of residual goodwill Obama now has more power to do good in an hour than most of us do in a lifetime. The demands of etiquette and propriety notwithstanding, he no longer has intransigent Blue Dog senators to appease, donors to placate, or personal electoral considerations to keep him up at night. When he speaks or acts, we can be reasonably certain he does so out of sincere choice and that the substance of his words and actions reflect the real Barack Obama and how he honestly sees the world.

It therefore tells us a great deal that, given the latitude, resources, and moral authority with which to influence events, Obama has spent his post-presidency cozying up to the global elite and delivering vapid speeches to corporate interests in exchange for unthinkable sums of money.

(snip)

When Obama has spoken about or intervened in politics, it’s most often been to bolster the neoliberal center-right or attack and undermine the Left. Having emerged from seclusion to endorse the likes of Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau, Obama also rang up Britain’s austerity-loving Conservative prime minister Theresa May on election night in 2017 to offer reassurance and trash the Labour Party’s electoral prospects. Only last week, while denouncing the Democratic Party’s “activist wing,” the former president who had once introduced himself to the nation as a progressive, community-minded outsider inveighed against those pushing for a more ambitious direction — contemptuously instructing a group of wealthy donors not to concern themselves too-much with the irrational zealotry of “certain left-leaning Twitter feeds.”

Another failed Democrat: "(Kamala) Harris’s record as a prosecutor was representative of a politics of the past."

I haven't thought very much about the presidential race because most of my time has been devoted to local issues, a paradigm now undergoing renovation.

Nothing has changed with me. I support Bernie Sanders, and will continue to support him. If Sanders loses in the primary, then it will be time for a rethink. In next year's election I'll vote for whichever presidential candidate best reflects my own worldview, and national special-interest-driven Democrats wailing about the necessity of centrism are of no greater attraction to me than Gahan's sycophants. 

In my view, Kamala Harris one of many non-factors, as the article linked here attests. In fact a case can be made for many of the Democratic Party aspirants as potential cabinet members, but that's about it, and it isn't clear if even this level of attainment would be proper.

KAMALA HARRIS’S CRIMINAL JUSTICE RECORD KILLED HER PRESIDENTIAL RUN, by Lara Bazelon (The Appeal)

Harris’s record as a prosecutor was representative of a politics of the past. The nation has moved on.

News broke on Tuesday that Kamala Harris was ending her run for president. While there are a number of reasons her candidacy was not successful, chief among them was her decision to brand herself a “progressive prosecutor.” She was not, at least not by today’s standards.

The Achilles heel for the Harris campaign has been a perceived lack of authenticity. There is no better example of the gap between public presentation and historical record than her mischaracterization of who she was and what she did from 2004-2015, when she was San Francisco’s district attorney and then California’s attorney general. In truth, Harris’s record reveals that she is a centrist on criminal justice. Had she run on that record or reckoned with it—including acknowledging the harm her status-quo policies inflicted—the outcome might have been different.

It is understandable that Harris would want to claim the progressive prosecutor label—it is trending nationally now. It signals to voters that a candidate will break from the failed tough-on-crime policies of the past. In the last five years, reform-minded candidates across the country have run and won top prosecutor posts on a message of ending money bail, refusing to prosecute low level drug crimes, and vows to prosecute police officers who shoot unarmed civilians—who are almost always black and brown men.

Harris positioned herself as the original “progressive prosecutor.” She was first elected as San Francisco’s top prosecutor in 2004. As district attorney, she pledged to never impose the death penalty, defying the city’s police department and Democratic leaders who were clamoring for the execution of a 21-year-old who killed an undercover police officer. She later wrote a book called “Smart on Crime” that urged officials to abandon the “tough on crime” policies of the past and instead favor rehabilitation over punishment. By the standards of the time, claiming a “smart on crime” mantle was lonely territory for an elected prosecutor.

But Harris fell behind the curve over the past fifteen years, as the nation’s sense of the scope and moral urgency of needed reforms to the criminal legal system—and especially to the role of elected prosecutor—shifted dramatically. The shift revealed that Harris’s brand of “progressive prosecution” was really just “slightly less-awful prosecution” — a politics, and set of policies, that still meant being complicit in securing America’s position as the world’s leading jailer ...

"Deval Patrick Is Everything That’s Wrong With the Democratic Party."

"Maybe five or ten years ago, Deval Patrick might have been the best Democrat that our dismal system could have produced. But that’s no longer the case. The time for guys like this has passed."

And by extension, this is why it's so very difficult to find a reason to vote for Democrats. The two party system is a reeking cesspool.

Deval Patrick Is Everything That’s Wrong With the Democratic Party, by Liza Featherstone (Jacobin)

Former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick’s resume reads like a dystopian novel about the nihilism and brutality of contemporary capitalism. He should leave public life forever.

The donor classes do not want Bernie Sanders to be president. Most of them don’t want Elizabeth Warren, either. They’d prefer someone who doesn’t have much to say about wealth distribution, whether in the form of taxing the rich, or big programs like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. Their most electable option in this vein — at least as measured by primary and general election polling, as well as occasional, if fleeting, resemblance to a sympathetic human being — is obviously Joe Biden. Unhappily for them, Biden is also a chucklehead. Terrified that the Left might win, the titans of industry have a plan: Deval Patrick.

Like Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris, Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts, is the extremely disappointing progeny of a radical father. (Pat Patrick, a jazz musician, played with Sun Ra’s band, The Arkestra.) That’s probably the coolest thing about him.

The enthusiasm for Sanders and Warren at the grassroots — as well as for progressive and socialist local and Congressional candidates nationwide — might suggest a sea change, a popular desire to grapple seriously with the problems caused by capitalism. Deval Patrick, until recently an executive at Bain Capital, is a flagrant insult to that popular uprising. He is a cherished asset of the fossil fuel, private equity, and subprime mortgage industries, which are some of the worst phenomena that contemporary capitalism has produced. What’s next, a member of the Sackler family?

Though news coverage insists on characterizing his entry into the primary as “sudden,” it seems that a few members of the ruling class have been working on his campaign for a while. Since 2018, OpenSecrets News reports, big donors, especially in private equity, have been pouring money into Deval Patrick’s PAC, putting his campaign in an advantageous position. Even in October 2018, more than a year ago, the PAC, called Reason to Believe, was far outperforming PACs of other candidates considering a 2020 run. Most of the money came from one private equity mogul: Dan Fireman, a billionaire golf enthusiast ...

Local DemoDisneyDixiecrats appalled as "Bernie Sanders and AOC Unveil a Green New Deal for Public Housing."

Half of Jeff Gahan's enthusiasts in the Floyd County DemoDisneyDixiecratic Party are horrified by this idea because they agree with Dear Leader that the best solution to the public housing problem is to run the residents out of town.

The other half are scandalized because this is radicalism run amok, and can't we just be clean safe centrists -- you know, avoid insulting the 1%?

Let's see a show of hands: who's a left-winger, or are you all just a slightly less vivid shade of Republican?

Bernie Sanders and AOC Unveil a Green New Deal for Public Housing, by Kriston Capps (CityLab)

The Green New Deal for Public Housing Act would commit up to $180 billion over a decade to upgrading 1.2 million federally owned homes.

Socialist Democrats are pushing the progressive envelope with a new iteration of Green New Deal legislation this week, this time with a focus on public housing ...

 ... The bill is an effort to bag two birds with one stone. America’s public housing portfolio is in a shambles, with deferred maintenance costs nationwide running into the billions. The bill introduced by AOC and Sanders would bring that backlog up to date while also reducing the energy consumption from this aging housing stock.

"Right now, the grim fact is that the Democratic Party has been constructed to lose, and we should stop acting surprised if it keeps on doing so."

Pretty much.

Doomed, delusional, divided and corrupt: How the Democratic Party became a haunted house, by Andrew O'Hehir (Salon)

Conflicted about ideology and identity and deeply compromised by history, the Democratic Party is built to lose

 ... I’m also not just talking about the party’s steadfast refusal to adopt coherent, progressive and broadly popular positions on issues like health care, gun control, marijuana legalization and electoral reform. But it’s important to grasp why Democrats in power won’t embrace those things — as opposed to embracing them on the campaign trail, which really doesn’t count — because the reasons go well beyond ideological confusion or political cowardice and into deeper, darker places.

Over the last 40 years, the Democrats have become an increasingly awkward coalition of affluent, cosmopolitan whites and urban people of color, and have largely abandoned their previous mistrust of corporate power, Wall Street and big capital in general. Go down the list of powerful congressional Democrats — especially the committee chairs and members of leadership — and pay attention to where and how they raise money, and who their major donors are. The corruption is widespread and deeply rooted, and it cannot be dislodged simply by anointing a reformer or “socialist” as the presidential nominee. If anything, that should be the end point of a renovation or redemption project that has not happened.

I’m not just talking about the peculiar fact that the 2020 Democratic campaign will likely boil down to a contest between three white people in their 70s, each of them with glaring and obvious flaws. I’m not talking about the unresolved post-2016 tactical and ideological struggle between “progressives” and “moderates,” which was a long time coming and is now playing out in the nomination contest. I’m also not talking about the exaggerated infighting on the left between supporters of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, which represents both substantive and symbolic divisions — and which, on both sides, also represents a profoundly unrealistic view of the nature of political power.

Those things can all be pulled apart and argued over individually, of course. But I am truly and honestly not arguing here for the victory of a particular candidate or faction or strategy. I don’t know how impeachment would turn out, and neither do you. I have no idea whether Sanders or Warren or Biden or Kamala Betogieg is the best bet to defeat Trump next year, and nobody else does either. That leaves us with the radical proposition that people should support the candidate they like best and we’ll see what happens, which I realize is deeply unsatisfactory punditry.

But all such questions, when considered piece by piece, ignore the deeper underlying narrative that frames them in the first place. They all signal toward the Democratic Party’s remarkable ability to manufacture defeat, even (or perhaps especially) when objective conditions seem overwhelmingly favorable to victory. The real problem here, I’m afraid, admits of no easy solution: The Democratic Party comprises a wide range of views and voices, some of whom are vigorously trying to change its direction. But all of them are trapped inside a haunted house. Troubled by the ghosts of the past and clinging to useless rituals, Democrats appear largely unable to perceive actually existing reality or react to it appropriately.

This is not exactly a new idea ...

Hello, random Cabinet post: "Why Pete Buttigieg is losing momentum."

Before or after the gold rush?

It doesn't help that Buttigieg's economic strategy is more of the same neoliberal claptrap. Two Democratic Party candidates make sense: Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. After that, I pick up a good book and tune out.

Why Pete Buttigieg is losing momentum at The Economist

The mayor of South Bend’s record on policing has overshadowed his other achievements

 ... His main problem is his failure to appeal beyond a core of white, well-off, highly educated and urban liberals. Those supporters offer up plenty of money and host generous fundraising events. Mr Buttigieg, a Rhodes Scholar and former McKinsey executive knows how to connect with them. As a military veteran he also gets a warm welcome from supporters, again predominantly white, in small towns in New Hampshire and Iowa. But look beyond those two early-voting states, for example to South Carolina where black votes will be decisive, and polls show the Indiana mayor would be lucky to pick up 5%.

Mr Buttigieg struggles with African-American voters for a host of reasons. Some—but not all—are beyond his control. It may be that a youthful, white politician with limited experience of working in the black community would always find it tricky to fire up support among African-Americans, however much he calls out racism or touts his own well-meaning ideas, such as his “Douglass Plan”, to empower black Americans. It is understandable that other candidates, including Joe Biden (as Barack Obama’s vice-president), Kamala Harris or Cory Booker, should have an easier narrative to tell.

He has presented himself as a Midwesterner who presided over the economic recovery of a former rustbelt city and was handily re-elected as mayor with 80% of the vote. But those things do not mean that African-Americans, even in his city, are enthusiastic. Places like South Bend have long histories of racial segregation and discrimination. African-Americans do worse than whites in the city in school and college. They suffer higher rates of unemployment and poverty. As mayor, Mr Buttigieg has not focused on addressing those problems. In his memoir, “Shortest Way Home”, he has little to say about civil rights and race relations, beyond mentioning some symbolic efforts to rename a street and put up statues to celebrate African-Americans ...

"Here are some leading examples of the dwindling currency of neoliberal thinking."

We can only hope.

The Sunset of Neoliberalism, by Max B. Sawicky (Jacobin)

To anyone who lived through the Clinton years — or merely remembers the Obama era — the discrediting of neoliberal ideas that were once sacrosanct among Democrats is nothing short of astonishing.

Cheer up. The Left is winning the battle of ideas. Ideas are the basis for organization, and organization is prior to change. The signs are in the evolution of statements and platforms presented by Democratic presidential candidates. As the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote, eighty and some years ago:

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

It’s our “madmen” (and women) who are more in evidence these days — not as public personalities, but in the guise of campaign commitments offered by leading Democratic politicians. Their ascendance parallels the decline of neoliberal ideology.

In this essay, I’d like to give credit where it is due for the raising of consciousness. In the process, I would like to foster a keener appreciation for the difference between progressive and neoliberal doctrine. What does it mean to be left these days? Everybody knows the extreme point — wholesale socialization of the commanding heights of the economy. But where is the separation between hackneyed liberalism, “woke” and otherwise, and emerging progressive platforms?

snip

As this article was being written, the Sanders campaign released additional, detailed plans pertaining to labor rights, the Green New Deal, and how law enforcement deals with race. In this respect, his opponents are invariably more fated to play catch-up than to reject his proposals. The few who tried to plant a flag on their opposition to socialism are passing from the scene. It’s as if Democratic voters have been thirsting for progressive proposals for decades, and now they will drink as much as can be offered. No candidate so far has proven willing to rain on this parade.

That’s why I say we are witnessing the sunset of neoliberalism.