“Of course, miracles do happen; but it is unwise to expect them.” -Alfred North Whitehead
That bird knows more than you think, Bernie.
A little birdie told me…
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6 responses to “A little birdie told me…”
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I respect your thinking and follow your thought but I am feeling very negative about Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. I feel a bit like he is functioning as a demagogue and promising the impossible, and I am afraid the result may be a lack of enthusiasm and votes for the Democratic nominee if it turns out to be Hillary.
I respect politics and politicians, at least partly because I feel that it is cynicism about politics is one major trend that threatens out fragile democracy. I agree with the statement the politics is, “the art of the possible”, and I feel like Bernie, like many political candidates on the right, is promising things that are simply not possible.
It seems obvious to me that winning the presidency, defeating ANY of the cretins running for the Rwpublican nomination, should be the highest priority for anyone who values justice, diversity, etc. Not sure that Bernie’s campaign may not be actually hurting that effort, as much as I agree in theory with pretty much everything he says.
I’m short, I feel like he has no real skin in the game, that he doesn’t really feel responsible to the process, and that worries me.
Can you convince me I’m wrong?
Thx-
I’ll reply at length later, but for now this paints a similar picture to the one I would: But in the age of Trump, winning is the only thing that matters, right? In that case, there’s plenty of evidence suggesting Sanders would perform better against a reality TV free-coverage machine like Trump than would Hillary Clinton. This would largely be due to the passion and energy of young voters.
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You can’t blame Bernie for the lack of enthusiasm for Hillary on the Left (nor can you blame him for the intense hatred on the right). I mean really? Did Bernie corner her into going on a $12 million corporate speaking marathon after she left the State Department? Is Bernie preventing her from releasing the transcripts? Did Bernie force her to vote for the Iraq war? To destroy Gaddafi/Libya for trying to gain economic independence from the US-based bankers? To support a coup in Honduras of a democratically elected leader who dared to protect his people and the forests and rivers of their nation from transnational corporations? If people are suspicious of Hillary, if they just can’t quite bring themselves to believe she is a progressive because she just sounds a little too much like a Goldwater girl, it’s probably because she is a Goldwater girl.
Bernie is not promising people anything. He is asking them to stand up, come together, and participate in a political revolution. It is a *political* revolution because he doesn’t want them to over-throw the governmental system, he just wants them to come out and vote for progressive candidates every time there is an election! If people come out and vote in their own social, economic, and ecological interest, Bernie’s policies are hardly impossible.
I agree, of course, that political cynicism threatens our fragile democracy. Even politicians insult one another by saying the other side is “just playing politics”! As if participating in politics, in the ongoing regenesis of self-governance, was a shameful act to be avoided at all costs… American culture glorifies private life over public reason. If the Athenian statesman, Pericles, were here among us today, he’d see immediately that American freedom is slavery. In America, in effect, the debtors have ceded control of the means of social and material production to the loaners. Politics is too difficult, so we watch TV instead and let the producers and financiers make our media for us. History is repackaged for us into “news”/infotainment. It keeps us calmly catatonic in the face of catastrophe, but just terrified enough of barbaric “Others” never to dare to believe we might be capable of coming together with our neighbors to make a more just and beautiful world.
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You Believe that it’s impossible because that is what you’ve been told and force-fed your whole life. If more people thought outside the box, or thought outside of the mainstream media, you would see that other countries are doing exactly what Mr. Sanders is promising to do . So it is not outside of the realm of possibilities or reality that we can have free education, healthcare, and an upgrade it infrastructure. If you think spending 55 percent of our budget on the military is actually necessary, then you are part of the problem and not part of the solution
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Matt, that Cosmos and History article you link to. Wow! Loving it.
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Michel Weber is the man. Met him in Poland at the 2013 Whitehead conference.
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Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?