drstrangelove » Wed Sep 15, 2021 1:14 am wrote:I resolve it easily. In a choice between two evils, Sanders, an independent, has chosen the democrats. The same way in which Ron Paul, and to a much lesser extent his son, have chosen the Republicans.
Anyone who doesn't play the game is excluded from it, or dies in a plane crash when flying a charter airline that has a maintenance contract with dyncorp.
If people like Sanders and Ron Paul didn't/hadn't play/ed the game, they would be replaced with people like Peter Buttigieg, Matt gates.
Politics is a game. To play you need to follow the rules or the ones who do and their backers will just straight up kill you. Trump was an outlier because his base of support was the petty middle class which is utterly powerless, and the rules he broke to gain their support allowed him to support establishment ends.
Sanders is a metropolitan/urban populist, which means he has the ability to mobilize many more people than a rural populist like Trump. Sanders base is also much younger, which means more dangerous. Sanders placated his base in exchange for some level of political action to empower them. You could argue this exchange is not well balanced and he should do more. I'd probably agree with that.
But we all know the kinds of people he is dealing with. Crooks, murderers, paedophiles, rapists, and probably worse combinations of all these.
I don't think he Is above criticism, but to discount him as a shill I think is to ignore the reality of the system he is forced to work with.
I'm in alignment with all of this, and agree 'shill' is too facile/incomplete as a descriptor.
But ultimately, from our limited/occluded view -- outside of his community-level/union-related accomplishments -- it doesn't appear Sanders' strategy has led to substantive change at the national level, at least not on the key topics raised during his campaigns (though it remains possible his still-formidable fanbase may evolve to pose a threat to status quo). Perhaps it's simply impossible to achieve from within, which is where I lean these days.
I wouldn't place AOC in the same category as Sanders, however. She appears to be more contrived and also less genuinely articulate/adept.