February 24, 2016 by David K. Sutton
Bernie Sanders Has Already Won
Even if he doesn’t get the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders has already won. Oh sure, his ideas have been dismissed by the mainstream media as too radical, or too idealistic. The pushback against the Sanders campaign is a feature, not a bug, of the status quo. People who are perfectly happy about the way things are going in America are not interested in entertaining proposals like Medicare for all, or free public college. Neither of these ideas are extreme when put into the context of the liberal democratic experiment we call America. But, several decades of relentless establishment droning has caused us to forget the liberal foundation of this great country.
That’s where the Sanders campaign has captured the minds of young people. Even in conservative red states, Sanders is attracting 6,000 and 7,000 supporters at rallies, usually with another few thousand outside the venue. In more friendly blue states, Sanders has filled up 10,000 even 15,000 seat venues. A 74-year-old democratic-socialist in 2016 in the United States of America is filling arenas with Americans who will be running the country in the coming decades. So, it is for that reason that Sanders has already won, even if he doesn’t become the next president, and even if he doesn’t win the Democratic nomination.
And it’s about damn time.
Because there is nothing Bernie Sanders is saying that is foreign to this country. Sanders calls himself a democratic-socialist, but he’s really an FDR Democrat. And hell, you only have to go back half a century or so when this country was chock-full of FDR Democrats. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” is largely responsible for turning the tide after the Great Depression, ultimately building the largest middle class society in history. But, somewhere after Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” and before Ronald Reagan’s “Morning In America,” we lost our way. Too many people bought into right-wing nonsense, demonizing minorities for our problems, when our problems were actually created by the largest transfer of wealth in human history from the poor and middle class to the top one percent. And we allowed it to happen. Shit, we still allow it to happen if we think nominating an incrementalist candidate is going to fix our problems.
Bernie Sanders is the Occupy Wall Street candidate who happened to arrive on the scene about four years too late. If a Democrat had not already occupied the White House, Sanders might just have run in 2012 on the heals of the Occupy movement, and then, well, who knows. But, the impact Sanders has had on the young American electorate in 2016 cannot be dismissed. That is why I say Bernie Sanders has already won.
Read follow-up: Don’t Blame Me For Lack Of Democratic Enthusiasm
