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HylianSwordsman on 01 October 2019
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Machiavellian said:
HylianSwordsman said:

But that's why I want Bernie over Warren. He doesn't need Dems or GOP, he has our support. "Political Revolution" isn't just a campaign slogan. It's a plan, a strategy. 

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/19/bernie-sanders-labor-protest-2020-1455151

This was the strategy he used to get Amazon, which I might remind you, is a giant, greedy in the extreme corporation, not a democratic institution, to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour. He'll wield the bully pulpit like a club and beat Congress into submission by leading us all against them. Imagine Operation Wall Street, right outside Congress, led by President Sanders. That's what will happen. That's how he'll get Congress to act. Its an untested strategy for the executive branch of the federal government, but I want to try it. At the very least, he'll go into any bargaining situation with a stronger position than anyone else, rather than trying to compromise before he even starts like Dems do now in hope of getting "bipartisan" support in the form of one or two vulnerable Republicans voting for a watered down version of their bill.

To get established old heads in Congress to go along with Bernie plans would be a revolutions but in order for that to happen, he would need to control the party at the same level Trump controls the GOP.  Dems and GOP are different in that respect and Dems are so diverse in what they want, I just do not believe he can get enough of them to fall in line.  I can definitely be wrong so I would love to see what he can do but it would be interesting to see what political power Bernie could weld if he became president.

If I were to hazard a guess, I suspect that there would be a massive "#NeverBernie" exodus from the party, even bigger than #NeverTrump, and that the resulting party would be much more populist on average, opening the party to a more broad populist coalition of progressives and centrist populists (these tend to look like the old labor movement, and are more tightly focused on such class-based issues). I think you'd see a lot of independents and people that currently feel alienated from the Democrats because of perceived corporate friendliness be really impressed by the exodus of corporate Dems, and feel safer to jump on board the class-based populism of Sanders. With this, I imagine you'd see a subsiding of xenophobia, racial animus, and the racial grievance motivated pseudo-populism of Trump, as the angst of socioeconomically stagnant white people was redirected towards more productive class-based outlets.

I recognize this is all pure speculation, but I base this speculation off of my understanding of the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. These decades featured a level of xenophobia comparable to today, but as the 1920s wore on and economic inequality got to historic levels, and the labor movement started to die out, eventually it lead to the Great Depression, right around the time when the Republican party held the Presidency, House, Senate, and the Supreme Court, and initiated tax cuts for the ultra wealthy. If history repeats itself, which it has done so pretty uncannily so far, then the warnings of a recession right now are real, it will be exceptionally nasty, and, as back then, it will wake people the fuck up about class issues and be a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart of an already recovering labor movement and a young progressive left.