Full text of statement:
"It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defend the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.
Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.
Today, despite an explosion in technology and worker productivity, many young people will have a worse standard of living than their parents. And many of them worry that Artificial Intelligence and robotics will make a bad situation even worse.
Today, despite spending far more per capita than other countries, we remain the only wealthy nation not to guarantee health care to all as a human right and we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. We, alone among major countries, cannot even guarantee paid family and medical leave.
Today, despite strong opposition from a majority or Americans, we continue to spend billions funding the extremist Netanyahu government’s all out war against the Palestinian people which has led to the horrific humanitarian disaster of mass malnutrition and the starvation of thousands of children.
While the big money interests and well paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much political power? Probably not.
In the coming weeks and months those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions.
Stay tuned."
sheepdog
Tbh, to me, this reads like “fuck you assholes. I’m founding a new political party right the fuck now, because you clearly cannot be bothered to pay the fuck attention to people’s actual fucking lives”. I hope I’m right. The DNC deserves to fully collapse for this result. It’s utterly damning.
The Green Party already exists as a Soc Dem party, I doubt Bernie alone can destabilize the DNC by jumping to the Greens or launching a new party. PSL is in a better position to attack the DNC’s foundations IMO.
I think Bernie is too old to have a massive impact, even by starting a new party. Hes 83 now, 4 years older than the average life expectancy. I don’t think there would be much faith in any new movement he tries to push, unless he can funnel all of his popularity into a younger candidate. A Bernie II if you will
Trying to run off of personality and not off of proper theory and practice seems to be the key to a fumbling movement with splitting.
I think that if he can form a party out of progressive democrats in congress or convince several progressive democrats in congress to defect to an established third party he’ll have a chance. That’s basically how the republicans formed from the whigs. The biggest problem third parties have right now is no faith. Dems currently have extremely low faith, and so if a new party starts campaigning from the democrats’ former members I might actually consider voting for them.
I shut my mouth for Hillary, I shut my mouth for Biden, and I shut my mouth for Kamala. Each time I tried to be enthusiastic for the opportunity to engage in anti fascism by doing something as easy and low risk as voting. But they kept heading rightwards.
I maintain that Biden was way better than I’d expected, but still I’m tired of this. I want someone who will campaign like Bernie. I want someone who will fight for me as a worker and as a trans woman and as an environmentalist who’s young enough for environmental concerns to be self preservation. And I want someone who will actually target the right wing violence I’m afraid of.
The problem is that because voting is easy and low risk, it doesn’t actually go far enough to get change. The dems are not an anti-fascist party. Capitalism is in constant decay, this decay leads to sharpening contradictions and fascism is deployed to protect Capitalist interests. Bernie would not end Capitalism, he may only slow it’s rate of descent, not stop it or reverse it. A great work on fascism is Blackshirts and Reds. I can provide a longer Marxism intro reading list if you’d like, but Blackshirts is a great start.
I understand your fear, but we can know the enemy, why it rises in strength, and can banish it forever.
Ok, but are you building popular support for this elsewhere? What I proposed is mutually palatable to a huge portion of Americans. What you proposed doesn’t have the base yet, much less if you’re asking us to risk everything for it.
Yes. Not only are there several proper Marxist orgs like The Party for Socialism and Liberation and Freedom Road Socialist Organization gaining in membership every day (especially in the context of the failures of the Democrats), Social Democrat organizations like the DSA have powerful Marxist caucuses like Red Star Caucus.
I know what I propose isn’t easy, but I also know it’s doable, and there are good people out there working to make it happen.
Maybe releasing a video begging people to overlook genocide and vote for the cop wasn’t very smart of you bro.
By the time that video was released the course was already locked in. That was just trying to make the best of a horrible situation. It’s what any sane, rational person should have done.
It’s what any good German should have done.
Sorry, I’ll take the person who stands by and does nothing over the person actively trying to kill me with a flame thrower any day. If you can’t understand that, you need to gain some perspective and rejoin the real world.
Speaking of the real world, who is standing by doing nothing and who is actively trying to kill you with a flame thrower? 😂
It’s a metaphor… Stop being deliberately obtuse.
GenZ had pretty much no impact on this election, the younger demographics all showed up in the same ratios they always do.
This election was lost by the dems because they assumed white Neoliberal men would vote for a woman
I guess everyone’s got their pet theory for why the Dems lost, even though all the votes aren’t in yet, never mind any scientific analysis of them.
Every failure is an opportunity to fundraise.
Awww, they let the doggie off his leash!
Bernie is the modern day version of Bernstein. Bernie’s emphasis on gradual reform and cooperation with the bourgeoisie is essentially an abandonment of the fight for socialism. Much like Bernstein did in hist time, Bernie prioritizes short-term gains for workers within the capitalist system instead of striving for its overthrow. He built a country wide movement that inspired millions of people, and then he made it all about the election. Once he lost the whole movement just fizzled overnight.
no no they will not
No, fuck no. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is like, their whole deal.
Marx and Lenin are vindicated every time the dems fumble what was supposed to be an easy election.
Betteridge’s Law says they won’t
Where was this months ago!?!?
He was too busy endorsing Harris…
As he does - support the best option that has a realistic chance of happening even if that’s just because it’s a lesser evil. He did it with Hillary too even after the DNC stabbed him in the back, and for the same reason: he saw the disastrous potential of a Trump presidency.
That ship has sailed and sunk, so now it’s time for aggressive introspection in the hopes that we can make a better ship next time that actually does its job.
…assuming there’s a next time.
I like you. You’re good with words.
And Bernie endorsing whatever ghoul the Democratic party chooses did not work in 2016, worked in 2020 mostly because of Covid, and again did not work in 2024.
He really has no spine to keep following wathever he is told to do by the party. I guess you don’t get that close to power as a Democrat if you actually want to fight for a better future. You can only say that you want to and then stop short of actually doing anything.
Yeah - problem being, I’m not convinced there WILL be a next time - definitely in the foreseeable future, or perhaps ever again in the context of America as it exists today.
you seem to be underestemating the value to the owning class to let the working class vent once every four years, while making no tangable effect. there is no real reason to assume voting is going to end
They didn’t learn when Hillary did it, they squeaked by with Biden because nobody could stomach another 4 years of orange man, and they shit the bed in entirely the same way with Harris. They’ll keep the same quislings in control, propping up the Republican monarchists and throw a bunch more elections to make sure there’s a supermajority the next go around to get some real work done for the fascists. This is the way.
If they are going to ram through protectionist type tarrifs and similar laws they should just make it federal law that US Pharma companies legally can’t sell drugs to any other nations health system for a penny less than what they charge any uninsured US citizen. We currently are in effect subsidizing systems like Canada or Britain’s NHS. The companies use our framework to develop and bring drugs to market, charge the US citizen (or their Rx plan) full freight while other systems get a negotiated lower price. Canadians and Brits should be defraying the development cost of expensive drugs by the US, rather than simply benefiting from them.
I too support destroying American pharmaceutical industry.
Where the fuck was this version of Sanders for the last 8 fucking years.
Haven’t been paying attention, eh?
You certainly haven’t, between defending Israel and actively supporting Biden’s agenda, Sanders hasn’t expressed any thoughts left of center in a while.
you have to work within your environment. you can’t just go full leftist in the backwoods redneck country that is the USA and expect to get anywhere. making concessions is necessary. but people fail to understand the nuance required to play the game. the second you’re an “outsider” you’ll be cast aside by the prevailing parties - exactly what happened to Sanders when he assumed most people were with him. social media has created echo chambers that reflect a mirage of what we want to see, not what’s actually there.
As a communist in a redneck area, nearly the entirety of the redneck South are leftists. They don’t think they are. They need some social theory that is happening slowly. But their core values are ripped straight from the manifesto, right down to beating their bosses ass for pulling some dumb shit.
You genuinely don’t need to make concessions. You need to be honest, seem honest, and genuinely recognize the problems people have, not pretend they don’t exist. Every single person I’ve talked to, and I do mean Trump supporting, flag bearing, lifted truck little shits, supports Medicare for all. They fully support free college and trade school. Hell a decent number support ubi, even for minorities. They don’t support the words, the labels for those policies, because of propaganda and dem failures, but they fully support the policies if you explain them wholly without buzzwords. Hell I’ve helped convert a few to union men.
And I’m not lucky or in an abnormal area… Polls have repeated showed left wing policies( or at least as left wing as Sanders) are incredibly, ridiculously popular. Medicare for all, when you don’t use that term, gets 70-80% approval in polls depending on how well it’s explained in said poll.
You, like all neoliberal excuses, have no idea what the working class of America is like, which is amazing because statistically you’re a part of it.
You genuinely don’t need to make concessions.
So backwoods white Christian nationalists are okay with abortion? Gay marriage? Women’s rights? Interracial marriage? Muslims Immigrants? Mexican immigrants? People not having a full grasp of the English language?
You, like all neoliberal excuses, have no idea what the working class of America is like, which is amazing because statistically you’re a part of it.
You’re attacking a straw man brother. You have no idea who I am, where I came from or what experiences I have. You’ve also painted a picture that doesn’t match reality based on your own experience. The world isn’t as shallow as your singular perspective nor is it black or white.
Endorsing every move the dems made.
Present and speaking similarly.
Was gonna say. Standing up for folks, yelling at the same empty room he’s been yelling at for 40 years. Dude is nothing if not consistent. If anything Bernie has moved to the right in the last 4 decades, and he’s still the left most politician we have
There’s C-Span videos online of him doing interviews before he became a US senator, and it’s interesting how the problems then are still relatable now. We’ve gotten better at kicking cans down roads and blaming each other instead of tackling the issues head on.
Honestly kudos to the man for standing up for his beliefs in the face of overwhelming American stupidity for this long. I’d have definitely folded.
Too true. Listening to Sanders from the 80s is the same as listening to him today. It’s shocking how little his views and rhetoric have changed while being absolutely correct from the beginning.
Bernie starting a labor party?
He’d ruin any labour party he touches.
Unfortunately, I don’t think any of this bothers them. As long as politics is controlled by money, this is the ultimate destination for any major political party.
If Bernie Sanders and Jon Stewart run in 2028, we might have a chance to install people that would actually attempt to remove blatant bribery from politics. Otherwise, this is it.
Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.
-Vladimir Lenin
Bernie and Jon Stewart will be too old by then. More than that, ceding defeat without fighting to begin with is the height of foolishness. It is the number 1 duty of leftists to get organized, and read theory. I can provide an intro list to Marxism if you want, but Blackshirts and Reds is an excellent primer. It helps us understand what fascism is, who it serves, where it comes from, and how we can banish it forever.
Jon Stewart is not that old. He’s only 61.
That’s still above retirement age, he shouldn’t have to run, nor am I in the mindset that he would be enough to course correct.
Obviously he shouldn’t have to run, but he’s not remotely too old. He’s sharp, has experience dealing with the political system (and succeeding), is extremely knowledgeable and insightful about the state of society, etc.
He doesn’t want to be a politician, though, so it’s a moot point.
Bernie’s gonna be in his 90s by then. He won’t run and I won’t blame him.
Dude litterally spent his entire life trying to help us. We consistently turned him down. He did all he could, the blame is not with him.
