"Bernie Sanders Has Always Sacrificed Pragmatism For Idealism, But Now Its Hurting Democrats"

[JCanete]

91. First, the question is what could get through congress? Was that kind of legislation worth

crafting?

Second, an argument that our current leadership's approach has been pragmatic would be more convincing if we hadn't purged a thousand down-ticket seats. Our approach has not been pragmatic because we've wanted the D to be whatever goodness we could get people to see in it. We need to be more specific and less wishy-washy, and far less middling. Selling the ideas is NOT putting idealism ahead of pragmatism. Again, it is selling something that will endure. You can't sell an amorphous party identity and think that is actually more powerful, on our side of the aisle, than something of concrete specifics.

Again, he doesn't have to convince people to become democrats. He is breaking down the barriers that exist to these ideas. When democrats run with them, the groundwork is laid out, the audience prepped. I don't know what you instead think he should be selling. Snake oil?

The pragmatic reality is that the Democratic party is the only way through which things can be accomplished, IF it is pushed/buoyed to accomplish said things. The pragmatic reality is that had Sanders bowed out when you suggest he should, the Democratic party would have considered it a timely burial not worthy of fanfare. We would have trampled his corpse along with his populist ideals on the way by, and that would have been evidence to the party that it did not need to adopt any of his messaging. The most pragmatic thing for him to do, if he cares about the things he's fighting for, was to go to the convention, because without his dogged insistence not to just bow out, we wouldn't have gotten the platform we got, and I might be sitting here questioning my decision to abstain from the GE right now.

When the very party that is supposed to be promoting single payer is not promoting it, then you're right, it has little chance of going somewhere. When people don't even know what it is and it isn't in the public discourse, you are right, its probably not going to be adopted. When the people start clamoring for it in town halls, is it still impractical? When more people have signed onto medicare for all in congress than ever before is it still impractical?

It has been a suicidal approach our party has taken to try to work for the people while at the same time stifling our rhetoric based on what the political realities are. Can't you appreciate that it IS the rhetoric that changes the political realities? We should be selling what is technically feasible, not what our GOP and blue dog democrats will let happen. We have to change what they will let happen, by getting the people to make them change.

I mean, the results are kind of in for the approach we've been taking. Not pragmatic.