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[Ken Burch]

209. OK. But that's not what the OP said.

The OP said the party used it. It didn't. The fall campaign refused to have anything to do with Bernie's ideas. It essentially pretended that the Sanders campaign never even happened.

Bernie's defeat in the primaries wasn't a rejection of his views on economic issues(while his policies there needed to take more account of historic oppression, they would have been just as good for African-American, Latinx-American, LGBTQ-American and female-American voters as they would have for the working-class whites Bernie was falsely accused of favoring. Bernie lost(and I ACCEPT that he lost and that HRC's nomination was legitlmate) for two reasons:

1) He did an ineffective job(although he did improve on this later) in addressing race, gender and identity issues;

2) In addition to the failings he did have, Bernie was smeared on those issues and his failings were ascribed to the worst possible motivations. It was enough to say he didn't say enough about what the eventual nominee's campaign defined as "social justice" issues-everyone before 2016 included the need to wage war against poverty, it was only in 2016 that that was excluded from the definition-it was NEVER necessary or fair to claim that he didn't care about them or worse, that he actually didn't WANT the votes of anyone but young white men.

There's no reason for the party to dismiss what he said about economic issues-his views on THOSE issues are popular and have majority support in many cases. And there's no good reason for anyone to try to keep us divided into Sanders people OR Hillary/Obama people. Every person of good will from BOTH campaigns should be fully welcome in the Democratic Party now, and none should be treated with suspicion.

It's about us...it's not about any particular past presidential candidates. And it's time to go to dialog on the social justice/economic justice thing rather than just endless "you don't GET it and you're not on our side!" threads. We're on the SAME side, whoever we backed in the damn primaries...the side of the suppressed majority.

It's time to accept that we don't have to choose between "social justice" or "economic justice"-that we can and must fight for both, and fighting for both, among other things is a crucial part of defeating racism, since racism always gets worse in times of hardship and scarcity.