Is there really a "movement" or is this all about Bernie?

[LWolf]

27. Do you really want an answer?

Or are you just using rhetorical questions to put that movement down?

On the off chance that you really want an answer, I'll give you what I've got. I don't speak for the movement or the revolution, just myself.

I am one of a number of people that have been disenfranchised by my own party during the neo-liberal takeover of the Democratic Party. Those not affiliated with partisan politics: independents and small 3rd parties with little power saw it first, the slowly building erosion of progressive values and support for the 99% within government and the Democratic party. For a long time, we were just discounted as "fringe" and tossed under the bus when it came to political representation.

Some people spoke up, and were made pariahs.

Then, though, as neo-liberal policies continued the destruction of the 99% begun under Ronald Reagan, and more and more people were disenfranchised, there began to be a rumbling.

We saw it in the response to the IWR and the Patriot Act, and those who turned out to protest, and were ignored. Of course, we could blame all of that on Republicans since it happened under the illegitimate GWB administration. No matter how many neo-liberals and other scared Congressional Democrats jumped on to the war and security bandwagon; people's fear was used against them.

We saw it further in the occupy movement, which lasted a very long time and was more public than tptb would have preferred before going more underground.

Then the primary season began. For myself I can say that I didn't really care WHO stepped up to the plate, as long as someone who was not a neo-liberal DID. Anyone. They are getting rarer and rarer within the party. I just didn't want to be faced with more neo-liberal choices that I couldn't, in good conscience, support. I wanted some hope.

When it was Sanders, I was fine with that. I wasn't holding out for Warren or anyone else. I just wanted SOMEONE. Sanders stepped in, and he's done an amazing job. He's run a powerful campaign and connected with all of us who are sick of neo-liberalism and corporate control of our government. In the beginning, I just wanted someone to represent me, so that I could vote FOR someone instead of AGAINST someone. That rarely happens. Then, the campaign did so amazingly well that I actually began to hope that we had a chance. That's my experience.

As far as "movement" and "revolution" goes? The Sanders campaign is a natural continuation of OWS. Win or lose, the sentiment, the anger, the determination, and the movement has been there before his campaign, and it will continue after.

With or without the Democratic Party.

I'm one who thinks that it is a fundamental error for the Party to have worked so hard to put that movement down. It renders them, at best, irrelevant, and at worst, an enemy of that movement. Beating it out of the party in 2016 will be costly in the long run, because it's not going away.

That's my answer, fwiw.