2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: How Bernie Sanders exposed Democrats racial rift [View all]raging moderate
(4,317 posts)Last edited Sat Jun 11, 2016, 08:46 AM - Edit history (2)
Bernie Sanders has been speaking, working, and voting, for DECADES, to increase racial and economic justice, necessary infrastructure maintenance, progressive taxation, universal health coverage, educational opportunity, reasonable police work, proper aid for children and others in trouble, and adequate minimum wages. His enthusiastic supporters know this about him, and those of us who are old enough to have experienced the obtuse goody two-shoes "Silent Majority" and the vicious racist "Reagan Democrats" were REPULSED by these people. I was there, and I know. You can fault the Sanders operation for defects in political strategy, but our hearts are firmly on the side of anybody who is oppressed.
It seems to me that Wall Street is not horrible in its essence as a concentration of market activities. Indeed, in Communist countries, a similar managerial elite evolved behind the scenes. Markets operate around the world and seem to be part of our human heritage. The problems arise when these people are allowed to morph into a sort of religion which worships mysterious "Market Forces," when it is really fallible human beings manipulating these activities, human beings in need of regulation and restraint by our government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
In our country, we continue to have a group of wealthy elite who secretly admire the old Confederacy (which actually had sympathizers in some northern areas) based on the old feudalist systems. They cling to the delusion fostered by the movie "Gone with the Wind,' that the Antebellum South was a land of "peace and plenty." These people seek continuously to reintroduce a society based on extremely differentiated social castes, with extreme privilege at the top and extreme suffering at the bottom, with the delusion that rich people are morally superior beings who deserve obedience and worship and are best managed by over-reinforcement, while poor people are morally inferior beings who deserve scorn and are best managed by over-punishment. That is what the "Silent Majority" and the "Reagan Democrats" believed, to one extent or another. And it is what the supporters of Bernie Sanders oppose.