Bernie Sanders' People-Powered Campaign Is on Fire [View all]

[Uncle Joe]

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Martin Luther King Jr. readily acknowledged that “power without love is reckless and abusive”—but he emphasized that “love without power is sentimental and anemic.” So, where does that leave us in relation to seeking power?

“Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose,” Dr. King wrote. “It is the strength required to bring about social, political or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice.”

That’s what the Bernie 2020 campaign is about—the necessity of gaining power “in order to implement the demands of love and justice.” And that helps to explain why the campaign is so profoundly compelling at the grassroots. It is oriented to meshing electoral work with social movements—however difficult that might be at times—to generate political power from the ground up. And that’s where genuine progressive change really comes from.

“The parties and candidates are not the agents of change,” a former chair of the California Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus, Karen Bernal, said a few days ago at a pro-Sanders forum in San Rafael. “It’s the other way around. They respond to the outside forces of movements.”

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Much of the energy behind the Sanders campaign is generated by what corporate media outlets often criticize or mock—Bernie’s consistency as he keeps denouncing massive income inequality and corporate power. In the process, he confronts head-on the system that enables huge profiteering by such enterprises as the healthcare industry, fossil-fuel companies, private prisons and the military-industrial complex.

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https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/01/21/bernie-sanders-people-powered-campaign-fire