aww i remember those days! i thought i was as cynical as i was gonna get ha ha ha ha ha ha

Bernie’s campaign activated many hopeless young people towards a leftward vision of US politics. Without him our ranks would be thinner and our message and goals would be more fringe.

He is also a coward and a Zionist, but he was extremely useful. Both can be true. There is no shame in having supported a failed candidate’s advocacy for working people on a national scale.

Btw, is the emoji of s, don’t yourself it’s not kind

you were bern’d but more importantly you were lern’d. regardless of anything that can be said about sanders he was sadly still the best shot at some sort of relief for working people in this god forsaken shit hole. bernie was the true “lesser of two evils”. not like a kamala trump situation where they’re just both evil evil

smoking that bernie superpack

I’m not American so I was on the sidelines, but I think there was merit in supporting the Bernie campaign in 2020, even if Bernie himself has been a disappointment since. The campaign was extremely successful in spite of the active pushback from the status quo political establishment. The Democrats had to sacrifice a lot of their credibility to stop Bernie from getting a shot at the general election, and ultimately the result was Biden shitting the bed in as many ways as you can shit a bed.

I would argue that the Bernie 2020 campaign hastened the decline of the Democratic Party, and for the right reasons. It showed that people will come out to support good things, and the Biden train wreck showed that those same people will stay home if you don’t do those things.

What would have been sad is to see him win and have to watch him send a trillion dollars to Ukraine and Israel while still not being able to get universal healthcare off the ground. That would have qualified for the for sure.

I remember, as we were returning home from the Okhta District along the banks of the Neva, I first heard the story of Vladimir Ilyich’s brother, a member of the Narodnaya Volya, who took part in the attempt on the life of Alexander III in 1887 and died at the hands of the tsarist executioners before he had even came of age.

Vladimir Ilyich had been very fond of his brother. They had had many tastes in common, and both liked to be left alone for long periods of time to be able to concentrate. They usually lived together and at one time shared a separate wing of the house, and when any of the young crowd dropped in (they had numerous cousins, boys and girls), the brothers would greet them with their pet phrase: “Honour us with your absence.” They were both hard workers and revolutionary-minded. The difference in their age, though, made itself felt in various ways. There were certain things that Alexander did not tell Vladimir. This is what Vladimir Ilyich told me:

His brother was a naturalist. On his last summer vacation at home he was preparing a dissertation on the Annelida, and was busy all the time with his microscope. To get all the light he could he got up at daybreak and started work at once. “No, my brother won’t make a revolutionary, I thought at the time,” Vladimir Ilyich related. "A revolutionary can’t give so much time to the study of worms. It was not long before he saw his mistake.

The fate of his brother undoubtedly influenced Vladimir Ilyich profoundly. Another important factor was that he had begun to think for himself on many questions and had decided in his own mind the necessity of revolutionary struggle.

Had this not been so, his brother’s fate would probably have caused him deep sorrow only, or at most, aroused in him a resolve and striving to follow in his brother’s footsteps. As it was, the fate of his brother gave his mind a keener edge, developed in him an extraordinary soberness of thought, an ability to face the truth without letting himself for a minute be carried away by a phrase or an illusion. It developed in him a scrupulously honest approach to all questions.

Krupskaya’s “Reminiscences of Lenin”

I think SocDems had a historically progressive role in the hyperreactionary landscape of the US. Before Bernie, “socialist” was a pejorative. Now it’s a lot more complicated, we can actually talk about socialism now without being written off and liberals are calling themselves socialists to win elections. Also, in Iowa especially I can use Bernie getting ratfucked out of the race to pull people away from Dems, because they so obviously destroyed the caucus to hand a win to a loser nobody like Mayo Pete.

They’ve outlived their shelf-life, though. Mamdani is now actually to the right of where a lot of USAmericans are on police and on Israel; he holds progress back every time he pointlessly compromises with Democrats and the NYPD and the Zionist lobby

I phone banked and door knocked for him. Sure he fuckin sucks but if he had won it would have been better than any other outcome.

I’m letting my Bernie bumper sticker fade off naturally

My Sunset Sarsaparilla Sheriff badge sticker on the other hand is being taken care of

That thing got me out of several tickets

my personal fell for it again trophy is a bernie 2016 mug that has cracks forming on the inside (plastic mug) which is weirdly poetic

not as embarrassing as me, who still probably has obama merch in storage somewhere

It’s ok, I’ve got an AOC Green New Deal poster rolled up somewhere, back from 2017ish

Hey, don’t feel bad. I have a couple Yang merch after spending 2019 on some of the hardest copium money can buy.