The Great Bernie Bust

Posted by collectivist
"It is now all but certain that Joe Biden will be the Democratic candidate. 
“The Bernie bust shows that the US is exceptional after all -- in a purely negative sense.”
Well, that was fun, wasn’t it? The Bernie Sanders boom captivated the global left. Everywhere else, social democrats seemed to be on the rocks. Britain’s Labour Party was a shambles, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise was losing steam, while Syriza and Podemos were hardly more than memories of radical opportunities lost. Only in the United States did the story seem any different, thanks to Sanders’ long march through the Democratic Party.
But that was before the ‘Super Tuesday’ cataclysm on March 3 and then ‘mini-Tuesday’ a week later, when six states voted, including the all-important Michigan. After losing 10 of 14 states in the first, Sanders needed a sharp rebound in the second to remain viable. He did not get it. He came in 16 points behind Joe Biden in Michigan, 25 points behind in Missouri, six points behind in Idaho, and a whopping 66 behind in Mississippi. Only in North Dakota and Washington state did he eke out victories by 6.1 and 0.2 points respectively.
Sanders will still have a sizable bloc of delegates going into the Democratic national convention in July. But since he has promised to rally around whoever gets the nomination, he will have no choice but to pay homage to the odious Biden on bended knee.
This is certainly a dramatic turnabout. Hillary Clinton messed up so badly in 2016 that even the most skeptical Marxists assumed that the nomination was Sanders’ for the asking. But they proved to be wrong. What happened?
“Sanders will have no choice but to pay homage to the odious Biden on bended knee.”
One possibility is that American exceptionalism turns out yet again to be nothing more than a myth and that any notion of the US left bucking international trends is a pipedream. Comparisons with Britain are striking. Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide leadership victory in September 2015 presaged Sanders’ dramatic breakthrough in the 2016 Michigan primary, while Corbyn’s disastrous performance last December paved the way for the latest debacle.
But in another sense the Bernie bust shows that the US is exceptional after all -- in a purely negative sense, that is. Not only is the American two-party system exceptionally old and suffocating, but it is exceptionally entrenched. In 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt bolted from the Republican Party to run as a Progressive, he was able to gain ballot access in all of the then 48 states. Today, the same feat would be impossible, thanks to sky-high registration requirements, designed to cripple upstart parties before they can even get off the ground.
Indeed, 1912 would be the last time that one of the two top vote-getters would be anyone other than a Republican or Democrat. (Roosevelt came in second behind Democrat Woodrow Wilson, while Republican William Howard Taft was third.) Since then, Americans have voted ‘Repocratic’ with depressing regularity. Since polls show overwhelming support for a third-party alternative, it is not because they want to, but because they effectively have no choice.
“Not only is the American two-party system exceptionally old and suffocating, but it is exceptionally entrenched.”
But the US system is not only restrictive, but exceptionally regulated. “Normally, democracies regard political parties as voluntary associations entitled to the usual rights of freedom of association,” the social democratic website, Jacobin.com, observed in 2016. “But US state laws dictate not only a ballot-qualified party’s nominating process, but also its leadership structure, leadership selection process and many of its internal rules ...”1  Rather than parties, as the rest of the world understands the term, the result is more akin to a couple of state-sponsored churches with intricate government-imposed rules concerning the selection of bishops and parish priests, weekly services, and so on.
It is a travesty of democracy every step of the way. . ."

https://www.blackagendareport.com/great-bernie-bust

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