Part the Second
If the question can be why didn't Sanders join the Democratic Party earlier, so also can it be to wonder why the revolution didn't assert itself earlier.
The answer lies in history. The movement just wasn't there. We didn't have a majority; we weren't going to win a majority.
One cannot stress enough just how different it was then compared to now.
#BlackLivesMatter? Massive protests against police violence? These ideas found far different regard, then. The discourse was far different, then. Rush Limbaugh, for instance, is nearly emblematic. In the Reagan and Poppy Bush years, "honorable men doing honorable work" still prevailed; you just didn't talk about elected leaders in certain contexts unless you were absolutely certain. When Bill Clinton was elected, Rush Limbaugh led the charge to a new standard in which you even attacked the president's children. George W. Bush took office and the honorable work standard found new support among conservatives, to the point that truth itself became anathema if it spoke ill of the president. And then Barack Obama was elected, and the right wing is even louder and nastier than it was during Clinton's years. But the discourse didn't simply return to the honorable work standard during W's presidency; liberals certainly threw down, and the result is that while harsh and even incendiary rhetoric is becoming more and more controversial, it also enjoys a certain
de facto degree of legitimacy for thriving in the marketplace.
Back then you didn't go after the cops this way. You didn't go after politicians this way. It was untoward, uncouth, a straight run to defeat. And we can pretend all we want that if only the Democrats had thrown down in the eighties and nineties they would have ignited the movement―revolution? presumed majority?―that for whatever reason chose to not assert itself in the marketplace, but we can never actually know the answer to that question since those people didn't show up, and the evidence suggests the reason they didn't show up was that they didn't exist.
Or else ... what? They corruptly and maliciously chose to celebrate and elevate injustice despite the clear will of a majority of voters?
That a majority of voters happened to both be liberal and consciously betray society, you know, just because? I mean, I comprehend that much of our society really does hate women and dark skin that much, but no, that doesn't explain it all. After all, the common liberal sin of racism seems to be privilege-guilt reaction formation: We frequently treat the people we purport to help rather quite terribly by paying too much attention and behaving with an overdose of deliberate focus and demonstrative compassion; ours is a pity only serving to remind us of our superior privilege in judging and pitying others. It's one of the reasons male feminists are so bad at feminism; or white liberals so embarrassingly terrible at discussing racial and ethnic relations. But the bottom line is that we wouldn't tank justice just to get the women and blacks; that's what conservatives do.
And it's true; white players in Democratic establishment power politics have taken some
incredibly hard―a phrase here meaning, "unbelievably stupid"―votes over the years, but the problem
isn't malice.
The problem is that the marketplace simply
did not suit―a phrase here meaning, "rejected"―what "progressives" now refer to as "social justice".
If the base for such a movement existed then, why didn't Sen. Sanders throw down at the time? Is it perhaps because he knew better? Just like millions of Democratic voters over the course of decades. You know, who apparently support corruption?
The younger Sanders voters especially―as the older ones ought to know better, already―need to take note:
Invalidating the experiences and decisions of so many people you damn well need to make your revolution happen is not a good way to appeal for their support and solidarity.
The thing about history, again: We were supposed to have learned that
last century.
And if Robbins or Kidder, or even Mr. Sanders himself, were actually paying attention, then they also know damn well that in addition to the question of smashing the glass ceiling, Democrats are actually within reach of a certain existential threshold. For decades American liberals have struggled to hold the line, taking what scraps they could win when things went badly enough that people broke leftward, or the courts did their jobs. This is actually as close to the turning point as we have been in my political lifetime, which includes thirty-six of my forty-three years. If Hillary Clinton manages eight solid years, Democrats will have pulled off ... well, something. It will be a harvest of sorts, and, the point is to bring in a good crop.
It's actually kind of surprising; this rising potential is in fact what fills the abhorred vacuum as conservative political dominance of the nation wanes. As
Jon Ralston↱ put it:
Sometimes the Establishment is, you know, the good guys, especially when, you know, they win a lot of seats. That's what parties are supposed to do, not be outlets for malcontents who have empty social lives or rabble rousers without a cause.
Like I said, we can pretend all we want about what if the Democrats had thrown down thirty years ago. The flip side of the Mysterious Revolutionary Majority is what we expect would have happened if Democrats got stomped even worse than they did.
The lesson of '48, as I recall, is that the petite bourgeoisie will break toward the bourgeoisie; later analyses argue persuasively they constitute essential support for fascism when it arises. It is easy enough to wonder, watching the Trump phenomenon, but generally Americans at the time would have stopped short of totalitarianism; it was even part of the generational mythography, owing to the Cold War. More realistically, though, it still isn't a promising landscape to suggest that Democrats should have thrown down and lost; imagine a Supreme Court with Scalia
and Bork, and thus no Kennedy. In the simmering debate that sent the Democratic Party into a flat spin by the end of the eighties, Jesse Jackson won the argument on points but Bill Clinton and the DLC won on votes. To argue that this outcome was somehow a wilful betrayal of a mysterious revolutionary majority would be laughable, except for the fact we are expected to take it seriously in the question of who should receive the Democratic presidential nomination.
This outcome was a market adaptation. It came about because that's what voters wanted.
When we target the Establishment we tend to separate the government by, for, and of the People from the People. This is, of course, nearly inevitable to a certain extent, but the American discourse is not one accustomed to collective introspection. We might, to the one, place undue value on the question of which presidential candidate we would rather have a beer with, but at the same time we tend to expect officeholders to conduct themselves in particular ways; there is a conflict between pretentious symbiotic omni syndrome and the otherness we actually expect. There even comes a point at which we don't really want our president to be "like us"; we're chaotic, overwhelmed, underinformed slobs compared to these expectations of our politicians.
But the Establishment, regardless of whether or not it ossifies as many establishment structures do and people reasonably fear, still represents the center of the bell curve as a representation of political marketplace demand; this is how "centrism" brings us torture, or revives disputes over who gets to give women permission to access health care. Any number of stupid compromises politicians have wrought over the years are derived from market demand.
Perhaps younger voters don't know the history; older voters in the Sanders camp forget the history because the record is inconvenient to their narrative. There are, of course, any other number of factors at play, but the end result includes the effect of separating what We the People have done from the People. Yes, the politicians are at least ritually corrupt; the People have generally allowed and in some cases even encouraged these outcomes. Yes, politicians have coddled the corporations, but anyone telling us voters didn't play along with that is either lying or insufficiently informed. And, yes, the infrastructure is falling apart, but there is an old slogan reflecting on the day that the schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber. Yes, voters built this. There were years in which election chatter was about running the government like a business, or that the budget should be like a household budget. To wit, corruption isn't
specifically the reason everything is falling apart, just part of the problem. The actual reason is voters; first voters told the politicians to spend less money on stuff like that, then they told politicians to spend that money by giving it to the private sector to do public work for profit, then they told politicians to spend more on the military, then they complained about the government spending too much money and not getting enough in return, then they did the whole thing all over again. And again. And again.
If the problem is the Establishment, remember that a parliament of whores is playing to the marketplace.
Naturally, any politician surviving all that must necessarily be corrupt for having done everything they could to accommodate voter demand.
―End Part II―
That was an obvious set up for Bernie supporters. 
