“Sometimes you have to lose elections to build your power,” Stein told RI Future in a wide-ranging, 35-minute interview Wednesday. “Because we don’t get out of this hole unless we build our power. We don’t change this system unless we challenge it. In the words of Frederick Douglass ‘power concedes nothing without a demand.’ It never has, it never will. We’ve been doing this lesser evil thing for quite a while right now and this politics of fear has brought us everything we are afraid of. All those things we didn’t want we’ve gotten by the droves because the lesser evil essentially silences us.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cgZoxHfz_w

But what about all the Supreme Court justices Trump would appoint, I asked her.

“As opposed to having Hillary Clinton in power starting an air war with Russia over Syria because she wants a no-fly zone,” Stein responded. “She’s all about challenging Russia and provoking Russia and surrounding Russia with nuclear weapons and missiles and troops. Do we really want an aggressive war hawk in the White House who has a proven track record of actually doing the things that Donald Trump says?”

Clinton and Trump are “different,” she conceded, “but not different enough to save your life, your job or the planet.” She asked if America would be better served by “an advocate for billionaires in the White House instead of a billionaire himself?”

Fair enough. But Trump’s alleged wealth doesn’t even register on the list of things that would make him a terrible president. What about the hate and distrust his presidency would breed into America, I said.

“And think about where that came from,” Stein retorted. “Why does Donald Trump have support now? Because working people have been subjected to a miserable economy. And where did that miserable economy come from? Well, we had NAFTA, who gave us that? This was a policy of the Clintons, supported by Hillary. We had the Wall Street meltdown, which disappeared 9 million jobs and stole 5 million homes.”

Stein added, “I would feel horrible if Trump gets elected and I would feel horrible if Hillary gets elected but I feel most horrible about a political system that says we have two lethal choices, now pick your weapon of self destruction.”

Instant run-off voting, which allows voters to rank candidates, would allow people to vote for their preferred candidate without risk of aiding a political enemy, she said. But she was also clear to point out, there’s no reason to think she can’t win.

“In my view we don’t even have to lose this election,” she said, noting that there are 42 million people who are “trapped in predatory student loan debt. I’m the only candidate who will cancel that debt like we did for the crooks on Wall Street.”

Stein said Cornell West, Michelle Alexander and Seattle City Councilor Kshama Sawant are potential vice presidential candidates. She said Bernie Sanders could have “just about any” position in her administration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cgZoxHfz_w

At the outset, let me be clear, I find his racism, sexism, xenophobia, and personal history of union busting repellent. But I also find any Sanders supporter who says they are going to hold their nose and vote for Clinton to protect us from the Donald slightly more problematic. The former First Lady has more gallons of blood spilled from racist imperial violence on the cuticle of her pinky finger than Trump does on both hands. Her pillaging of Haiti and Libya alone is the stuff of a bacchanal that would make the Marquis de Sade blanch.

Well-intended hyperventilating pwogwessives, to quote Alexander Cockburn, have already been having a fit whenever I point this out. But it is not my fault that my sense of morality and decency stands when I am dealing with Democrats as strongly as it does when I deal with Republicans. In reality it is just a case of moral hypocrisy on the part of Democrats who are so high on their horse about corporatized neoliberal feminism they are delusional enough to think the woman who decimated welfare, said you can be a feminist and anti-choice at the same time, pigeonholed black children as super-predators, and supported lunatics who sodomized Muammar Gaddafi with a knife is anywhere near Eleanor Roosevelt.

Wake up, kids, she is in fact much closer to Eva Braun than you realize. And just to be clear, I am voting for a woman in this election because I am a feminist, it just so happens that Jill Stein is a medical doctor, a parent, and a gentle person who has one of those funny things I heard my priest call a soul when I was in Catholic school way back in the twentieth century.

No, what I find so hilarious about Trump is how his campaign is tearing the Republicans apart. The Democrats are fundamentally and forever hijacked by the business class through this ridiculous super-delegate system. The Republicans are not because they always were intending to remain the party of the businessman, the parliamentary equivalent of a country club soiree that bars the entrance of minorities, women, and poor people. In that sense, they never saw any reason to hijack their party the way the Democrats did.

But then something pretty ridiculous happened. They re-branded themselves as a populist party by way of the astro-turfed Tea Party movement, the whole Ron Paul revolutionary cadre, and a few other steps that, in the short term, allowed them to be intransigent in the face of Obama. This was not unlike when Barry Goldwater did the same thing in 1964, setting the stage for the Southern Strategy that gave us the Nixon presidency and all the abominations that went with it. But the key difference, which they obviously did not grasp, was the fact that white privilege and the Cold War did not work in the same way it did in 1964. When Goldwater was campaigning, he was courting the white supremacist that did not want to de-segregate schools and the hawks that wanted to drop an atomic bomb on the Vietnamese. But under Obama, what exactly was there to do but peck at the periphery of a system that was already unjustly tilted away from not just minorities but everyone who is poor? What the Republicans did not do, probably due to an anti-Communism that has become general stupidity, is think in the vulgar Marxist terms of class warfare and understand the populists they flooded their ranks with were in fact not gunning for black people as much as rich people.

Take for example the classic Republican talking point about “entitlements” and all that anti-social safety net stuff. Once you get past the certainly racist shell, you actually find at the soft center not a criticism based on race as much as class, an argument for economic fairness and equal opportunities for all Americans. These talking points are framed by the Republicans to target black and brown people, but if you replace the phenotype descriptor with an economic one, change it to entitlements for bankers, you have the main talking points of the Sanders campaign and Occupy Wall Street! This is not to suggest that these people are not prone to white supremacy, they have those tendencies, but the tendencies come from despair and misunderstanding class warfare. They have been indoctrinated to believe in race war rather than class war. But the economic downturn is very quickly making the delusions of white supremacy loose their realness, the feeling that the dream is tenable. The Matrix has ceased to prove to be convincing to them.

How do I know this? Simple.

For years the myth of white supremacy was class mobility, the idea that a white person could go through education, get a good job, and live a middle class lifestyle. While this was occurring, black and brown people were doomed to their apartheid status of barely-subsisting poverty, having as their horizon maybe ascending to the management of a fast food restaurant if they were lucky and a municipal or state job if they were blessed. But now that delusion is all over.

What bothers me about Chris Hedges and his recent writing is not so much his moralizing, though he is prone to that, as much as his inability to articulate that all his doom-saying about where white people are going to end up in the next few years due to class warfare is exactly where black and brown people have been living for the past several centuries in America. It is not that there are no jobs for white people, it is that management of a fast food restaurant is becoming their horizon also. The privatizing of municipal, state, and federal jobs by neoliberal capital has made that blessed job even more unlikely for white people. The Liberal dream was that white supremacy would collapse and we would all be free. The neoliberal nightmare is that white supremacy is collapsing and we all are being made to live in apartheid, but, rather than an apartheid of ethnicity, an apartheid of class.

Doubt me on this? Just take a look at the financial investments of the Bushes and the Clintons. One of the major things they are now putting their money into is private water sources. They are doing this because they know climate change is going to seriously imperil our water supplies and make us live in a society not unlike the nightmares of MAD MAX. They are quite cognizant of this and so are investing to protect the well-being of their children and grandchildren. The recent apathy and lack of action towards the water supply in Flint, Michigan was a test run of the wider apathy that they hope will occur when we all have a compromised water supply.

And so Trump, the union-busting, casino-franchising, loudmouth Looney Toon who cannot be stopped, has become the symbol of a great portion of our country’s class warfare anxieties. He is rude, crude, oafish and obscene. But his base is the working people that will prove to be essential when we make the decision, to quote Rosa Luxemburg, between socialism and barbarism.

And we already know Clinton favors the latter. All you need to look at are her investments.

So you’re telling me there’s a chance, the loyal Sandernistas respond. As well they should.

Yes, there’s still a chance Bernie Sanders can finish the primary season with more pledged delegates than Hillary Clinton. And after last night’s big win in Wisconsin, New York next week becomes even more consequential. It’s Clinton’s home court but Sanders is predicting victory. There are 247 delegates at play to distributed proportionally and a debate in Brooklyn, where Sanders grew up and Clinton has her campaign headquarters, four nights before the polls open.

If Sanders can win New York and then elsewhere in the Northeast (that’s us, RI! 24 delegates), California (475 delegates) can and will make it anyone’s ball game.

According to this New York Times interactive tool, Sanders needs to win roughly 58 percent of the delegates in the remaining 19 states. Winning 57 percent in Wisconsin wasn’t enough, but it didn’t damage his chances either. New York and California have by far the most delegates, and wins of any size by either candidate likely completely scramble these numbers. Polling in both New York and California still favors Clinton, but that’s been the trend in almost every state Sanders has gone on to win.

That’s the math. Analysts who have long called Clinton the inevitable nominee are loathe to admit this, but it doesn’t seem like it’s over to me. Sanders need only to perform as well as Villanova did against North Carolina to pull off this electoral upset. That not impossible, and maybe not even unlikely given he’s beat the expectations all primary season long.

Today, that same justice is on the line in voting booths and caucuses across the nation. The sun has risen on Super Tuesday, a day which may historically become a referendum on the nature of American democracy. At sunrise, tireless volunteers of the Sanders campaign will distribute literature to doors across the country before commencing the final round of canvassing for the last Get Out The Vote effort. Bill Clinton will speak in New Bedford later in the day, but fortunately, we’ve already covered the whole city, which is feelin’ the Bern. I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of those in attendance for his speech will vote for Sanders; even some of Hillary’s canvassers will.

But the race is tight in Massachusetts, and in many of the other states that Sanders has focused on winning today. It would seem that the sinister rise of Trump is beginning to intimidate voters into supporting Clinton, an establishment candidate that is widely, and falsely, believed to be the best chance at defeating him in a general election, even though Sanders has the best numbers against him. And I believe that Sanders’s campaign is still nascent, still growing, and his declared commitment to not stop running until all 50 states have voted, a declaration made after raising $6 million in a day, will build permanent momentum in his base with a clear goal in mind: to win the Democratic nomination.

However, such a win is not necessary to validate Sanders’s revolution. It has already received its validation by those who support it. His campaign is one of activists, ranging from volunteer organizers and leaders to canvassers and phone bankers to the Bernie fanatics waving signs and marching in the streets across the nation. We have been spurred into action by his candidacy and we do not plan to stop. His staffers, even though they are paid, carry the same fire and dedication that the activists and volunteers do. They, and we, all of us, are dedicated to a cause, and that is to reclaim American democracy.

Much is at stake today and in the coming weeks. The media establishment is already touting Clinton as the front-runner, that she is simply moving beyond Sanders and seeking to pad her lead. And it is quite possible that Sanders will falter today, and though we have yet to see, his voters do have a chance to make history by choosing to vote for a government that is truly representative of the people. To vote for a candidate that seeks to restore our democracy is an act of courage in the face of the hate-mongering of Trump or the unfair and unethical corporate sponsorship of the Clinton campaign.

Today, let us stand together as activist voters who will fight for economic and social justice. Let us stand together as brothers and sisters across races and religions in the face of the hate that seeks to divide us. Let us be courageous today and cast that vote for Bernie Sanders, the sole candidate who will fight for our democracy. And in the words of that candidate, “When we stand together and demand that this country work for all of us, rather than the few, we will transform America.”

Win or loss, we have already begun that transformation.

Read more from Chris Dollard on Bernie Sanders’ campaign.

That’s because it is.

In New Bedford, as I write this, more than 30 people are out on the streets with clipboards and Bernie stickers and pamphlets, knocking on doors across the entire city. Fifteen of them are from Rhode Island. Other RI volunteers are up in Worcester, Framingham, and Boston talking to voters. Right now, we’re sweeping the state, asking every potential supporter to get out and vote for Bernie on Super Tuesday.

This is important. Primaries don’t draw near as many voters as the general election, and a couple hundred votes can make or break a campaign. Boots on the ground and voices through the phone statistically lead to high voter turnout, as it did in New Hampshire. And an important fact of the South Carolina drubbing is that voter turnout was very low. Like Bernie has said, when voter turnout is high, Democrats win because voters feel empowered and energized, but when voter turnout is low and people feel demoralized, Republicans win. In this particular case, Hillary won, but if you consider the ideological gap between Hillary and Bernie, she might as well have been that uninspiring conservative candidate.

When I think about why I decided to volunteer for Bernie, it is because he has inspired me. As someone who all but gave up on politics, Bernie has ushered me out of the darkness of political apathy into a psychological state where I feel compelled to work as hard as I can with other volunteers to get him in the White House. And when we work that hard together for something that we all believe in, for a positive change that we want to see in the world, that inspiration comes not just from Bernie, but from all of us. It’s synergistic, and our energy rubs off on one another. I’ve seen one-time volunteers suddenly decide to come back again and again to help our campaign win. The same thing happened to me after my first canvassing shift in New Hampshire.

The energy, the excitement, is addicting. And these campaign staffers hardly sleep—they are working every moment of their waking lives to get Bernie elected. No days off, 5 hours of sleep if they are lucky, but you can tell that they believe so firmly in their work that they wouldn’t be doing anything else. That is truly inspiring. When we work together to Get Out The Vote, people vote! They did in New Hampshire, they will in Massachusetts, and as long as we keep up the pressure and keep gaining momentum, we will win.

While a few dozen supporters waited outside of the main entrance, ticket holders slipped through the crowd and into the warmth and light of the school, where they passed through metal detectors and faced pat-downs by the Secret Service. From the frigid dark outside, we could see through the large cafeteria windows, ringed with steam and frost, where the national media gathered with their laptops, and a big screen projected the live feeds of CNN, MSNBC, CBS, and FOX.

Despite the cold, everyone outside was ecstatic that Bernie was approaching victory.

However, it still felt jilting to be stuck out in the cold after we’d spent a day canvassing for Sanders, and nobody knew how to get tickets. Young campaigners, frustrated at being locked out of the rally, decried the campaign as readily as they supported it earlier in the day, but I knew better. Abel suggested that certain donors probably got tickets, and I realized that fire codes would prevent a large raucous crowd from entering the school at will. The frustrated supporters gradually trickled back to their cars as the temperature continued to fall, and I watched a middle-aged woman storm away from the school after tossing her white “Bernie 2016” sign to the salty, icy concrete. I picked it up before it could get wet—my first piece of Sanders campaign swag. The next day, we found out that the Secret Service had used tickets as a crowd control measure.

Abel and I had just spoken to three different reporters, two of whom work for our local TV news in Rhode Island and one for Scientific American. We told them that we came to New Hampshire to help out and take part in a movement, even though we couldn’t vote here. We had spent the day knocking on doors in Hudson, an effort coordinated by local volunteers, and we told the reporters that the incredible energy and organized efforts of the volunteers we worked with made us want to return to our home state and help support Sanders.

We told them that it was inspiring to see so many different kinds of people working together to build a political revolution. In Hudson, our canvassing activity centered around a “mothership” of a single-family home in a quiet neighborhood that devoted their entire first floor and garage to campaign work. Teenage kids sat around with laptops and headsets, making calls to voters and supporters. Older men and women scanned through sheaves of paper to consolidate the data gleaned from the rounds of canvassing while younger folks, like me, hit the streets to knock on doors.

Jim led training sessions in the garage for each new batch of canvassers. Howard, a veteran 10-month campaigner who sported a white “Bernie 2016” shirt and a black peacoat bedecked with blue and white Bernie buttons, told us his story and how far the campaign had come in such a short time. All told, I probably saw fifty different people come and go from that house on that cold and sunny Tuesday, and everyone buzzed with nervous energy at the possibility of Sanders’s first campaign victory after the “virtual tie” in Iowa.

I told the reporters that that was just one house of supporters—a house that had the energy and organization of an official campaign office. Imagine how many other well-organized volunteers are out there, doing the work needed for Sanders to succeed.

We made the eleven o’clock news that night on Rhode Island affiliates of NBC and FOX. They reported that we were shut out in the cold outside of Concord High School, where Sanders would deliver his victory speech after a landslide victory over Hillary Clinton, but I had a feeling that if we waited, they’d probably let us in. After an hour and a half of shivering and wiping our running noses, they did, and there was a bum rush for the doors.

Those of us who waited grinned with satisfaction, eager to get inside not just to see Bernie, but to be out of the frigid night. After passing through security, we entered the packed, brightly lit gymnasium where grandstands of supporters waved blue and white placards that read “A Future to Believe In,” the same slogan that hung on a banner behind the stage. A whole bleacher full of reporters and camera crews and garish lighting stood directly opposite the stage, and I recognized Sanders’s campaign manager while he gave an interview to CNN. I had never been so close to the national media before, and their presence added to the bright energy that streaked through the room. I was so happy to finally get a chance to see Bernie speak, but to be part of such an electrified and inspired crowd made me feel politically empowered for the first time in years.

A large screen hung over the crowd, and we watched live coverage of the election. When CNN called the election in favor of Sanders after a nearly 60-40 split with 70 percent of precincts reporting, the crowd erupted in cheers. And when Bernie came out for his speech, people clapped and stamped and jumped up and down, waving those rally signs in a blue wave of thunderous celebration as he raised his arms in victory and waved to the crowd. Chants broke out: “Ber-NIE! Ber-NIE!”; “We don’t need to Super PACs, Bernie Sanders got our backs!”; and the most popular, “Feel the Bern! Feel the Bern!” Every time he said “huge,” we all yelled “yuuuuuuge!” And during his speech, we took every opportunity to cheer the candidate that had finally found the pulsing vein of progressive, populist, working-class voters who grew tired and frustrated with established politicians that serve special interests and party concerns instead of their electorates. We took every opportunity to feel the energy, the Bern, that jolted through the crowd, and we felt like we were part of the movement, part of a potential revolution.

Cusp millennials feel the Bern too

I’m 29, a cusp millennial, and in my 11 years of voting and my fifteen or so years of political awareness, I had never felt anything as empowering as this rally. I had never been part of a presidential campaign before—I had mostly supported and worked for Abel, who once ran for Congress and now serves as the town council president in South Kingstown, RI. I always read the news and pried my way through different analyses and opinions to learn the truth as well as I could so that I could vote accordingly. I even developed my tendency toward progressive politics before I was old enough to vote because I grew up with George W. Bush as president for nearly all of my adolescence. And when I became old enough to vote, I relished the opportunity to vote against him.

It felt real good to cast that first vote. It felt real good to cast the second for Barack Obama when he took the presidency. But that soon became a problem for me, as I didn’t see the ethical merit in voting for a Democratic Party candidate just so a Republican Party candidate wouldn’t be elected as president. It felt like negative, dark energy—a vote cast merely to prevent the opposition from victory, not a vote cast to ensure the victory of the candidate I truly believe in.

Of course, I voted for John Kerry and Obama in 2004 and 2008, respectively, but once I discovered that not only did those politicians serve their party’s interests (influenced by donors) instead of their voters, but that they also continued many controversial policies borne from the Bush administration (i.e. drone warfare and other military actions and policies) and abdicated their leftward promises for centrist policies, I became politically apathetic. I began to vote for third-party presidential candidates such as Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate in 2012, because instead of voting against the opposition, I intentionally voted for politicians who actually represented the kind of governance and policies that I hoped to see. It was also my act of protest against the two-party system.

During all of this time, I followed Senator Bernie Sanders. After studying his voting record—a successful civil rights progressive who is not, and never was, beholden to special interests—and after watching many of his speeches on the Senate floor, I began to believe that he was the only Washington politician that I can actually trust. Unlike most in Congress, Sanders was honest and had integrity. Senator Elizabeth Warren soon joined Sanders in my trust when she joined Congress. But I also understood that he, and Warren, were lone progressives in Congress and that most of their colleagues did not support the progressive legislation that they put forth, at least not publicly. I knew that Congress was so gridlocked along party lines that even the most useful and necessary legislation, such as the federal budget, either faced dismissal or indefinite delay and argument.

But I knew that Sanders and Warren were still in there, fighting the good fight and raising awareness to dire issues such as the reality and danger of climate change, the disenfranchisement that voters face from unethical campaign spending, the economic perils of banks that are “too big to fail,” the potentially lifelong burden of massive student debt, and the necessity of universal health care. I took heart in the fact that somebody was doing something, even if futile, about the most important issues that we face as a nation.

But after years of Congressional gridlock and stall, I became more and more apathetic, and soon I began to stop following any politicians, even Bernie.

Bernie can win, and should

It wasn’t until Sanders announced his candidacy for president that I started paying attention again. I didn’t actually contribute in any way, but I started talking to friends more and more about the election in 2016. Once Sanders gained traction and picked up in the polls, those conversations became more and more hopeful and serious about the idea of a Sanders presidency—one that represented the people, not the party and its donors. Soon, my parents and my friends’ parents, all middle-aged, started asking me about Sanders, even if they didn’t believe he could win or didn’t necessarily support his progressive politics. And once the Democratic leadership attempted to permanently cut off Sanders’s campaign from their voter information files (data which became useful and absolutely necessary to me and others as canvassers), I knew that I wanted to get involved again, and my arguments for Sanders grew more passionate and detailed.

I told them what I knew about his voting record and about the progressive policies he supports. I told them about his history as a civil rights activist. I told them how I thought he was a candidate of integrity that refused to play the games that Washington politicians play—that he chose to serve his constituents first. Most often, these arguments for Sanders were met with dismissal, their counter-argument being that Sanders couldn’t get elected, even though he represents the kind of progress that many voters want to see in government, including voters from my parents’ generation. They argued that he was “unelectable” as a septuagenarian Jewish guy from Brooklyn who is a self-proclaimed democratic socialist. They argued, almost always, that we should just support Hillary Clinton because we can’t let the Republicans get the presidency, especially not with Donald Trump as the GOP front-runner.

I chafed at those ideas, and I told them that we, as an electorate, have been faced with a pair of bad choices in every presidential election in recent history, and that we’ve often chosen the candidate that is the “lesser of two evils.” I told them that that, to me, is a defeatist viewpoint that surrenders all individual political power, and that to do so feeds the prevalence of negative campaigns and stokes the idea that we should simply vote against the opposition, which is essentially a pessimistic position to take. And I told them that, because of Sanders’s candidacy, we now have a more positive, optimistic choice for a Democratic candidate for president. I told them that Clinton’s policies are an echo of her husband’s, whose economic policies have often exploited people of color across the world and whose support of the “three strikes” rule led to the mass incarceration of black men in America, and her tendency toward favoring militaristic intervention abroad is simply not a pragmatic position to take in a time where we are faced with massive unrest in the Middle East, especially with a fatigued American military that has been at war for nearly fifteen years. I told them that Clinton often adjusts her politics to suit the political climate and times, especially on progressive issues such as gay marriage, whereas Sanders has been fighting for the same progressive policies for decades. I even told them that he once marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, even if that fact is purely symbolic of Sanders’s commitment to civil rights.

However, it also occurred to me that we of the Sanders campaign, unlike any other campaign in recent history, are actively proving that through an internet-supported grassroots campaign fueled by small individual donations, his candidacy, and by virtue his movement, our movement, can prove that a healthy democracy is possible in this America. Our movement can prove that the established rules of the nomination process serve the major parties and their wealthy donors, not everyday voters. Our movement can prove that the process of giving power to appointed superdelegates–those unelected party officials and politicians who have preemptively pledged their votes to nominate Clinton–diminishes the importance and value of a single vote, which is a value that is constantly and hypocritically emphasized by establishment politicians. Our movement, through sheer numbers, can prove at last that we can take control of our government and pressure our government to serve the people first. And if our movement fails, we will at least have tried—because why not try to guarantee a better future than any other candidate or campaign can offer?

If Sanders maintains the momentum and energy that his campaign sparked in New Hampshire, the energy that Abel and I contributed to and felt a part of, then Sanders can win. Clinton represents a centrist status quo, one that implies that to fight for progressive ideals is pie-in-the-sky and not worth fighting for, while Sanders represents a dynamic change in government to serve the people first. The newest voting bloc—young voters like myself—is likely to side with Sanders, and, in New Hampshire, he took every demographic except for older wealthy people. Voters age 18-24, a demographic that is gaining power and will become the future leaders of our country, supported Sanders over Clinton nearly 9 to 1. Those erstwhile Clinton supporters of all demographics are beginning to see the error in Clinton’s ways and are beginning to trickle over to Sanders’s side.

After Bernie’s electrifying speech in which he said the word “we” more than any other word—he always termed it “our candidacy,” an incredibly empowering piece of oratory—Abel and I weaved our way out of the packed gymnasium. I ran into a Sanders field organizer that I met in Hudson, a young man from Kansas who has traveled all over the country working to get Sanders elected, and we high-fived and hugged, ecstatic at the win. I didn’t even get his name, but I got his energy, a positive energy that is contagious. We wished each other good luck and said that we hoped to cross paths again on the campaign trail—a trail that I hope to follow, as a volunteer for Sanders, to victory. And as Abel and I walked out into the cold quiet New Hampshire night, we could hear the people at Concord High School chanting, “This is what democracy looks like!”

Christopher Dollard is a Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer who holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. He writes poetry and nonfiction. For volunteer opportunities, you can contact him at cjdollard@gmail.com.

“I don’t think it matters very much,” said the URI history professor who will be discussing his new book Out of Sight next week – Wednesday, Nov. 18 from 5:30 to 7:30 at AS220. Earlier this week, RI Future interviewed Loomis about his book, and the TPP.

“This is out of no love for Hillary Clinton that I’m saying this,” Loomis explained. “My guess is that a Bernie Sanders presidency for progressives is about 10 percent better than a Hillary Clinton presidency because of the limitations and structure of American politics.”

Though he said a Sanders presidency would be more likely to oppose a trade deal like TPP than Clinton, he said the two Democratic candidates will likely be facing the same conservative Congress and courts.

“We have to stop thinking strictly through presidential politics as the answer,” he explained. “We’re never going to elect the right person. That’s not how power works. That’s not how the world changes. It’s not how it’s ever changed. It changes from below. It has to come through from people organizing on the ground.”

He said it was was more important to focus on defeating the Republican Party than which Democrat to nominate. “Where the rubber meets the road in 2015 is defeating the Republican Party who actually wants to literally bring us back to the era of the 1890’s and we don’t want that,” he said.

• Erik Loomis on his new anti-globalization book “Out of Sight”
• Erik Loomis on TPP: the ugly, the bad and the good
• Erik Loomis on Bernie vs. Hillary: Not as critical as defeating the GOP
• Erik Loomis live next week, Wednesday, November 18 from 5:30 to 7:30 at AS220

“As you know I have been campaigning on a platform of Prosperity Through Peace,” he plans to say today at a speech to the National Issues Conference of the Women’s Leadership Forum. “But after much thought I have decided to end my campaign for president today. I would like to take this opportunity one last time to advocate for a chance be given to peace.”

Chafee, an unpopular but principled governor, didn’t gain many supporters in his longshot bid for the White House. He raised only about $30,000. The defining moment of his campaign came during the first Democratic debate, when he described himself as a “block of granite on the issues” even though he went from being a Republican, to an independent, to a Democrat – and then said he wished he had a “take over” on his vote as a US senator to overturn the Glass-Steagall Act. He made national news for his poor debate performance.

But wait! If you thought this was the beginning of a stump speech for Senator Bernie Sanders, you are dead wrong. In fact I am referring to the late Murray Bookchin, a man who, in many ways, was the striking opposite of what Bernie Sanders is in every way. Bookchin was a scholar, activist, and writer whose polemics against capitalism but also cultish politicking on the far left and opportunism by people like Bernie Sanders make for great reading nine years after the man died in 2006.

I have previously written that I have a sense of respect for those who support Sanders in his quest for the Democratic Party nomination. Or rather, I did. What has made me change my mind is the reaction of Sanders supporters to the direct action techniques of #BlackLivesMatter protestors in recent weeks, which seemed to gravitate between condescending and racist to religiously fanatical and racist. “Don’t these people realize Bernie is the best thing going for them in this campaign?” “Don’t they know that Bernie marched with Martin Luther King Jr.?” In my own praxis (a socialist term referring to the combination of philosophy with action), I have a very simple rule: if someone is not going to do any real harm, I let them stick to their beliefs. It is not my place as a reporter to break the news story about how there is no Santa Claus because that would only hurt those who believe in Santa, individuals who have no capacity to cause serious damage to others.

But with the level of condescending, self-important, prejudiced nonsense coming from Sanders supporters, I do see a real threat. I can imagine in very concrete terms a moment in the near future where, should Sanders not topple the Clinton machine, his disillusioned supporters will point out the #BlackLivesMatter zap as the moment that did him in and the anti-black animus will soon follow. And in a technical sense, they would have some concrete grounds to stand on. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com recently carried a story by Harry Enten titled THE BERNIE SANDERS SURGE APPEARS TO BE OVER, where Enten shows with mathematical precision that Bernie has reached his crescendo:

Not long ago, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was surging. In just a few months, the Vermont senator halved Hillary Clinton’s lead in Iowa and moved to within shouting distance of her in New Hampshire. But it’s probably time to change the verb tense. No longer is Sanders surging. He has surged. From now on, picking up additional support will be more of a slog… Support for Sanders rocketed up in Iowa but has leveled off since June. The story is nearly the same in New Hampshire. Sanders rose from June to July in the Granite State, but his ascent slowed.

Eneten points out several possible reasons that could have contributed to this. Part of it has to do with the fact Bernie was the newcomer when he announced his candidacy at the end of May as compared to Hillary Clinton, who seems to have been running for office since the day after the 2012 inauguration. At the beginning of the summer, the Run Warren Run PAC was dissolved when the Senator from Massachusetts announced she would not make a Presidential bid. As a result, the Warren supporters combined forces with the Sanders supporters, based in part on politics and in part because of their mutual dislike of the Clintons. Of course, this is nothing new, it happens every election cycle, the Democrats roll out a seemingly radical candidate who has a great opening sprint but cannot maintain pace throughout the race. Do the names Howard Dean or Dennis Kucinich sound familiar? But for those who are Feeling the Bern of Sanders fever, the coincidental occurrence of the #BlackLivesMatter protest with his sluggish poll performance just breeds conspiratorial fever dreams that it was those pesky blacks who killed Bernie’s chance.

But besides that, there is also the fact that Sanders, for all his bluster, has never been serious about this. Just look at the Issues page on BernieSanders.com:

Those are all great phrases and I do not doubt that there are serious people in the general population who are earnest about those topics. But there is one phrase that every serious presidential candidate always puts on their website, without fail: FOREIGN POLICY. For all that can be said about candidate Obama, one thing that can be said without a doubt is that he had foreign policy in his campaign literature from day one. Just look at his page from September 12, 2007, as archived by the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive:

Now look at Hillary Clinton’s website. It’s a huge, in-depth page that has multiple paragraphs dedicated to foreign policy alone. Granted, as Secretary of State she basically committed a bunch of war crimes and let Joe Biden handle the Iraq withdrawal, but at least she is trying.

This is not even hard work! And that brings me to my second point, the real Bernie Sanders. He makes some great speeches, but behind the verbiage is a pretty repellent record.

Since we are on the topic of race and Bernie, let’s talk about his supposedly great record as a young man. Everybody right now is in love with the pictures of him organizing in the Civil Rights era, and that’s a respectable feat. But what they are not talking about is what turned him on to socialism, his time in Israel living on a kibbutz. For the goyim, the kibbutz is sold as a sort of Israeli utopian experiment, a state-sponsored socialist collective where the children are cared for in a communal fashion, everyone eats and works together for the benefit for all, and the socialist dream is realized. But what they do not tell you is the bitter and painful truth about the kibbutz as an apparatus of state violence by the Israeli government against the Palestinians. Some are built in Israel proper while others are built in the Occupied Territories, which displaces the native indigenous inhabitants of the land. And, for all the socialist fluff, Arabs are strictly forbidden from joining in the effort. In fact, Noam Chomsky and the late Tony Judt, both adamant critics of Israeli policy, cite their time as kibbutzniks as one of the reasons they rejected Zionism. By contrast, Sanders thinks of this as the ideal.

When Sanders moved to Vermont, Murray Bookchin was already at work on a serious corpus of anti-authoritarian socialist literature tinged with environmental ethos that were spot-on way before being “green” was a trendy thing. When he saw Sanders, he gave him a chance but quickly came to see him as an opportunist and showboat, writing an article called SOCIALISM IN ONE CITY? THE BERNIE SANDERS PARADOX: WHEN SOCIALISM GROWS OLD for the January 5, 1986 issue of Socialist Review magazine. It is extremely difficult to locate the original article, but someone did print a quote in a thesis for Cornell University, which I replicate here:

To spoof him for his unadorned speech and macho manner is to ignore the fact that his notions of a “class analysis” are narrowly productivist and would embarrass a Lenin, not to mention a Marx…The tragedy is that Sanders did not live out his life between 1870 and 1940, and the paradox that faces him is: why does a constellation of ideas that seemed so rebellious fifty years ago appear to be so conservative today?

For the rest of his life, Bookchin would propose what he alternatively called ‘post-scarcity anarchism’ and ‘communalism’, a system of direct democratic governance that could be implemented in real time for Burlington. In reply, Sanders dismissed him as a kook.

After serving in state politics, Sanders went national in 1992 and remained in his seat thanks to a hushed-up alliance with the Vermont Democratic Party, an arrangement where the man with funny hair spouts off populist rhetoric while voting the party line and then some, such as his opposition to gun control, his vote against the Brady Bill, and . I had no idea the mothers of Sandy Hook victims were so offensive to his working-class hero ethos. For all his yapping about the Patriot Act, he voted for the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which expanded the racist capital punishment system and created the basic structures that the Patriot Act was hinged upon.

And just so we are clear, Bernie is certainly not making moves to stand in socialist fraternity with actual socialist countries. He voted in favor of bombing the socialist nations of Libya and Yugoslavia at the behest of NATO. And for those who forget, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia included an instance where an American missile “accidentally” landed on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, which qualifies as sovereign Chinese land. He’s voted for the various restrictions against Cuba when that was the national policy. He also supported the institution of the regime in the Ukraine, which most mature analysts describe as openly neo-Nazi, and has worked hand-in-hand with John Kerry to de-legitimize the Eastern Ukrainian Donbas, which democratically voted to break away from Kiev and has operated since under a policy of Leninist War Communism.

When asked in 1988 on his cable access TV show about his thoughts regarding the non-violent civil disobedience campaign of Palestinians, the First Intifada, overseen by the Soviet-backed and socialist-leaning Palestine Liberation Organization, he was more emphatic about Arab responsibility than anything else. In the clip, he does condemn a scene of brutality that had been caught on camera, but he does it in a way where it would seem that this type of thing was an exceptional case of soldiers getting out of hand as opposed to an example of continuous and systemic brutalization. When confronted about Israel’s siege of Gaza last year, he tried to claim that Hamas was somehow aligned with ISIS (they aren’t), ergo killing children is fine.

As for this idea of ‘Scandinavian social democracy’, let’s be serious. Scandinavia has a military budget that is far smaller than ours, hence the reason that they can fund healthcare and free college studies. But even then, they are not all that great. Scandinavia, like the rest of Western Europe, is in the midst of a refugee immigration deluge caused by American adventures in the Levant and North Africa. As a result, a right wing movement that is arguably more racist than ours, if that is possible, has found a resurgence among the voters.

By aligning with the Democrats, Sanders is giving tacit approval to the very party that launched the less-remembered 1918 First Red Scare, overseen by Woodrow Wilson, as well as the 1947 Red Scare, begun by Harry Truman. This is the same Democratic Party that jailed Socialist Party Presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs (allegedly Bernie’s hero), red-baited the living daylights out of Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party campaign in 1948, revoked Paul Robeson’s passport in 1950, gave final allowance for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and brought American terror to Korea and Vietnam.

One of the polemics that ended up being one of Murray Bookchin’s best was titled LISTEN MARXIST!, written in 1969. Bookchin had been involved in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and saw way before anyone else that the independent spirit of the counterculture was going to fizzle out, that the glory days of Paris 1968 were flashes in the pan and the New Left was selling its soul to a type of Marxist dogmatism that can only called one thing, a cult. Bookchin was involved in revolutionary politics because he wanted to talk about socialism as a living, breathing, modern system of emancipatory liberation politics. Instead, he saw his comrades falling into a morass of Stalinist, Trotskyist, and Maoist locker room scuffles.

That is exactly my feeling about the whole Bernie Sanders thing. I am far too jaded by the Democratic Party to fall into formation and join in the chorus line. Now, if Bernie Sanders was doing something intellectually stimulating, like issuing an anthology of his favorite socialist writings as a sort of AUDACITY OF HOPE with a little more punch, and trying to have a conversation about socialism, that would be respectable. I would be on board and a full-time volunteer for a Quixotic campaign where, knowing full well he is going to lose, Bernie encouraged letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend so to foster a national dialogue about Marxism, the Industrial Workers of the World, Leninism, and other varieties of social democracy. But instead we get this personality cult:

This is not a political campaign, it is a corralling action for Hillary in the form of a faux-leftist folk music concert. The Democrats needed a distraction to keep the masses in line because they know that people are not feeling inclined by destiny to vote for Hilary in the same way that I felt proud to vote for the first black president. They understand very well that people are sick to death of the Clintons. They also know they look like complete hypocrites for essentially installing a dynasty after agitating against the exact same thing with the Bush family. So who do they throw into the ring but Lincoln Chaffee to shore up the right and Bernie Sanders to pull in the left.

Personally, I have remained somewhat hopeful for Jim Webb, who very well could at some point pull a Hail Mary and steal the show in the last minute. A populist, moderate Southern governor sneaking in under the radar and stealing the race from the establishment Democrat, where have I heard of that before? Oh, right, that’s what happened in 1992 with Bill Clinton!

I do have a wisp of sympathy for those disillusioned Sanders supporters, honestly, I was a very religious Catholic and parting ways with Mother Church had its harsh moments. But here’s the rub, American electoral politics at the national level are simply far too corrupt to affect real change. We have not had a legitimate election probably since Richard Nixon put in the fix in 1968. By the time Ronald Reagan came around, everything was stage managed. Obama, for all his achievements, was less of a political scientist and more of a rock star, and that primary contest in 2008 against Hillary Clinton was closer to American Idol than American democracy.

If you want to see real change in our world, you need to do it the old-fashioned way, by working in collaboration with others to create structures that might be able to stand in for the corrupt old ways of the world, you can’t affect change from the voting booth, FaceBook, or the internet. This is about solidarity and forging cross-cultural alliances.

Perhaps one place to begin would be with the #BlackLivesMatter folks. They have just unveiled a platform with a series of tenable, real policy solutions to curb police violence. And the perfect group to promote that platform are the progressives now flocked around Bernie Sanders, they have the resources, the finances, and the sense of morality that can help BLM flourish.

Only then, united as one, could perhaps a real revolutionary movement come about to change things. But that would require something akin to rewriting the American Constitution itself.

Stein, a doctor from Massachusetts and the Green Party’s standard bearer for the second election in a row, will visit the CCRI campus in Warwick on Saturday, August 22. She’s the keynote speaker at the Green Gathering, an annual meeting of local Green Party members and supporters.

Unlike even Sanders, Stein offers a real alternative to mainstream political candidates. She endorses a $15 federal minimum wage, ending poverty by creating a job for everyone through a “Green New Deal.” And she’s been critical of campaigns like Sanders’ which seeks to change the party from within.

“What Bernie is doing, speaking truth to power, is a wonderful thing,” Stein said, according to ThinkProgress in June. “It’s been done many times before within the Democratic Party. But one only has to look at the inspired campaign of Jesse Jackson to see where that goes. It’s a wonderful flourish, but when it’s over, it’s over. And the party continues to march to the right. These reform efforts within the Democratic Party feel good for those who participate, but at the end of the day, they have not built a foundation for the future.”

Stein will be joined by Sherrie Anne Andre, one of the FANG activists who have been fighting the expansion of methane gas in Rhode Island and David Fisher, a former Green Party candidate for mayor of Woonsocket, who will speak about local elections.

Here are the details of the Green Gathering, from Greg Gerritt: