Put baldly, for all of you who blame Bernie Sanders for Hillary Clinton's recent devastating loss in the election, that's foolish. Even blaming Independents and Third parties misses the core of the problem.
Bern was the single greatest clue into exactly what was absent in HRC and the Dems - a radically populist-oriented progressivism (or even centrism). This could have been leveraged by the HRC team, if she'd for instance made him VP or substantially changed her positions on certain economic matters after winning the nomination.
Instead the HRC team seemed to go forward in incredulous strides of confidence, as indicated by the poll predictions and inability for Lefters to understand where Trump supporters are coming from and how they reflect large majorities of the discontent and distrust of establishment politics of so many American citizens (that's right, they are citizens - however flawed as we all are - not monsters).
Analyzing what went wrong, what lead to defeat, is no simple task. But it was a big defeat, a full defeat. It's true that if people who voted for Stein and Johnson voted for HRC, she'd have won indeed.
But to me the inability to appeal to the many that supported Bernie and then turned to Stein or Johnson, this by and large reveals the HRC team's inability to respond sufficiently to their needs and the Bern's view, which clearly appealed to a progressive populist faction sympathetic to far less established political discourse, so to speak - a point Robert Reich makes.
By not agreeing with the view that the HRC team and Dems failed to heed Bernie's message, you (the reader of this post) suggest just how deep the plausible denial can go in terms of the absolute need for ground up change, the need for serious alterations in our civic infrastructure and modes of political leadership. Well, good job - that view effectively places the onus away from establishment politics and now we've gotten ourselves Trumpian disestablishment politics to swallow for four long years.
Lastly, I'll say this: I care very little to hear the same distorted slanderous far leftist ideology (such as calling him fascist) that helped get Trump elected in the first place by overestimating him. He's not that bad. There are many serious problems with his presidency - neglect of ecological matters, treatment of minorities and LGBT, and his aggressive tendencies potentially informing his international relations. I understand the pain and deeply sympathize with the grievances that minorities, activists and progressives feel in light of Trump's ascendency to the most powerful leadership position in the world.
But it's quite possible that much of his bigotry and rebel-rousing ways were part of his ego inflation during the election trajectory, and that he will change, even dramatically, into a more centrist person. I mean, for Lefters, he'll still be highly distasteful, but I find the continual characterizations of Trump as fascist racist rapist both blown out of proportion and revealing of a central element that got him elected.
And this is not only about populist movements being mobilized and democratically leveraged with political clout, a lesson not heeded by the HRC team. It's also generational. As we saw with Bern's followers, the youth proactively supported him during the nomination trajectory in rather outstanding measures of support. In this sense, we're just getting started. The American political Phoenix will rise.