Open Letter to Senator Bernie Sanders

Dear Bernie,

I was one of the gullible liberals who thought and vehemently argued for months on end that you could win the Democratic Primaries fair and square. After all if a rookie billionaire with zero political credibility and a spotted past could win the Republican nomination, why wouldn’t an unimpeachable United States Senator be able to do the same in my party? We both know the answer(s) to that, don’t we, Senator? You chose the high road when all was said and done, but was that the right road? I have no doubt that your entire career and this ill-fated campaign in particular were driven by a desire to lift the exploited, the downtrodden, the poor and the excluded to their rightful place in a government of the people, by the people, for the people. In which case, Senator, you are now squandering the opportunity of a lifetime to change history in a way no one else can, or ever could, or will ever be able to even try.

You may be telling yourself that once you failed to win from the outside, the smart choice was to fight from the inside. You may be taking great pride from that lefty progressive platform you managed to negotiate. When was the last time any President felt hamstrung or guided in any way by the party platform? Ninety-nine percent of the public doesn’t know what the party platform looks like. It’s an empty achievement, and you probably know that. There will be no fight for fifteen. There will be no free college. There will be no extended family leave, no pay equity and certainly no single payer health care. And there will be no end in sight to the steady hemorrhage of middle class jobs to slave labor countries. But I’m sure you know this too, Senator.

Nobody is going to bother the venerable Wall Street institutions hanging around our collective neck like a rock. Nobody is going to lose sleep over the Silicon Valley technology cartel, which is quickly acquiring more power than the biggest bank ever had. And there will be war, Senator Sanders, as sure as I am sitting here and you are sitting there, there will be war. With a little bit of luck, it will be an old fashioned cold war that will further impoverish the nation and strip citizens of even more civil rights. If luck runs out, and it will, Americans will again die in some God forsaken desert with an unpronounceable name, to “protect our freedom”.

How do you feel, Senator, when you watch the swarm of millionaires and billionaires coalescing around the candidate you endorsed? Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffet, Mark Cuban and now Meg Whitman, are all praising your former opponent and promising to fund her campaign. Heck, even the Koch Brothers seem sympathetic to her cause, not to mention the deluge of conservative purists crossing party lines spontaneously or after being actively wooed by the Democratic candidate running on the most progressive platform ever. Your preferred candidate said that our cause is her cause, and this must be why hedge-fund managers rewarded her with something like $50 million in campaign “donations” (so far). Do you think any of these powerful interests gives a rat’s ass about our political revolution?

Have you noticed, Senator, how the only places where your name is still spoken are Trump rallies? The much touted shift to the left in the Democratic Party ended abruptly when the television cameras were powered off in the Wells Fargo arena in Philadelphia. The impressive array of professional exploiters of humanity, and the planet we live in, who are stepping all over each other to swear allegiance to the Democratic candidate is matched only by the unbridled enthusiasm of the hired guns of the corporate media. There will be no campaign finance reform, no end to fossil fuel indecency, no end to fracking and drilling and pillaging and slashing and burning, but it will all take place with the utmost respect for stately decorum. Was this your vision for our future back in April of 2015, Senator? It wasn’t ours.

Our $27 voices have been silenced when you decided to suspend yours, and frankly Senator Sanders, I don’t think that decision was entirely up to you. This was not a regular primary season where one can barely tell the difference between campaigns before they all merge into one bland compromise. As you said many times, this was indeed a revolution. Yes, you sparked the flame, Senator, but we build the fire. It wasn’t yours to do as you please with, and you were certainly not empowered to deliver “your supporters” to the subjugation of the status-quo. To put it in terms everybody understands these days, we funded this revolutionary venture with our hard earned money and our feet, and you, Senator, had a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders.

We lost one battle and you conceded the war. We can’t undo the loss, but you can undo the concession to some extent. You can at least try to make things right for people whose $27 investment represents a week’s worth of food. On a personal level, you have much to lose if you do this, but when you fan the flames of revolution (even a political one), personal sacrifice is baked into the cake. You should have known that, Senator, and you should have made peace with that from the start. I have to confess here that I am not entirely surprised by your decision. Your acquiescing response to subtle and not so subtle efforts to coopt this political revolution, by what I consider unsavory actors, was in my mind a harbinger of things to come. And things came.

I’m not asking you, Senator, to get out there and campaign for “the other” movement propped up by millions of small donations from people who can’t afford to donate either. I am asking you to recognize in your heart of hearts that the road of our political revolution does not go through another Clinton administration. I am asking you to recognize that eight more years of keeping people down, while fraudulently posing as their champion, are far more devastating for our revolution, this nation, and the world at large, than a Trump administration could ever be. These are desperate times for most of us, so I am asking you Senator Sanders, to remember that you have a responsibility, nay, a duty, to stand up one more time and help us keep hope alive, Sir.