'In a Dark Time, the Eye Begins to See': The Bernie 2020 Campaign Represents
a Fight That Must Continue
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
11 March 20
In a dark time, poet Theodore Roethke wrote, the eye begins to see.
No matter who wins the Democratic presidential nomination, many millions of
people will refuse to unsee what has become all too clear. On the verge of
spring 2020, we can see what were up against:
A crowing media establishment, eager to relegate the Bernie Sanders campaign
to the political margins.
A gloating Democratic Party establishment, glad to rally around Potemkin
candidate Joe Biden and extol his carefully crafted façade.
Overall, interlocking systems based on greed and corporate power instead of
shared resources and genuine democracy.
On Tuesday night, there was no mistaking the smug joy of studio pundits and
Democratic Party operatives on networks like AT&T-owned CNN and
Comcast-owned MSNBC. Meanwhile, The New York Times rushed into print yet
another all-out attack piece masquerading as a news article about Sanders.
Dominant media have routinely slanted coverage to make Sanders look bad,
often bypassing context and skewing facts. It was just another day at the
office last week when the Times front-paged a flagrant smear of Sanders as a
supposed propaganda tool of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. A former
U.S. ambassador to Moscow quickly denounced the story as a distortion of
history.
Such regular deceptions from a range of corporate media shouldnt surprise
us, but they should never cease to outrage us. The same is true of the
rampant corporate sleaziness in the upper reaches of the Democratic National
Committee.
Corporate media and corporate Democrats want the Bernie 2020 campaign and
the grassroots energy behind it to melt away. Thats not going to happen.
Movements that have been propelling the Sanders campaign are here for the
long haul as determined to keep fighting for social justice as top
corporate executives are determined to keep collecting huge paychecks. (And
thats saying something.)
The chances of Bernie winning the nomination have sharply diminished, but
its still possible. And no matter what: movements for basic social change
and democracy will vitally persist with long-term struggles to wrest power
out of the hands of oligarchs and their functionaries.
Candidates who rushed to endorse Biden after his big victory in South
Carolina Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Beto ORourke,
Kamala Harris and Cory Booker each personify, in their own way, whats so
corrosive about standard-issue Democratic Party leaders. Their backgrounds
and personalities vary widely, but they share a political space of
opportunism and ultra-coziness with corporate power. (Meanwhile, during the
crucial aftermath of her withdrawal from the race after Super Tuesday,
Elizabeth Warren shed new light on her political character when she decided
not to endorse Sanders.)
The antidote to anti-democratic poisons has nothing to do with cynicism,
passivity or defeatism. The solutions will come from realism, activism and
ongoing insistence that a better world is possible if were willing to
keep fighting for it.
