"Eight-sixteen years from now a Eugene Debs or George McGovern or Bernie Sanders type will be political mainstream."
This is the good news. Those college girls who wet their panties over him wearing "Feel The Bern" t-shirts are eventually going to take over this country. And they will want a similar politician to vote for. He's the first in what I think will be a series of guys like this on the left.
I don't understand this. How exactly is running for president not mainstream? McGovern? George McGovern? The guy who lost to Nixon? Boy, ya blink your eyes and ya lose track of American politics.
Just realized I didn't really answer the question. This will be reductive lest boredom. In a partisan republic politically mainstream means center. The center moves. In the Great Depression FDR's New Deal was just left of center, he was the outsider candidate, until it worked and made us for three decades the most income equitable we've been this century, and the dems the party of the working class. In the 1970s under Nixon and Ford's watch, deregulation of financial among other types of private sectors began, which worsened dramatically under Reagan, another outsider candidate. The reason he's popular, as Bill Clinton is, is only the poor saw the negative effects of their deregulation and removal of safety nets (unions, etc.) immediately and there was short-term prosperity for some. Bill was so good at it he preserved his legacy and got W to take the hit for the 2008 collapse which was all his fault, just ask his former economic czar and labor secretary Robert Reich. If there was one last gasp before Reagan ushered in the conservative mainstream era it's watching Jimmy Carter pull political suicide by warning about climate and telling people in a debate that we need to consume and produce less giving Reagan the obvious riposte that we must consume and manufacture more.
Anyway, that age of conservatism never really ended and FDR's New Deal is now considered far left. With Obama there were significant foreign policy strides (waiving unconditional support of Israel to attempt two state solution negotiations, which when they fell apart Sec. Kerry imposed economic sanctions on new settlements in Gaza and set a timeline for UN classification as an apartheid state if Netanyahu doesn't get his act together in x amount of years, climate conference) which were small, incremental victories for the left (telling that BO had highest staff turnover rate of any modern president; he'd routinely refuse to listen to economic advisers if they disagreed with him). Still, his biggest hurdles and failures were doing barely anything to regulate financial markets, protect unions, fix tax code and trade deals to be equitable etc. just like his conservative predecessors. These are most difficult things to do because rich people don't care about the poor and have Washington in their pocket. Obama has gotten very good at lying to people that the economy is better than under Bush, when actually it's worse than ever, employment stats are dated, reductive and quixotic, and wealth concentration is limited to a very few selfish people (400 -- the top one tenth of one percent -- control almost as much wealth as the bottom 90, and the middle class is barely distinguishable from the poor with little upward mobility) Visualized, income inequality from the turn of the 20th to now is a bell curve. In the 70s wages also stagnated; if the minimum wage kept up with inflation and cost of living it would average $25/hr. VCs play with money and rarely create opportunity or jobs or social utility. With Clinton or Trump it'll probably get worse.
Why Trump is worse is as demonstrated by polarities of Reagan and FDR, outsider candidates tend to move the needle a lot. Because they usually come on the heels of economic issues, volatile reform can dominate, and they tend to do the most good or bad. Trump looks pretty bad. Think GOP is using a fringe lunatic to sign their bills. Global alliances are fragile now.
Just look at Brexit. They have the Chunnel, a marvel of the world, and it's totally worthless and congested now.
BS supporters aren't sore losers, they're on the right side of history. Democracy was undermined by capital this primary cycle in unprecedented ways. Press colluded and complicit.
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