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Bernie Sanders' People-Powered Campaign Is on Fire
The Bernie 2020 campaign is a crucible of broader activism from the grassroots that can spark uprisings of heat and light.
Tuesday, January 21, 2020
by Norman Solomon
Excerpt:
“Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose,” Dr. King wrote. “It is the strength required to bring about social, political or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice.”
That’s what the Bernie 2020 campaign is about—the necessity of gaining power “in order to implement the demands of love and justice.” And that helps to explain why the campaign is so profoundly compelling at the grassroots. It is oriented to meshing electoral work with social movements—however difficult that might be at times—to generate political power from the ground up. And that’s where genuine progressive change really comes from.
Much of the energy behind the Sanders campaign is generated by what corporate media outlets often criticize or mock—Bernie’s consistency as he keeps denouncing massive income inequality and corporate power. In the process, he confronts head-on the system that enables huge profiteering by such enterprises as the healthcare industry, fossil-fuel companies, private prisons and the military-industrial complex.
By remaining part of social movements, Bernie has made himself especially antithetical to the elite sensibilities of corporate media. Elites rarely appreciate any movement that is challenging their unjust power.
The electoral strength of the Bernie Sanders campaign is enmeshed with intensities of feeling and resolve for progressive change that pollsters and editorial writers are ill-equipped to measure or comprehend. The potential has sometimes been called “the power of the people.” Whatever you call it, such power is usually subjugated. But when it breaks free, there’s no telling what might happen.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/01/21/bernie-sanders-people-powered-campaign-fire