this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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Politics
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As an outsider, I personally would like to see them branch away from the democrats and start a new party. The whole system needs to be fixed from the ground up. But perhaps it's too soon for that. Maybe things need to get worse first. Maybe government reform is too "extreme" at the moment.
My reasoning is that if the system survives this, it will likely return to the same BS that plagued it before. When this situation is fixed, I would hope there are actual solutions rather than band-aid fixes.
However any action is better than nothing at the moment.
to push back on this: Bernie is only ever a Democrat by registration for political reasons, and he has a long history of being in left-wing third-parties where he--frankly--has mostly spent his time losing and not getting much done. when he is politically successful that is almost exclusively as a genuine independent not tied to a formal third-party, or as a Democratic-caucusing independent. and even the Vermont Progressive Party with which he is often associated is only a major player in Burlington, and that's because they've completely shoved the Republican Party out of the political system in the city (rendering it a two-party system with the VPP on the left and the Democrats on the right). they generally do not wield much political power themselves, despite being more successful than any other contemporary third-party.
in short: i think there is a very straightforward explanation of why he has not taken this course of action, and won't do so for the remainder of his time in politics. if building a party doesn't work it would waste a lot of grassroots energy on a project that simply isn't politically effective, and there are few reasons to think building a party would work right now. there are an incredible number of man-hours, volunteers needed for party-building, and political capital needed to even have consistent ballot access--and Bernie probably cannot assemble all of that at this point even if he wants to. additionally: major parties obviously have no incentive to make ballot access laws more lenient, so even if such a project got off the ground it could easily be killed by tightening those laws.
(incidentally: DSA, the organization i do work in, has many of the same debates about this subject--and the absurd capacity needed to credibly run third-party is the reason we're not and are unlikely to become one in anything but the longest term.)
That all makes sense. I think I'm probably getting ahead of myself a bit. In my mind, it seems like democracy has already lost, and the only way forward is through a full reform.
But you're absolutely right. It would likely require too much time and energy to attempt something like this now. Maybe once the threat has been removed, would they even consider such a thing.
I could also be speaking from a place of ignorance as I'm not familiar with the inner workings of the political structures that are currently in place.
How does the math work for that?
It's happened before so... Pretty okay.