A common avenue into the basic ideas of socialism in today’s political world is that of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). In the current political climate this is more prevalent than ever, with the “Fighting Oligarchy Tour” being led by the two figures. Indeed we can see just how popular this rhetoric is, as it has attracted an incredibly large attendance and insane amounts of social media attention.
My own personal introduction to Bernie Sanders was during his 2016 run for president. After a short google search, Bernie Sanders was with no doubt my candidate of choice. Everything I had read about him only made me like him more, consistent, progressive, genuine and with a historical track record of supporting causes of great importance. To me, Bernie had represented a separation from the typical bourgeois establishment politics that most people resent.
It was from this point that I really began to jump into socialist theory, not simply from an ideological perspective, but as a living tradition rooted in the struggles of those revolutionaries and theorists who have spent their lives fighting to overthrow this oppressive system. The more I read the more frustrated I had become. Why was so much history re-written? Why was none of this taught while I was in school? Who was behind this whitewashing of US history and why?
The more I would read, the more radicalized I would become. I began to imagine there could be a world and movement that exists outside of the coercion on Western electoral politics and the dead end “lesser evil”ism of our structurally defunct two party system that is so deeply embedded in our American political culture. During this time of my political and historical education, I started to draw some connection between our current moment and some of the struggle of the past that became familiar to me. It came clear to me that history was not something behind us, but something we are still living through and have the ability to change.
History does not simply repeat itself, it is repeated by the ruling class. Subjects of violence, pacified and rebranded as “citizens” are taught to forget about this violence. Indeed, it would seem that modern Americans of just about every political shade has forgotten these historical facts, especially some of our more progressive counterparts. When we forget, we fall apart. The tactics of repression, co-optation and exploitation are not new. These are recycled, repackaged and redeployed over and over. We are currently living through one of those cycles now. If we do not approach this moment with discipline, clarity and militancy, we will all be duped into settling for scraps, again, whilst being told that symbolic gains are victories, that simply survival is progress in itself.
The crisis of the system is undeniable. What we are witnessing mirrors the Great depression, a great disillusionment with capitalism, an eruption of working class anger and the rising appeal of revolutionary rhetoric and organizations. But we must not forget the past, as communist organizations surged for that time, the state moved quickly. Franklin D Roosevelt, one of the pearls of liberalism, crushed this momentum. This was not done with outright force, but instead with flattery and co-optation. He took radical language, borrowed leftist aesthetics and smothered out the thread of a revolution with concessions and reforms to preserve and save the system of capital.
That moment is repeating itself right now. And unless we are willing to learn from these mistakes, unless we are willing to organize outside and against the systems constraints, the ruling class will again rob us of any possible future we are owed. We cannot afford to be lured in by false promises. We need to fight for what is ours, and take it.
Much Like Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition served to neutralize any revolutionary energy in the 30’s, Today’s “progressive” Democrats Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Cory Booker and their cohorts all play the same role, regardless of if they know it or not. Their project is not revolutionary, its just another form of containment. While they’re celebrated as figures of “progress” we are witnessing the systematic liberalization, defanging and co-option of radical language, terms like “abolition,” “resistance,” and “revolution” stripped of their claws and repurposed to serve the very same institutions they once condemned.
This is not a mistake, this is not the owning class “going left” on us, it is a strategy and one that has been done before.
Sanders and his cohorts have seemingly perfected the art of ideological sleight of hand. They borrow from the aesthetics of our radical movements while remaining firmly within the bounds of bourgeois politics. For millions, this illusion has been persuasive, and even convenient. This Illusion allows many activists to wholly believe that doing these performative motions themselves is a form of revolutionary activity. While the illusion of the democrats may be comforting, illusions dont liberate people.
When these “progressives” recycle the language of radical tradition, intersectionality and revolutionary struggle only to weakly attempt basic reforms that amount to little more than the minimums of social democracy, basic rights that exist in most other imperialist states, they reveal the limits of their imagination and the depraved depths of their allegiance to the system. If the best these “radicals” (dont laugh) can offer is a gentler capitalism, a smarter police state, or a more diverse empire, then the question has already been begged: exactly how radical is any of this really? and how much longer will we allow our language, our history and our future to be weaponized and turned against us?
Already, millions of Americans cling to the idea of social democracy, but what this really amounts to is a sanitized, defanged politics. Nothing more than a wishlist of welfare state policies like free healthcare and free education, stripped of any real reckoning with power, class struggle or imperialism. These demands are often framed as common sense, as if they can be won simply by “taxing the rich,” without confronting the fundamental structures that make exploitation necessary for the imperialist core to sustain its ruling class.
Bernie Sanders and his supporters frequently point to the Nordic countries as the ideal model, praising their “blend of capitalism and socialism.” But this is a fantasy, one that falls apart with even a small amount of scrutiny. These nations are not socialist; they are imperialist welfare states which gain these social programs with centuries of colonial domination and their current participation in imperialism. They too are witnessing the rise of fascist movements, proving that even a robust welfare state cant guarantee against capitalist decay and reaction.
Why is it that the only nations held up as aspirational are wealthy, white, imperialist ones? Why is there never serious mention of Cuba, Burkina Faso or China, nations that have achieved equal or greater material gains for their most marginalized populations without relying on the brutal exploitation of the Global South? The answer to this is relatively simple: because social democracy, like every other variant of liberalism, is an anti communist project. It exists not to challenge capitalism, but to stabilize and secure it. It seeks to delay or defuse revolutionary rupture by offering just enough reform to preserve the legitimacy of the system.
What we are witnessing is a 21st century era of Cold War liberalism, soft power pacification dressed in “progressive” language. With its true task to destroy a revolutionary movement, not build it.
Even the so called progressive wing of the Democratic Party, the likes of Sanders, Ocasio Cortez and Omar has shown its true allegiance to capital and empire through their championing of the watered down Green New Deal. The deal was originally conceived by the Green Pary with anti-imperialist and anti-militarist foundations, the proposal was co-opted in short order, gutted and repackaged to serve the needs of capital. It now centers market solutions, profit incentives and capitalist “growth” in the face of a planet rapidly approaching climate collapse. In yet another classic liberal imperialist fashion, this agenda refuses to challenge the foundations of capitalist accumulation or white supremacy.
Western “green” movements that fail to call for the abolition of capitalism and imperialism are nothing but greenwashed colonialism. The material basis for the transition to “clean energy” still rests on the intensified extraction and militarized seizure of resources in the Global South. One of the best examples of this would be the 2019 coup against Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president and leader of a socialist government committed to nationalizing lithium for the benefit of its people. This coup was a textbook imperialist action orchestrated to ensure US dominance over strategic resources. It was a direct attack on Indigenous sovereignty and anti capitalist development, cloaked in the liberal language of being “pro democracy.”
Bernie Sanders offered a lukewarm and reluctant condemnation (not of US imperialism), but of the “coup” (as if naming the enemy is too radical for his brand of acceptable dissent)
Can we finally admit that Bernie is not any kind of break from the past, but a continuation of it? Much like Roosevelt, who remains mythologized as the most “left wing” US president despite his open anti-Semitism, Japanese internment camps and refusal to support anti-lynching legislation, Sanders exists to channel mass discontent into safe, institutional avenues. He talks socialism but defends imperialism. he criticizes corporations but affirms zionism. He advocates for healthcare reform but balks at reparations. When he calls socialist governments like Venezuela and Bolivia “authoritarian” and “dictatorships” (terms never applied to the US in spite of its global death toll, political repression and private prison complex) he does so in the same racist, imperialist tradition that has always demonized anti-colonial leadership.
Sanders and his lackeys, like FDR and his before him, serve as a bulwark against revolution, not a vehicle for it. His function is not to liberate the working class, but to pacify it, to neutralize the treat posed by a militant, internationalist, anti-imperialist socialism that actually seeks to dismantle US hegemony and capitalist rule.
So we have to ask ourselves: why is the country that imprisons more people than any other, violently crushes dissent, rigs elections through corporate domination and fund genocidal regimes across the globe still allowed to parade itself around as a “democracy”? and more importantly why are we still letting anyone who defends this empire be called a “progressive”?
It’s easy to be a “progressive” when it comes to domestic social issues. Many activists are wholly comfortable confining themselves to poetry slams, performative protests, social media and iconography. This zone of politics is relatively safe, and does not directly challenge any of the root causes of the symptoms themselves. In this way organizations like the Young Democrats funnel progressive youth into attacking the symptoms of the root issue, and in the process whittles them down into model establishment democrats. The mask slips however when the topic shifts to non-white, non-western leaders and nations targeted by the US war machine. Thats where people reveal their true ideological commitments (or lack thereof). Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar and AOC have all played their part in propping up imperialist narratives, distancing themselves from the Global South, or at best giving a milquetoaste word salad response to virtue signal.
Left wing chauvinism reveals itself most clearly in the face of war. Sanders and his base adopt the language of the empire, calling oppressed nations and leaders “authoritarian” or “dictators,” under the pretense of “nuance.” But what this really means is no action, no resistance, just quiet support for intervention. This same crown condemns US interference in name, while accepting every narrative used to justify it. This can be seen most clearly with the DPRK, China, Syria, Venezuela, Boliva and countless others smeared with the same colonial language to make imperial aggression more palatable. The old phrases of “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds” and “the liberal opposes all war except the current one” still ring just as true today. There is a real deep contradiction that can be seen here. Sanders and AOC supporters can see how corporate media smears him and other “progressives,” but then take that same media at face value when it demonizes socialist leaders abroad. If the ruling class attacks a mild reformer like Sanders so viciously, what do you think they do with actual revolutionary movements and leaders?
What has been made increasingly clear as this facade continues is how Bernie Sanders’ rise, alongside the mainstreaming of social democracy under the label of “Democratic Socialism,” has created more than a simple mass break from centrism. It has also created a moment of political opportunism, careerism and performative radicalism masquerading as organizing. This wave has done more than fuel the Democratic Party; its actively mis-educated people on what socialism actually is beyond welfare.
For many years there has been endless talk about finding a way to appeal and being socialism into the mainstream. What is actually happening now is a whitewashing of socialist politics to make them palatable to liberals. Socialism is now treated as some policy tool instead of a revolutionary class struggle. But socialism is not something you can sprinkle into capitalism. It cant be implemented through legislative tweaks inside of a capitalist state. Bernie knows this, especially in a country where any reforms are stripped away every 4 to 8 years by whichever capitalist mouthpiece takes power next. The reality is that socialism and capitalism are fundamentally and irreconcilably opposed.
In 2016 and 2019 Bernie faced red baiting from media as well. The liberal press smeared him with Cold War hysteria. But this is not because bernie threatens capitalism, its because the Democratic Party will burn itself to the ground before it allows even a hint of genuine progressivism within its ranks. This reveals just how committed they are to maintaining imperialist power, even at the cost of democratic legitimacy.
Regardless of who you vote for in the next presidential election, your vote will be inevitably casted for the next global terrorist leader. whether they are “progressive” or not they will, like all presidents, do everything in their power to preserve the system. They will cast racialized terror on oppressed and colonized people everywhere. But I am not writing to discourage you from voting, I am simply trying to provide the facts and highlight the historical precedence as it related to our current political moment. The progressives, often white chauvinists or “activists” too busy socializing or hosting feel good events, peddle harmfully held sentiments like “we need to elect XYZ because they are the best we’ve got and a revolution isnt possible right now” are no different from the white moderates who wanted to “wait our turn” in the 60’s, those same moderates who Martin Luther King Jr and James Baldwin warned about.
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice
Martin Luther King, Jr. , Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963)
Committee of Labor for Arkansas Workers Party 