Bernie Sanders and "Movement Politics"

[Blasphemer]

20. The movement described in that piece resonates for me... The Sanders movement does not

I can see that that is where his roots are, but they have become badly distorted.

There can be no poor people’s movement in any form unless the poor can overcome their fear and embarrassment. I think the release comes from a certain kind of organizing which tries to make people understand their own worth and dignity. This work depends on the existence of “material issues” as a talking and organizing point—high rents, voting rights, unpaved roads, and so on—but it moves from there into the ways such issues are related to personal life. The organizer spends hours and hours in the community, listening to people, drawing out their own ideas, rejecting their tendency to depend on him for solutions. Meetings are organized at which people with no “connections” can be given a chance to talk and work out problems together—usually for the first time. All this means fostering in everyone that sense of decision-making power which American society works to destroy. Only in this way can a movement be built which the Establishment can neither buy off nor manage, a movement too vital ever to become a small clique of spokesmen.

This paragraph tells the story of my the Sanders movement has not captured me. There is a dependence on a messianic savior figure who is meant to take us to the promised land. There is not an ethos of empowerment or bottom-up decisonmaking.