Bernie is Leftists’ Divinely Appointed “Hitman”

[eridani]

http://www.nationofchange.org/news/2016/01/17/bernie-is-leftists-divinely-appointed-hitman/

The political left needs to wake up now. Love him or loathe him, Bernie Sanders has succeeded in doing something the left itself has never in recent memory accomplished: he’s spearheading a potential political revolution.

“How so?” ask skeptical leftists. Because his recent breakthrough successes—his pivotal MoveOn endorsement swiftly followed by his seizing the lead in the Iowa and New Hampshire polls—have created an urgent crisis of legitimacy for today’s Democratic Party. As every student of revolution knows, creating such an acute legitimacy crisis is the first step toward toppling, or at least radically transforming, any political institution. And the Democratic Party is the first political institution budding U.S. revolutionaries need to topple or transform. For, as the left has always astutely griped, it is by far the chief diverter of revolutionary energy—the place where promising political revolutions go to die. But this political revolution, launched wittingly or unwittingly by comparatively tame “house socialist” Bernie, could be the death knell for the Democratic Party as we know it. And that’s a very good thing.

But the toppling or transformation of today’s Democratic Party won’t fall in leftists’ laps. Bernie has in effect accomplished Phase 1 of any political revolution: delegitimizing a lynchpin political institution—one that holds together the whole shaky edifice of a corrupt social order. I would argue that in siphoning off legitimate revolutionary energy—coddling hopes it means to kill, exactly as the left describes—the Democratic Party has played that counterrevolutionary role in our political system. But my chief bone to pick with fellow leftists is that they’ve hated Democrats “not wisely but too well”: in mustering all their surplus outrage for a richly deserving target, they’ve forgotten the useful mob cliché that revenge is a dish best served cold. Only by taking that cliché to heart can leftists even begin to accomplish Phase 2.

If leftists play it smart, Bernie could be our revolutionary “hitman.” Or even more precisely, he could be the picador who fatally weakens the Democrat bull so leftist matadors can move in for the kill. But before developing my follow-up bullfighting metaphor, let me first explain my logically preliminary mafia one.

[merrily]

1. Great article, not such great comparisons.

Divinely-Appointed and Hitman? Picador? Metaphor up, Mr. Walker!

[Donkees]

2. "The political left needs to wake up now..."

But if I have anything personally to offer as a political analyst, it’s precisely the insight of one belatedly awakened

It does sound as if the writer recently discovered alarm clocks