Like I agree with a lot of what you said. I was very alienated from the Hillary campaign because as a leftist I was not welcome on that scene. Coming at it from the left, Hillary and her cabal of Neoliberals were very sore winners. That makes sense because what Hillary learned from Obama was that you can’t even allow anything other than token resistance. Enter Bernie Sanders. I’ve loved the man for a long time. My college roommate had a poster of Brittany Spears with a snake and Bernie Sanders on his wall. That roommate reminds me of you, Ucci. We disagreed about a great many things but he influenced my philosophy in a substantial way. He was also the best man at my wedding. Good dude. Anyway, Bernie was supposed to be “red meat” for “the base” like Kucinich and Sharpton. They aren’t actually going to win but they do a lot to motivate core constituencies that vote. it’s an easy strategy for a coronation primary.
Didn’t work out that way and things got weird. Hillary’s reaganesque vision of social justice was that what we need are more black and women CEOs and the fundamentally healthy system will heal itself. That vision does great for generating donations but so what? I’m from the Midwest. That vision ain’t gonna sell there.
Given the choice between “obvious con man” and “actively hates you” I can’t blame my midwestern brothers for opting to stay home. It was a bad decision and things are going to get a lot worse for them. I’m very lucky that I’ll be mostly insulated from that (though, working internationally, things have gotten very interesting and not in a good way) but a couple of tens of thousands of dollars isn’t going to hurt me either way. But having lived in the midwest, that shit is life-or-death.
I always thought Juan Bosche was a bit of a joke but his whole Pentagonization theory, if you accept the internal colonization parts, is basically the best model we have right now. That’s a scary and bad thing.