So what happens next?

You have already seen it, you were part of it.

Bernie’s big lesson: Socialists should occupy the Democratic Party, not abandon it Now that the trail has been blazed, the next step for Bernie supporters is to take over the Democratic Party

Dear Sanders Supporters: Don’t Kill Your Revolution by Voting for Hillary Clinton

How stupid of a story. Where do they think this Revolution took place?

Sen. Sanders got the rules for the primary changed, less super delegates, more open elections, and enacted the most progressive platform in my life or your life too because this is the most progressive since FDR.

And where did all this happen...inside the Democratic party. not voting for this victory is self defeating. Don't abandon the party take it over. Elect progressive super delegates and get ready to elect more in 2018.

There is only one person who gains if you don't vote for the Democratic nominee and it damn sure isn't anybody who would support Sen. Sanders!!

I think it's a bit early to be claiming victory.

What Hillary will do once she's actually in office is yet to be seen. All we know for sure is that Bernie helped drive the discussion during the primaries; it doesn't necessarily mean that he will be successful in changing the actual politics of the party once they are in office.

While I agree it would be great if Bernie supports took over the Democratic party, that is a completely orthogonal issue to whether they vote for Hillary or not.

Imagine you were a dyed-in-the-wool Republican (e.g. Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, etc.). You don't support Trump and you know the Republican party is losing track of its own identity. Who are you going to vote for? Do you vote for Trump just because he represents your party? Is the party as a whole better off if he loses? Do you vote third-party in the hopes that it will pressure the Republican party to get back on track? Do you try to reform the Republican party from the inside (knowing how the whole Tea Party thing turned out), and does that change whether or not Trump wins?

The answers are not cut and dry, and it is in no way obvious that voting for Hillary somehow enables reform of the Democratic party.

While I agree it would be great if Bernie supports took over the Democratic party, that is a completely orthogonal issue to whether they vote for Hillary or not.

Ahh how do you figure...you have 3 choices...do I really have to go through that again?

If you think voting Green will change anything in the Democratic party you are dreaming people have been voting Green for a long time.

The changes Sen. Sanders made were in the Democratic party, not in the Green party. The changes that Donald Trump made were in the Republican party. voting for Gary Johnson will not change the Republican party.

There is no 3rd party candidate who is viable in 2016 why does everybody think that they can change that by wishing it so....It takes votes...why is that so hard to understand 1% can't win.

Hillary somehow enables reform of the Democratic party.

Voting for the Democratic nominee enables the Democratic party that 45% of voted for a Democratic socialist....voting for Donald Trump enables a party that 2/3 of voted for a racist authoritarian...and voting for Jill Stein makes no difference anywhere. Voting for Gary Johnson may...may make a difference if he is close to the 5% mark which I seriously doubt.

Again, you are conflating two things which are orthogonal. Reforming the party has nothing to do with which party wins the election. Party reform can happen regardless of whether they have the presidency.

I'm not asking why voting for Hillary enables the more liberal party (i.e. lesser of two evils) to have control of the office, I'm asking how voting for Hillary puts any pressure on the Democrats to change regardless of whether they win or lose.

Reforming the party has nothing to do with which party wins the election.

You couldn't be more wrong. To start with there is the court system, not just SCOTUS but the entire federal judiciary. That is how you get reform.

I'm asking how voting for Hillary puts any pressure on the Democrats to change

Voting for Hillary doesn't . Voting for the nominee does. Bernie has done more to change the party than anyone or anything. But having those reforms won't mean a thing if they lose....

They have adopted the most liberal platform in a... no in two generations. And if they are shown they can win with that platform they can be made to accept more if they lose who do you think gets the blame..."if we had just gone more to the center"

Not to mention the things that would happen if they lose...Obamacare gone..voting right reform gone, legal abortion gone, The list goes on and on.

No I don't see Hillary as a progressive, but she has to be progressive if her base is. If she doesn't get progressive votes...well she doesn't need you and will tack right back to the right.

raphael, what would your ideal third-party platform look like?

This is something that I message about with evil_leet and steele a lot so let me just say sorry ahead of time for stealing words out of their mouths.

Priority Numero Uno: People before profits. America has this weird submissiveness to it where most of us just accept the fact that people are going hungry, dying, and living in squalor for reasons that could easily be fixed.

Universal Basic Income- everybody gets a set amount that covers the basic costs of living for your local region and surviving beyond that of which you would normally afford the animals of some shitty third world zoo. I want poor people to have fridges and Air Conditioning.

Single Payer Health Care - including RX, vision, dental, sexual, and mental

Free College and a form of Subsidized Trade Schooling - education, massive priority for democracy. Student loan forgiveness.

Public School reform - Including a massive upgrade for inner city/low income area schools. We also need a better way than standardized testing. I'm open to suggestions.

Overhaul the progressive income tax - drastically raise taxes on the upper income brackets. Overhall the capital gains tax, estate tax, et cetera. People before profit!

Campaign Finance Reform - Public Funding of elections only. Lately, I'm even leaning away from small donors, but I'm not 100% married to that yet. Remapping of districts using a fairer algorithm so that district maps don't look like jigsaw puzzles.

A Federal Department dedicated to proactively investigating for cases of modern day redlining.

Get Rid of First Past the Post Voting - I'm still on the fence for what to replace it with but there are plenty of options.

Public Transportation systems. Minimum of driverless/solar or hydrogen busses on a local scale. On a nationwide scale, a light rail system or an equivalent. Cheap Travel across the country is a necessity to getting people to travel outside their literal comfort zones. Which is a necessary ingredient of the well informed citizenry that democracy requires.

Nationalize necessary public utilities - Power, Water, Electricity, Internet. Yes, internet - again a well informed citizenry AND the ability for people to communicate open and freely are required for democracy. The same reason the post office is important is why we should be nationalizing our information infrastructure. Massive upgrade on the internet infrastructure while we're at it.

Post Office - get rid of the Pension pre-funding plan that is meant to drive them out of business and have them offer basic banking services.

Public Libraries - this is steele's idea - Digitize your basic fictional paperback catalogue and convert the function of a library into a cross between physical research resource providers, digital distribution centers, and makerspaces.

Green Grid and Climate Change - Make for a massive shift for solar, wind, and hydrothermal energy. I'm not against nuclear, per se, but there's too many variables floating around them that make for disaster. We're not living in a very stable position right now. Nuclear can wait. We need to stop spewing CO2 immediately.

EPA reform - EPA needs to be overhauled and given much more power

Intellectual Property Reform - Companies like Disney are screwing the Public Domain in order to hold onto their cash cows. We should drastically drop the number of years before IP is introduced into the public domain with an option for exceptions on the condition that profits derived from excluded IP are heavily taxed and put towards public services. Think a progressive income tax plan but IP based.

Anti-Trusts galore - Break up the banks (new glass-steagall), break up the media, break up the pharmaceutical industry if necessary.

We need some sort of economic Bill of Rights that covers privacy and how a person's data is being handled.

FDA overhaul - for all the complaints about Jill Stein's pandering, she's still right about the FDA.

Expire the Patriot Act and power down much of the NSA. Massive cut backs to the DOD. Shift priority from war to construction and humanitarian efforts.

Police Reform - Cameras for cops, we need a massive overhaul of our law enforcement situation. Still thinking about it.

Gun Control - background checks, waiting lists, classes. Not my greatest priority but I'm for reasonable gun control.

Reproduction Rights - Support women's right to choose with a heavy funding for preventative safe sex education.

Support Equality for all in wages, marriage, religion, et cetera.




I'm sure there's a lot more but this is what I was able to come up with over breakfast.

You forgot worker rights ;)

Right, thank you. That 'Right to work' stuff needs to be obliterated and we need to focus on rebuilding Unions.

Why? Unions are great for a generation that plans to spend their entire lives working for one company, but that just hasn't been the case for the last several. Seniority would be a big net loss for most of us.

Then we update Unions for the modern times as well. Workers need to be organized in some form. Basic Income would do wonders to give workers more power over their employers, but there will always be a faction looking to take that power away. Unions just happen to be the label I'm applying to whatever form that organization concerned with workers' rights may be.

That's the thing; unions were never concerned about the rights of anyone but their members. We need something a little more broad based than that. I don't think it'll look anything like a union.

Ideally, I'd imagine it would look like a government, but we've seen how that turned out.

partial list:
Minimum Wage
Overtime laws
Child Labor laws
OSHA: workplace safety
Family and Medical Leave
Davis-Bacon Act
Federal Mine Safety Act
Black Lung Benefits
Social Security

Ultimately, all the advances that unions lay claim to had to be ratified by the government. Unions may have given a push, way back in the mists of time, but real progress only comes through the government.

Yes, and I'm saying wouldn't it be nice if it was the government proactively fighting for those things instead of being strong-armed into having to relent to provide the things on that list HoZay generously provided. We were forced to collectively organize to regain power lost to the employers AND the government. Ideally, it would be the government standing between the people and the corporations with the government seeking out ways to enrich the masses, instead of the oligarchy we have with occasional scraps of bread being thrown to us.

Trouble is, in the US, "the people" includes quite a few who think your ideas are completely bogus. Those people may be wrong-headed, but they exist, and they can vote. You have the ability to collectively organize to push your ideas into the mainstream. You just have to do it better than the wrong-headed people have been doing it. It's a contest.

When a few of the "wrong-headed" people are winning by spending millions of dollars, it's not a contest anymore, it's an oligarchy.

I'm not raph, but I think you guys need some kind of proportional representation in everything but the president. Because two party states are not bringing the democracy.

If we called a Constitutional Convention right now, I hate to think what would emerge. Probably not Democracy.

We are a lot closer to that than you might think.

Corporate America Is Just 6 States Short of a Constitutional Convention If ALEC succeeds in rewriting the constitution to mandate a balanced budget, we’ll be stuck with supply-side economics for at least a generation.

If you open a convention you open it to anything. They do not outnumber progressives in population but they do in number of states...look out.

This was I think a more damaging law that CU.

Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976), is a landmark case in American campaign finance law. In a per curiam opinion, over two strong dissenting votes, a majority of the Supreme Court of the United States struck down on First Amendment grounds several provisions in the 1974 Amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act.

The one that said money is speech. But it is still law that can be changed.

The last link addresses that question pretty well. The short answer is no one. They exist more to pressure the party into reform.


What might be nice to happen is are the Republican Party form into a party that's not a total pile of shit, and actually be a challenger to the democrats- making the democrats have to become more responsive to voters.

The article suggesting that that is exactly how we got unions (as a beneficial sense) etc.