"Black voters' failure to support the candidate they most agree with in the Democratic primaries, is nothing new."
Younger Black people are looking into the abyss, and see nothing in their elders' flailing machinations that would prevent descent into powerlessness and utter precarity. There is no Black "strategy," and young Blacks know it. There is only fear -- plus the desire of Black elites to preserve and serve the Democratic Party structures that have provided their grasping little class with a degree of status and some limited authority to help manage their own people's oppression. Joe Biden offers nothing more, and the Black Misleadership Class dares not demand"anything.
As I discussed two weeks ago, the impending failure of Sanders' primary challenge will not cause Michael Bloomberg and his fellow oligarchs to cancel their plans to make the Democratic Party a much more hostile environment for even mildly radical politics. The rulers consider Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as infestations to be eradicated. This oligarch-enforced narrowing of the Democratic Party's parameters of political tolerance will reach down to the local level. If even a fraction of the tens of millions of Sanders supporters reject their leader's expected call to go all-in for a nominee and party that is determined to suppress them, a mighty and independent mass movement can be built in a relatively short space of time. Indeed, that was always the best outcome of the decade's resurgence in anti-capitalist, anti-racist politics. The Democrats were always a dead end, but folks had to get their asses kicked TWICE to learn that you can't turn a ruling class party against the ruling class.
"The rulers consider Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as infestations to be eradicated."
It may be that it is impossible to mount a successful national anti-corporate electoral campaign at this stage of monopoly capitalism, with mass communications under the firm control of ruling class propagandists. It is certainly clear that progress depends on mass action in the street that changes popular assumptions of what is possible.
Demands for community control of the police are gaining traction, notably in Chicago, where activists are figuring out how to build people's counter-structures to fight the Democratic Party, not join it. The Black Is Back Coalition holds another of its yearly Electoral Schools, April 10 through 12, in St. Louis, devising ways to build alternative Black voting opportunities in support of grassroots movement political activism. The cops keep killing; Democrat-supported U.S. sanctions starve and sicken millions; Democrats argue in Congress that Trump should keep U.S. soldiers on occupation duty in Africa and protecting jihadists in Syria; sea levels keep rising; good jobs pass into extinction; affordable housing no longer exists; higher education equals perpetual debt, and high school in Black cities is prison. There's plenty of work to do for disbanded Sandernistas and "woke" Black youth. Here's a slogan for you: "Power to the People."
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford at BlackAgendaReport.com
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