Bernie Sanders First to Sign Pledge to Rally Behind Democratic Nominee.

Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible, talks to Rachel Maddow about the group’s call for Democratic presidential candidates to sign a pledge promising unity and a primary that is a real contest of ideas ending with all participants coming together to support the eventual nominee.

Published April 26, 2019

This was all the Sanders campaign was ever meant to be: corralling 'Democratic Socialism' into supporting the Democratic party while making Hillary Clinton appear young/diverse/moderate/female in contrast to old(er) white(r) socialist(er) men.

Now it will be the same thing to support Warren.

I honestly do not know who will ultimately win the democratic nomination.
It's far too early for me to make a prediction.
Presently I don't think Warren will win the nomination, but anything is possible.

Based on your post, you appear to be predicting Elizabeth Warren to win the nomination.
Is that what you are predicting?

No, I am just looking at the play emerging in the same way as it did before with Hillary as the intended protagonist (who ultimately turned out to be the tragic hero).

History always repeats itself, but it changes as it does. Each new generation of a species exhibits new aspects within new/changing conditions.

What I am saying is that it has always struck me that Sanders was funded as a faux candidate to make Clinton appear moderate in contrast to overt socialism and to appear young and female in contrast to age and maleness.

In identity politics, candidates are portrayed in a way that they fill a certain identity niche vis-a-vis other candidates. It's like when you watch a movie and each character occupies a certain intersectional identity in order to drive the plot in terms of diversity interacting with diversity.

Sanders always makes a point of promising to defer to and support the nominee, so that makes him a good person to keep in the primaries until the nominee is ready to engage the final assemblage to unify the party. For this reason, I think Sanders was quite surprised when his supporters refused to support Clinton.

I don't think most voters really understand politics well enough to foresee how their interests will be used to lead them into supporting things that are ultimately against their interests. I think a lot of people are trying to explain how socialism will backfire, but Bernie keeps telling them it will be different from national socialism in the 1940s and the USSR and Venezuela under Maduro, etc.

People don't understand that the US already experiences a great deal of socialism and fascism in various forms, because they have been lulled into accepting them as status quo, and as long as they think about harsher examples like gulags in the USSR or militant WWII nazis barking orders and shipping people off to death camps, they can stomach some manipulation and corralling of people via mass media, economic/infrastructure policy, etc. They even get used to it and fear another Great Depression if they question what has been established.

So when you have someone like Sanders actively preaching 'democratic socialism' while other Democrats just talk in terms of loan forgiveness, health care reforms, women's right to choose, making the economy work for everyone, etc. it makes it easy for people to support socialism because they don't even see it as socialism. You can't question what you can't see, and maybe that is why Sanders is actually being really honest when he uses the word, 'socialism' and calls it democratic, because you can only subject it to critical discussion if it is visible to begin with.

I think I've heard at least 4-5 other candidates doing the same thing.

Now if only we could get all the Bernie Sanders supporters to make the same pledge.

Amen to that.

We are much stronger if we are united in the general election.

There are forces out there who wants to weaken us by dividing us.

Especially Russian trolls.

I will do my part by staying united.

I will give my full support and my vote to whoever wins the democratic nomination.

Several candidates and their surrogates attack Bernie. You don’t really think we’ll let that go unanswered.

Unfortunately I think some ill-minded individuals will continue to do whatever it takes to split the Democratic Party.

We know who they are, and they are meaningless to me.

Of course not. Republican operatives posing as democrats want to make the devide wider just as they did in the last election.

That's the spirit!

I guess I don't keep up with the attacks but which candidate and which surrogate has personally attacked Bernie Sanders? I can't imagine anything worse for a plan of a campaign. Bear in mind disagreeing with Bernie Sanders is not attacking.

Yes it is, I imagine others will do the same in the end even if they don't announce it. It is usually pretty common as everyone in the democrat president campaign is working towards the same goal. Ideally. Bernie Sanders tried to get his followers onboard last presidential election with little success. But I hope more follow Bernie's example and sign the pledge.

Exactly...

Not at all. When your support for one candidate gets corralled into supporting another candidate, that essentially usurps and transfers you political will to support something besides what you actually support.

It would be like ordering a veggie burger and then getting a chicken burger after you already paid for your meal.

What Dems keep telling voters is that they should accept the chicken burger as a veggie burger because if they don't, they'll get a steak.

How is that democracy?

Democracy is one voter making a decision to vote for the candidate that has most impressed them. Democracy is not one person telling everyone else to vote the way I tell you too because I am much more intelligent than you.

Karl Popper once opined that democracy has never been about electing the best possible rulers but about being able to get rid of the worse leaders.

Democracy is ultimately about consent of the governed, not because consent is manipulated through trickery by tactical strategists but because there is constructive public discussion among honest people.

Trying to count more votes in order to get a stronger majority to implement the will of the tactical strategists who make an art of puppeteering and spinning public opinion to their advantage is not democracy.

Democracy isn't even about leaders. It's about the governed deciding responsibly how to govern themselves. Elections, representatives, courts, and law-making processes are all just part of the grand project of getting people to govern themselves responsibly.