Beginning of a Movement?

Bernie Sanders remains unlikely to win the Democratic nomination, but Thomas Piketty sees something very positive in Sanders' support among younger voters.

Sanders’ success today shows that much of America is tired of rising inequality . . . and intends to revive both a progressive agenda and the American tradition of egalitarianism.

[A]nother Sanders – possibly younger and less white – could one day soon win the US presidential elections and change the face of the country. In many respects, we are witnessing the end of the politico-ideological cycle opened by the victory of Ronald Reagan at the 1980 elections.

Update (April 22):  Tony Karon sees the scale of Sanders' support as "evidence of wide and deep enthusiasm for his ideas".

Sanders’ campaign looks more like an extension of the extra-electoral politics of phenomena like the Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Fight for $15 and Dreamer movements, small-d democratic citizen activism bypassing political institutions beholden to narrow, moneyed interests. Those movements are based outside the Democratic party – as was Sanders himself before he decided to seek its nomination – but through grassroots activism they have forced their issues on to the party’s agenda. Sanders has taken that same disruptive spirit into a national campaign to restore the Democrats’ New Deal values, and reverse their capitulation to the Republican fiscal agenda that began with the presidency of Bill Clinton.

Update (April 24):  Andrew O'Hehir expands on what the Sanders campaign has accomplished.

Bernie Sanders is not going to be president. But in defeat he has accomplished something extraordinary, probably something more important than anything he could have achieved in four or eight frustrating years in the White House. For the first time since the end of the Cold War — and perhaps since the beginning of the Cold War — large numbers of Americans have begun to ask questions about capitalism. Questions about whether it works, and how, and for whose benefit. Questions about whether capitalism is really the indispensable companion of democracy, as we have confidently been told for the last century or so, and about how those two things interact in the real world.

Update (May 1):  Patrick Smith takes a more critical view of the Sanders campaign noting

the Democrats’ transformation from New Dealers into what we see before us: a party of professionals, technocratic elites and NPR-addicted suburban liberals who have no habit of thinking for themselves and whose interest in labor or any kind of properly left agenda is more or less zero.

Smith sees enormous political obstacles.

Politics in America has been turned into spectacle over the past four decades—a ritual reenactment serving to legitimize power as it is now distributed. There is very little more to it. This is a recognition of considerable magnitude. Given our near to total immersion in the illusions presented by the spectacular, it is difficult to hold on to this recognition, but we must. Then we must ask what responsibilities this reality places upon us.

And the Democratic Party is not the route for overcoming those obstacles.

It has long been understood that an important aspect of the Sanders campaign, win or lose, is his brave willingness to change the very language of American politics and shift the conversation leftward. ... [H]ow much greater would the Sanders legacy have been had he left behind a third-party apparatus with a formidable ability to raise funds outside the patronage system and speak directly about the dysfunction endemic in our political process? ... If Bernie Sanders concluded that even his many millions of lively constituents are not ready to support a third party that stands for their interests, he is right. Had he better understood what time it is, he would have seen that his task was to lay the first stone and think of the future. This is Sanders’ error, but it is not his problem. That is ours.

Although Sanders refused to bow down to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Smith maintains that he had too little to say on U.S. foreign policy. New ideas are out there, but no politicians are bringing them into the conversation.

And we must face, post-Sanders, our bigger problem—the one that makes Bernie Sanders’ fate ours, too: We can see more clearly now what an immense amount needs to get done if America is to fix itself, but we are not ready, in 2016, to get much of it done. We have not equipped ourselves. Too much of the hard work has too long been neglected, and as the election in November will confirm, this leaves us spectators at the spectacle. This is Bernie Sanders’ bitterest lesson—even if he had no intention of teaching it.

Update (June 13):  Roger Bybee claims that democratic socialism is going mainstream within the Democratic Party.

[F]our long decades of economic decline for the majority, a mounting environmental crisis, and imperial misadventures have opened the door for Sanders’ openly democratic socialist candidacy. The appeal of living-wage jobs, tuition-free college, universal health care, and forceful environmental measures are only likely to grow more popular as economic conditions decline.

Update (July 4):  Anis Shivani says socialism is a natural fit for the millennial generation.

[M]illennials are done with blind faith in the market as the solution to all human problems. They question whether “economic growth” should even be the ultimate pursuit. Ironically, again, it is the extreme form capitalism has taken under neoliberalism that has put millennials under such pressure that they have started asking these questions seriously: Why not work fewer hours? Why not disengage from consumer capitalism? Why trust in capitalist goods to buy happiness? Why not discover the virtues of community, solidarity, and togetherness? It is inchoate still, but this sea change in the way a whole generation defines happiness is what is going to determine the future of American politics.

Update (July 10):  John Mackey says the Cold War really ended when "socialism" is no longer considered an insult.

European-style democratic socialism offers more realistic solutions to many of our national problems than Clintonian neoliberalism. As Sanders was perfectly willing to point out in the campaign, the countries that embrace his kind of socialism tend to be the most prosperous, happiest, most equitable, safest, healthiest places on earth. The neoliberal, globalist vision embraced by many mainstream Democrats and Republicans, both Clintons included, is mostly fantasy. Sanders voters were ready to embrace democratic socialism not because they’re wild-eyed idealists, but because it works.

Democratic primary voters got a chance to seriously consider some ideas put forth by a democratic socialist, and liked them. ... [I]t seems that Americans can now finally discuss and debate socialism and sometimes even cast a meaningful vote for a socialist in a major election. The Cold War is finally over. And it’s about time.