Unequivocally good news for US progressives (and their friends elsewhere, including up here in Canada): Bernie Sanders is running for president in 2020!
As the Rational National (who is Canadian too, BTW — and you really should subscribe to him if you haven’t already) outlines above, Bernie has laid out far more of his platform than any of his rivals, both in and outside of the Democratic party. This is not a cult of personality; this is a race based on the issues, and on serving the people. Something that’s been sorely lacking in US politics for a very long time. And something that Bernie’s been working at since his student days in the early 1960s, when he got arrested in Chicago during the hottest and ugliest days of the struggle for civil rights.
And if you think a democratic socialist who has always been consistently ahead of the other so-called progressives can’t win in the US, you couldn’t be more wrong. Remember, Bernie was the guy who could have beaten Donnie in 2016 (even Donnie’s own pollsters admit it!), and would have if the rigged machinery of the Democratic primaries hadn’t tripped him up. This time around, that same machinery is going to have a lot more monkeywrenches thrown in its gears, thanks to the fact that strong progressive upstarts who successfully primaried their more conservative predecessors have become the political stars to watch, rather than the “centrist” old guard. They are the ones now steering and shaping Democratic policy, and the energy they’ve unleashed will make it that much harder for the establishment to squelch progressive momentum.
But the biggest monkeywrench of all will still be the fact that Bernie is running on actual issues that appeal to the people, and not just on “hey, at least I’m not that other guy”.
And that’s a powerful thing.
