Bernie has dropped out.  Soon he will be campaigning for Biden.  It’s easy to say Bernie should have been more aggressive with Biden, and while in a vacuum I don’t disagree, the reality is that if this is who Bernie was, no one would have ever heard of him.  He certainly would have never made it to the U.S. Senate.

Independent thinkers are generally filtered out before they can make it to positions of power:

Most people are not liars. They can’t tolerate too much cognitive dissidence. I don’t want to deny that there are outright liars, just brazen propagandists. You can find them in journalism and in the academic professions as well. But I don’t think that’s the norm. The norm is obedience, adoption of uncritical attitudes, taking the easy path of self-deception. I think there’s also a selective process in the academic professions and journalism. That is, people who are independent minded and cannot be trusted to be obedient don’t make it, by and large. [emphasis added] They’re often filtered out along the way.

Here, Chomsky is talking about journalists and academics, but the point generalizes.  You can be a mouthy right winger and rise to levels of great power.  But mouthy lefties are rendered invisible — if they’re not unemployed and sleeping under bridges.

Many on the left are presently confused and bordering on despair.  They don’t know where the left goes from here.  I have long argued the left should become a threatening good example by remaking itself into a pareconish left.  That would, however, require the almost-entirely-coordinator-class left to honestly assess its class privileges in meaningful ways — something that it has been loath to do for at least 30 years.

Einstein said, “We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”  I argue for parecon as winning strategy because not only is the current strategy of everyone on the left running their own successful small businesses and hoping that will magically translate into social change not working, frankly it’s the obvious next stage in thinking that needs to occur before anything will be won in the Western world.

The alternative is probably hard fascism.