Portside

A convention fight this summer in Philadelphia offers Sanders the opportunity to make significant reforms to the Democratic Party. He should continue fighting to mobilize every last voter and delegate behind his agenda of guaranteed universal rights to healthcare, education, and dignified conditions - and continue impressing the necessity for ongoing mass agitation (what he calls the "political revolution") to accomplish the same.

"He's not moving a party to the left. He's moving a generation to the left," Della Volpe said of the senator from Vermont. "Whether or not he's winning or losing, it's really that he's impacting the way in which a generation - the largest generation in the history of America - thinks about politics."

"It is an outrage that the secretary of state in Ohio is going out of his way to keep young people — significantly African-American young people, Latino young people — from participating." Sanders said.

Republicans may have a lock on Congress and the nation's statehouses - and could well win the presidency - but the liberal era ushered in by Barack Obama is only just beginning. The need to win the votes of Millennials and minorities, who lean left not just on cultural issues but on economic ones, will shape how whoever wins in the general election, and governs once in office.

Change comes precisely when you do change hearts -- and once that change has come, then the laws and the "allocation of resources," and the "way systems operate" follow pretty easily. Large majorities of Americans are, like Sanders, "democratic socialists." Sanders favors private ownership and markets, but with rules that protect little people from abuses and uncertainties. Even substantial majorities of Republicans support much of the Sanders economic plan.

The Bernie generation is our political future, joining with groups demanding living wages or $15/hr, Black Lives Matter, the Dreamers, and 350.org. With their roots in the Occupy movement, they are viscerally mad at the rigged economy based on McJobs and the monopoly power of the plutocrats.This is such an important election, the riskiest of my lifetime. If we win, then we can resume our quarrels and patient work for peace and justice.

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