The radical left has Bernie Sanders all wrong

They mean the lefties who don't think Sanders is left enough.

http://www.salon.com/2016/01/31/the_radical_left_has_bernie_sanders_all_wrong/

When talking about the right wing, radicals like to stress how the likes of Donald Trump give the green light to street violence against black people, Mexicans and Muslims. Yet, they don’t ask how left politicians may give the green light to social movements they are sympathetic to. For instance, Bernie supported DREAMers on hunger strike. Bernie became critical of Rahm Emmanuel echoing Black Lives Matter demands. Bernie lent public support to CUNY workers’ rights before they voted to strike. Sanders’ political revolution would require mass mobilization of exactly these constituencies: African-American, Latinos and workers. Sanders calls for street mobilization as part of the political revolution.

Radicals argue that the masses get co-opted by elections. This just doesn’t line up with lived experience. They point to the enthusiasm around Obama’s 2008 victory as proof that politicians simply manipulate voters. That may be true, but it is untenable to say that social movements were co-opted by Obama. Since Obama’s election this country has witnessed a steep rise in social movements. Disappointment after Obama raised expectations may have partly fueled such a movement to the streets. Occupy Wall Street was unprecedented. The growth of Black Lives Matter and the DREAMers movement developed principally in the years since Obama came to office. The idea of electoral co-option sounds theoretically plausible, but it is simply a theory without standing in our reality. One socialist website even makes it seem that Bernie will undermine the revolutionary working class’s aspirations for syndicalist control of the economy. This kind of thinking is the result of a mind-body split. These radicals are clearly not experiencing the embodied world around them. Instead they seem to be using deductive logic based on theory, not sound history. It is worth noting that 1936 and 1946, in the midst of the New Deal—which much of Bernie’s platform alludes to—had some of the largest mobilizations of strikes in American history. People were not co-opted by the New Deal; they were emboldened by it.