I fixed the markup first, so I could read the piece easily. I don't think you looked at the piece on the web after you submitted it, or you'd have seen the effect of using titling markdown on every paragraph. You might want to use the "Raw" button to look at the markdown of the piece.

You Say You Want a Revolution? Democratic Socialism and Political Presence

-- By JohnsonD - 19 Feb 2016

Bernie Sanders uses the word revolution to define a political awakening where millions of Americans will rise up against their corporate masters and bring about a new era of (democratic) socialist politics. For many on the American political left, his proposition sounds enticing, especially in the face of slow social progress and stagnant wage growth. People who have historically held a privileged place in society have begun to feel the the same type of social and economic pain usually reserved for people at the margins of society. At the same time, increased polarization makes it exceedingly difficult for political compromise to take place.

In the face of this new social reality, members of both political parties have begun to turn to extremist ideologies. Sanders taps into this phenomenon on the left by co-opting the language of revolution. He sells middle America a homogenized version of socialism wrapped in the language of the revolutionary. We should examine this rhetoric closely because as Malcom X succinctly stated: “you never had a revolution without bloodshed.” The fear of true revolutionary action is evidenced in many ways, the most striking being Sanders’ strict adherence to economic issues at the expense of what he sees as more divisive racial and gender issues. A true revolution would require the type of massive and rapid social change that would be unpalatable to the average Sanders supporter.

It's not true that such efforts cannot be made at the ballot box alone. Taking a quote from Malcolm X out of context and applying it elsewhere isn't an argument. Britain adopted social democracy at the ballot box in 1946, for example, beginning an alternation in power between socialist and non-socialist parties that is also common elsewhere in Europe, often (because of proportional voting systems) in coalitions across socialist/non-socialist lines. The government which has just succeeded a Conservative government in power in Canada is a social democratic party, led by the son of the most successful socialist politician in Canadian history.

In the US, on the other hand, the bilateral hegemony of the two cross-regional parties agreed on common non-socialist ideology—which was secured by the prohibition in the Taft-Hartley Act prohibiting the existence of a labor party or labor newspapers in the US—has prohibited any meaningful form of post-war socialist electoral effort. Senator Sanders is claiming that the reservoir of votes for social democracy (which are the votes of the poor who ordinarily do not vote) can be tapped to change government policy in the US decisively. There's no doubt that he's right. If the poor turned out to vote in the US in the proportion that they do in the world's largest democracy, in India, for example, social democracy would indeed come to the US overnight. Senator Sanders is also claiming that is going to happen in response to his running for President. There's no doubt he's wrong about that. But he's litigating a case which is crucial to the future of his society—at a time in his life when he will not have a better future chance to do what he has been preparing all his life to do—and he's doing a terrific job of it.

Are we all socialists now?

It seems as though the main gripe of disaffected millennials is not that the system is irrevocably broken, but rather it’s the disappointment of not having met the expectation of achieving the version of the American Dream they were promised.

Maybe. But what was the promised "dream"? From the beginning of European mass migration here, the society that coalesced into the United States has been characterized by the presence of an opportunity for personal re-invention, growth and self-improvement that was unavailable in the societies migrants left behind. That opportunity for personal self-realization and improvement was attributable not only to the freedoms of economic and civil life guaranteed by a republican form of government, but also because this burgeoning society took possession of immense physical resources—previously possessed instead by indigenous populations the Europeans dispersed and sometimes genocidally mistreated—and conscripted the labor and very lives of millions of enslaved persons. The combination of benign and malign subsidies to the freedom for self-development of some of the population produced a unique condition in human history. By 1950, that society had become the most powerful economic and military aggregation in world history.

The rising generation, itself demographically very large because of a postwar birth boom, enormously benefited from a few key socialist institutions. Socialized old-age pensions removed the threat of poverty among the old for the first time, allowing them freedom from the need to provide subsistence to their aging parents. Socialized medicine for everyone above 65 also freed them from the costs of their parents' health care. The GI Bill socialized the financing of higher education for tens of millions of people, men and women, who fought our wars. Their educational attainments helped to build the strongest higher educational system in world history, and immensely increased the human capital and productivity of their society. A mortgage market subsidized by federal guarantee allowed them to become home owners at a previously unimaginable level. Because working-class people otherwise must rent in a market in which landlords raise rents as wages rise, home ownership allowed this generation to avoid the landlord-trap, so producitivity gains were real wage gains to them. Strong labor law allowed collective organization and bargaining, which ensured that the immense gains in value to postwar enterprise were shared with workers.

Now, the next generation fears it cannot count on those socialist institutions to help them up, and they are right. A generation of right-wing government has savaged the institutions that remain. We have expanded virtually nowhere, and where we have—in the Affordable Care Act, for example—the results are maintainable only contingently, subject to the continued hostility of a system of government that depends less in the making of public policy on the votes of the poor than on the contributions of the rich.

What is the "American Dream" they were promised? The sunshine of postwar American Social Democracy under another name ("the New Deal, the Great Society"), or the older version, in which an equal chance in the race of life was promised to those for whom equality was impossible to imagine at home (as well as being denied outright to those for whom equality was supposedly not intended)? There was always a continuity between the conservative non-socialist outlooks of the present and the past, even in the business-dominated Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln was indeed a man who looked to the "equal chance in the struggle of the poor man to improve himself" as the essence of the American promise; he was willing to die himself in the end, as he asked others for their last full measure of devotion, to make that equal chance come true for those enslaved, as well as those already free. It was the Democratic Party, under Franklin Roosevelt, that turned to socialist policies under non-socialist names to save American society from the Great Depression. What your "millennials" have a gripe about, apparently, is that they are not being delivered the degree of socialism that was accorded to their parents, and are being forced back on the "American Dream" of all earlier generations, which is far more strenuous and brutal. In that case, Senator Sanders is making an entirely rational and appropriate case to them, about the future of the Democratic Party, is he not?

As long as people who looked like them had the promise of affordable college, raising a family in a gated suburb, and making a respectable amount of money at some soul-crushing 9-5, then everything was fine, regardless of what was actually occurring around them. It was only when these issues started to cause discomfort and disruption to their middle class existence that it became a real threat to them. The desire for revolution stems not from the anger that arises when one realizes the inequalities in the system, but the anger that arises from feeling excluded from the system. They see the world changing around them, and they don’t know what to do, so instead of reacting creatively they cling to an ideology that claims that it has all of the answers.

Unfortunately, the solution Sanders proposes is not based in reality. What the Sanders supporter fails to understand It’s not just the politicians and special interests who are opposed to (democratic) socialist ideas, Half of the country is opposed to much of the democratic socialist agenda, and many conservatives and liberals are opposed for reasons both based in ideology and practicality.

Maybe.But it is quite clear at the moment that the Republican Party has been claiming largely about the conservatism of its voters, and is discovering that its electorate does not believe what the Party's classe dirigente proclaims. Whether the Democratic Party's electorate believes what the "New Democracy" wing of its ruling class, led the Clintons, proclaims is equally uncertain now, for many of the same reasons. But the Republican Party is being pulled apart by its electorate's response to the demographic changes in the skin colors, languages, and cultural origins of new Americans. If the Democratic Party can adjust its creeds and habits to those new Americans, on the other hand, it stands to strengthen itself substantially, and probably—this is Senator Sanders' point—to move more directly to becoming a social democratic party.

It may be easy to brush these people off as shills under the influence of special interests, but that sort of thinking solves nothing. The assumption of bad faith not just for those on the right, but for fellow Democrats is troubling. How exactly are they supposed to win a senate seat in a Republican state with their rigid ideological tests? What candidates will they recruit that will have widespread appeal in Republican states? They don’t seem to have a plan behind their slogan.

In no densely-populated state in the US are non-voting poor people unable to change the partisan composition of government if they showed up at a turnout level proportional to that of the rich, and voted as those among them who vote vote now. In such an electorate, Idaho and Utah would be "Republican states."

It is what it does

Ideas such as universal healthcare and free (or at least debt free) college tuition are welcome in a political conversation that has too often skewed to the right. But in order to effect the system the self-proclaimed democratic-socialists must recognize their place within it. The mental gymnastics needed to refer to a man who spent thirty years in politics as anti-establishment, especially one going up against a woman running to be the first female President must be done away with.

The work it takes to make actual change happen must begin. The Senate and Supreme Court might all be decided by the next election. An electoral loss could mean, the loss of voting rights and healthcare for our most vulnerable. The stakes are real and the Sanders supporter must learn to be present if they are to have a say.

It's a good start. The next draft should consider, in addition to your own ideas, some of other peoples'.