It gives me no pleasure at all to watch so many friends be sad and angry over the end of the Sanders campaign. In their dissatisfaction over Biden, there's not much daylight between them and me. Whatever is true or false about Biden, he and the Clintons both embody a generation of Democrats who put their own prosperity first and let the next generation pick up the tab, thereby making an insurrection like the Sanders movement thoroughly inevitable. Their generation now has so little time left that I honestly think it conceivable that they'll mostly do the right thing from now on, but it took so unconscionably long for them to get there, and for them to see unconscionably much to realize it was necessary.
At this point, the country has so thoroughly lost its way from the FDR/Truman/Johnson liberalism that brought good fortune that I don't have much hope to offer people because I think most offers of hope would be false hope, and I find offering false hope to be cruel. No doubt, the liberalism of the 20th century needs to be updated for the 21st, but there was no major candidate who sufficiently did it, not even Elizabeth Warren. For me, it was just another indication that the American chapter of the world story is in its final third, and there's clearly no convincing anyone of the necessary two-fold premise: that things really are as fragile as they seem, but that there is also a way through the mess. The end result is that even now, nobody has learned from any of this, and we're all sitting in our houses with the end results.
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