Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said the reelection of former President Trump would be the “end of democracy” in an interview released Saturday by The Guardian.
“It will be the end of democracy, functional democracy,” Sanders said in the interview.
The Vermont senator also said in the interview that he thinks that another round of Trump as the president will be a lot more extreme than the first.
“He’s made that clear,” Sanders said. “There’s a lot of personal bitterness, he’s a bitter man, having gone through four indictments, humiliated, he’s going to take it out on his enemies. We’ve got to explain to the American people what that means to them — what the collapse of American democracy will mean to all of us.”
Sanders’s words echo those President Biden made in a recent campaign speech during which he said that Trump’s return to the presidency would risk American democracy. The president highlighted the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol in an attempt to cement a point about Trump and other Republicans espousing a kind of extremism that was seen by the world on that day.
That’s certainly a convenient way to dismiss people who don’t think Democrats should be supporting genocide.
It’s been great watching centrist Democrats cave and capitulate endlessly over the course of decades, only to find out that the single issue they will actually hold firm on is supporting the genocide they’ve always wanted.
Oh, I’m firmly against genocide. I’m also against the death penalty. I lean a lot more socialist and am what most on the right would consider an “extreme leftist” (even though my views are pretty much center left when you consider global politics).
I think that relations with Israel are very complex, and Biden is fucking them up. I don’t support what his administration is doing in thar regard.
But I also lived through the last Trump presidency, and I know what is at stake. Most of the astroturfing we’ve seen aimed at the left for the last decade, at least, has been an attempt to suppress the Democratic vote by latching onto a single issue to point to and say, “see! The Democrats are just as bad!”
When people don’t show up for the presidential, down ballot votes suffer, too.
And in the end, will you want to vote for the guy who supports Israel and wants to destroy democracy, or the guy who supports Israel and wants to retain democracy? Because those are the likely choices.
So keep the pressure on. Call your representatives and let them know of your disapproval. But please stop with this, “the Democrats are evil because of this one thing,” bullshit. Politics are complicated, and you should be able to recognize and weigh more than one issue at a time.
If centrist Democrats don’t want me judging them based on their support for genocide, they just have to stop supporting genocide.
I’m voting for Biden. This is now the fifth time in this thread I’ve had to make that explicit because someone assumed otherwise based exclusively on my assertion that he should stop supporting genocide.