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What Part Of ‘Or Bust’ Did You Not Understand?

By Caitlin Johnstone
Published on: 21:42 PST, Nov 8, 2016

The Democratic party is now on probation. There’s a gun to its head, and the American people have their finger on the trigger. We have taken the power of our votes back by force, because they would not give it to us willingly. And now we have placed it in a position where it will change, or it will die.

The Democratic party betrayed the American people, who nearly abandoned it after the 1968 fiasco at the Democratic Convention, but remained when the DNC Charter was drastically revised to change the party nomination process. The Democratic party made the American people a promise of fair democratic nominations at that time, wherein the will of the public would determine who would represent them to run for the highest political office in the land, and because of that promise the party was permitted to survive. In 2016, they broke that promise, and now the public will decide if the Democratic party lives or dies as a consequence.

The Democratic party failed the American people, deceiving and manipulating them while actively sabotaging the only candidacy they truly loved at every turn and replacing our beloved Bernie with a woman who gave us every sign of wanting a war with Russia, without ever once providing any reassurance to the contrary. They sneered at us, lied to us, and demanded our votes anyway, costing themselves not only the White House but any hope of recapturing the Senate as well. And now it’s up to the donkey party to prove to the American people that is still deserves to exist.

Political parties die all the time all over the world when they stop representing the will of the people, and rightly so. The Democratic party is officially the single oldest political party on earth, but that doesn’t mean it can’t die, or that it shouldn’t. The American people need to be abundantly clear that this is exactly what will happen if the party doesn’t change.

A party that is on probation does not get to keep secrets from the American people, and it doesn’t get to employ individuals that lie to the American people. If the Democratic party doesn’t want to lose viability and be replaced as the major political party on the left, it will fire every single individual from the DNC who was shown by WikiLeaks to have violated the Impartiality Clause of their Charter. It will give us a new DNC chair who we know we can trust, like Tulsi Gabbard or Nina Turner. It will bring an unprecedented level of transparency to all levels of government that it is involved in, from local to federal, from House to Senate. It will take steps to ensure that there is a completely fair and evenhanded presidential primary, and it will share those steps with the American people.

If it does not do these things, it can be sure that it will lose in 2020 again, and it will continue losing federal and local battles as well. It is up to the Democrats to woo its progressive base, who will not come crawling back in desperation under any circumstances. They would be very, very stupid to try and call our bluff on this, and now they know it.

When we said “Bernie or bust,” it wasn’t a threat, it was a prophecy. A party cannot win elections without the support of the public, and it cannot have the support of a public that knows it’s being lied to, manipulated, betrayed, and robbed. We knew this was a change election, but they insisted on more of the same. With one in four children living in poverty and half of all Americans living paycheck to paycheck, there was no way the status quo would enjoy meaningful support from anyone other than those who benefit from it.

We offered them Bernie. They chose bust. They will choose more wisely next time.

[Featured Image by John Minchillo/AP Images]

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