Even though I'm not supportive of either Sanders, why the fuck didn't he get the black vote. For fuck's sake, Shillary Clinton and her husband, Bill Clinton, are one of the destructive reasons why the Prison Industrial Complex and War on Drugs are/were prominent in contemporary society. These things fucked up impoverished African-American citizens to the Nth degree.
Oy vey.
I feel like the Sanders campaign was a little deaf to the black vote. Assuming that demographic to be worried mostly about prison stats and and drugs is a fairly hamfisted way to go about it. Generally speaking, the black vote has been reliably democratic since Johnson signed the Civil Rights bill (though they started switching as far back as FDR), but being reliably democratic doesn't mean liberal. Plus the Clintons are really good at the sort of local democratic politics ground game that so define the black vote.
This isn't to say that the Sanders campaign should be discounted. That a self-proclaimed socialist managed to take on the Clinton political machine and keep himself in the running is something that people should pay attention to going forward. I've been a self-proclaimed socialist for a decent amount of time now, and if you asked me a year ago if I thought someone of the same political persuasion had a chance in an American election, I would have laughed you back into your time machine. Even in loosing Sanders' success has been absolutely a delight to me. Now the question is if Sanders socialism is a serious political movement or just happenstance, and whether he represents a socializing of American progressives or just a lucky alignment with progressives who see Clinton as a closet conservative. I suspect millennial sympathies are slipping to the left since the economy is hostile and even conservatives seem to doubt it's ability to recover, but fuck if I know. We'll figure it out going forward I suppose.
Wilted Rose
