Even Lebanon voted for Bernie Sanders. As I write, the small rural upmarket Grafton County, NH has Sanders beating Clinton by 32 per cent. The county is 94 per cent white, 3 per cent Asian, 1.8 per cent Hispanic and 0.9 per cent Black. It’s middle-class white America and they voted, on a large turnout, for the first serious left-wing candidate in the history of the Democratic Party.
What does it mean? Quite simply that the radical progressive sentiment that’s swept Greece, Spain, Scotland and the British Labour movement has now hit America. It’s the same basic pattern: protest movements against austerity and financial power in 2011 were heavily repressed. They did not peter out, but simply worked their way into mass consciousness.
The unequal global recovery did the rest. That and the sight of political elites revelling in the rising inequality that results from sustaining growth through printing money. Oh, and the abject failure of the West’s expeditionary warfare doctrines, which have produced — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya — four spectacularly failing states.
In Spain, so entrenched was the elite culture in politics, that the alternative had to come out of nowhere — in the form of Podemos and the En Comu community activist movements that now control three major cities and 20 per cent of the vote.
In Greece it came via an old political formation — Syriza — newly infused with protesters and disaffected social democrats. In Britain it’s flowing through many conduits: the tens of thousands of pro-independence left-wing Scots who flooded into the SNP after the failed referendum, the millions who made Ukip the third largest party by share of the vote in 2015; and the hundreds of thousands of people who joined Labour to support Corbyn.
- See more at: http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/bernie-sanders-radical-moment-begun/4368#sthash.PX0eUEIC.dpuf
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