WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 10th April, 2020) The Democratic party establishment and major financial backers joined forces behind former Vice President Joe Biden to block progressive Senator Bernie Sanders' bid for the party's presidential nomination, destroying all hope for peaceful social and economic reform in the United States, analysts told Sputnik.
On Wednesday, Sanders formally ended his second candidacy for president of the United States. But his campaign in reality had been dead in the water since he lost ten out of 14 state Primary elections and caucuses on March 3 - the so-called "Super Tuesday," the analysts recalled.
CORPORATE INTERESTS AGAINST THE PROGRESSIVE AGENDA
Sanders, a lifelong Independent and senator representing the state of Vermont, enjoyed strong early momentum, winning the early Iowa caucuses in the Midwest, the New Hampshire primary in the Northeast and the Nevada caucuses in the southwest.
But he was always an outsider, a socialist supported by progressives seeking socio-economic changes based on a heavily left-leaning policy agenda, was fiercely opposed by the insiders who ran the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the major corporate interests behind them, University of Houston Professor of African-American History Professor Gerald Horne said.
"The big Democratic financial donors were hostile to him," Horne said.
Sanders' dreams of finally winning the White House went up in smoke in only one week in February, Horne recalled.
The DNC and their biggest donors "exerted their influence in between Sanders' victory in the Nevada caucuses on February 22 and his defeat in the South Carolina primary on February 29," he said.
After February 22, a flood of money started pouring into Biden's campaign, which had previously appeared to be on its last legs after his humiliating defeats in the Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary and the Nevada caucuses, Horne pointed out.
Senator Amy Klobuchar withdrew her candidacy on March 2 and immediately pledged to support Biden. So did former New York City Mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg when he pulled out on March 4 and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg after he ended his candidacy on March 1.
All this left Biden free to sweep the South, where he always enjoyed far more African-American support among registered Democrats than Sanders.
"Sanders was up against the big battalions," Horne said.
Sanders' defeat also showed socialism would never be allowed to work even in the Democratic Party, which is also corporate, Horne pointed out.
"It is ironic that Bernie Sanders pulled out of the presidential race at a moment when his ideas, particularly his campaign for universal health care, were more timely than ever because of the coronavirus pandemic," Horne said.
LONG-TERMS IMPLICATIONS TO THE US POLITICAL SYSTEM
Sanders' defeat and elimination from the race has long-term implications far beyond the Democrats' struggling and increasingly futile struggle to deny incumbent Republican President Donald Trump a second term, historian and analyst Dan Lazare said.
It showed that any efforts to revive and save the crumbing US economic and social orders by peaceful means are impossible, Lazare warned.
"Bernie Sanders' withdrawal shows that the chances of fundamental reform in this country are essentially zero," he said.
The United States remained politically, economically and socially frozen in structural terms, Lazare warned.
"Absolutely nothing will happen until the entire system collapses in a heap. That is the lesson of France in 1789, Russia in 1917, and China in 1949. The longer change is put off, the more sweeping and radical it will be when it finally arrives," he said.
Sanders' withdrawal also showed that the American political left was now at a complete dead end, Lazare advised.
"The Democratic Party is impossible as an instrument of socialization. It is dominated by big-money interests [and] it is ideologically reactionary through and through," he said.
The Democrats were not really a coherent political party any more at all, Lazare continued.
"What it is, rather, is a mutual assistance society for corrupt and self-serving politicians who don't have an idea in their sawdust-filled heads," he said.
Horne and Lazare also agreed that Biden was proving to be a very weak candidate who was likely to lose his nationally televised direct debates with Trump in the fall disastrously.
