But hope still lies in the imagined thing. Liberals have dared to believe in the seemingly impossiblea socialist presiding over the most capitalist nation to ever exist. If the liberal imagination is so grand as to assert this new American reality, why when confronting racism, presumably a mere adjunct of class, should it suddenly come up shaky? Is shy incrementalism really the lesson of this fortuitous outburst of Vermont radicalism? Or is it that constraining the political imagination, too, constrains the possible? If we can be inspired to directly address class in such radical ways, why should we allow our imaginative powers end there?
These and other questions were recently put to Sanders. His answer was underwhelming.
It does not have to be this way. One could imagine a candidate asserting the worth of reparations, the worth of John Conyers HR-40, while also correctly noting the present lack of working coalition. What should be unimaginable is defaulting to the standard of Clintonism, of Yes, but shes against it, too.A left radicalism that fails to debate its own standards, that counsels misdirection, that preaches avoidance, is really just a radicalism of convenience.
