It's time to have a talk about electoral politics.

Bernie Sanders was a fluke. A once in a generation lightning rod for economic angst and anxiety. He's done more to build the socialist left than any other person in the last 30 years. He has also failed to be elected president.

Bernie can't run for president again. The media will say, and a majority of people will believe, that he is too old. Personally I think he could manage at least a single term through his eighties, but that doesn't matter. He's not going to get the chance.

The question the electoral left needs to ask itself is, how are you going to respond to this?

Are you going to go ride or die and follow the Bernie campaign into the dustbin?

Are you going to declare war on the corporate Democrats and try to fight this fight without a leader?

Are you going to give up and allow yourself to be defanged and absorbed by the neoliberals?

Or are you going to step back, recalibrate, and adopt a new strategy?

There is something that needs to be understood:

Electoral politics does not build power.

Electoral politics consolidates and expresses power that already exists.

The Democratic party has power because the people that back them are powerful -- banks, tech companies, weapons manufacturers, the nonprofit-industrial complex, union leadership, liberal media, celebrities. They have financial capital, social capital, and human capital.

Many people who are angry about Bernie's loss are talking about "destroying" the Democratic party. You can't destroy the Democratic party without destroying their backers, and bad news bub:

The left as it stands is nowhere near capable of destroying even one of those backers.

The radical left died in the 1990s; the communists lost credibility with the fall of the USSR, the anarchists were crushed in Seattle in 1999, the Trotskyists turned into neocons and liberals, the IWW fell to its lowest membership in history. The left was utterly defeated.

The left was resurrected by the 2007 crash; Occupy; and the Bernie Sanders campaign. Everything since has risen in the wake of those events.

The movement we are riding now is connected to the past by only a thread; a handful of elders, a handful of hollowed-out institutions.

We have no power base. We have a handful of electoral successes, subjugated to the power of the Democratic party. We have a handful of unprincipled media figures. We have a large number of disaffected social media addicts. And we have a solid critique of capitalism.

Our goal now should not be to spend our meager resources on winning electoral seats that will yield no dividends; nor should we waste them on waging a pointless campaign of self destruction against liberal enemies real and perceived. Nor should it be wasted sadposting on twitter.

Our goal should be to turn our numbers toward organizing new labor unions and tenants unions; toward breaking the cultural hegemony of liberal and conservative institutions by creating leftist competitors (see SRA vs NRA); toward learning how to promote our ideals successfully.

We need to take all the disorganized people and energy on the left and organize them into groups which are capable of winning.

Winning fights against bosses. Winning fights against landlords. Winning arguments against liberals. Winning fights against the police.

And after we have institutions and organizations with financial capital, social capital, and organized people -- only then we will have the power base necessary to make electoral politics worthwhile, because our elected politicians will be backed by real political power.

@ this at people who need to see it