United States is in the middle of its first existential crisis since the Civil War. US response to COVID-19 has become one of the worst in the world because of the mistakes we made in 2016. We can’t afford to keep making them, not when failure to restore democracy means that US, EU, and the rest of the world all fall to fascism, religious totalitarianism, and economics of slavery and serfdom. Where on this bottomless spectrum of disaster is your acceptable cost of “burn it down because the candidate I wanted didn’t win the primary?”

In short, we can’t. Voting for policies rather than for politicians is called direct democracy, and there are currently no functioning direct democracies in the world. They are all, including the political system of the United States of America, representative.

I have many problems with the civil war Justice Democrats are waging against the Democratic Party: results; motives; manipulative rhetorics (double standards, impossible standards and victim blaming); strategy; priorities.

I’ve been trying very hard to keep my mouth shut about Sanders since Sunday, but his statements about Venezuela are the last straw. I must rip that band-aid off.