The reform/revolution split between socialists and communists means that I do not believe that Bernie Sanders' platform, even if implemented in its entirety, would fix anything in the long term. It would be unpicked, piece by piece, by greedy liberals over the next few generations as they progressively decided it was safe to cancel the guillotine insurance. It would likely be paid for in the long term, after an initial tokenistic plundering of Wall Street, by plundering the Third World. As an international socialist, I cannot countenance aiding and abetting such imperialism. Yet I joined the Democratic Party in 2016 long enough to support him in the caucuses, and rhetorically supported him in 2020 because he folded like a map before my state even voted.
I supported Bernie not because his social democratic reforms will work; I've explained in detail why they won't. It isn't even because he's detoxifying the concept of "socialism" for millennials, although that's an awesome knock-on effect. One of the many things that Bernie made possible was the sight of Canadian students ironically standing at attention for the Soviet anthem (the video is now private, but it's at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBAbI3lSPJc), which brought an unironic tear to my eye. More importantly, that video has prompted a wave of schoolkids playing the Soviet anthem in school whenever possible, and some of it still makes its way to Youtube. The kids truly are all right.
No, the reason I supported Bernie, and got my friends to do the same, was because Donald Trump was conflating Bernie, a lukewarm social democrat, with an outright Marxist-Leninist to his base. Had Bernie grabbed the Democratic nomination, he could have won the election against such a weak candidate, as Biden went on to prove. And the first socialist to win the Presidency, whoever they are, will probably be remembered as the greatest President since Abraham Lincoln, and for the same reason: delivering victory to the United States in a civil war against its most reactionary elements.
Because we live in a bourgeois democracy, we cannot directly establish socialism via the ballot, because the bougies retain far too much control over it. But the political system has too much legitimacy with the conservative working class to establish socialism by the bullet either. The Communist Party of the United States of America, not to mention Bernie, has tried and failed at the first method, and the Weather Underground has tried and failed at the second. The only way to change the workers' relationship to the means of production in such a system is to vote in someone moderate enough to win election, but radical enough to scare the reactionaries into literal rebellion as a last-ditch resort. Once we put our political opponents in the position of rebelling against the flag and constitution, we can rally the conservatives behind us in a righteous march to the sea, and clothe a socialist revolution in Old Glory.
There will be a lot of parallels between Abraham Lincoln and the first socialist President. Abolitionists and socialists are not the same thing, but both sought to change the relationship of at least part of the working class to the means of production. Lincoln was among the most moderate of the abolitionists; he only wanted to restrict the extension of slavery from new states yet to be formed from the territories. Our first socialist President won't win an election campaign by promising to end capitalism. Yet Lincoln still called himself an abolitionist, the first socialist President will still be a socialist, and like Lincoln their political positions will be blown way out of proportion by the reactionaries.
Lincoln did not want to emancipate the slaves, but he was forced to as a wartime measure. Once emancipated, he wanted to send them to Africa; he ended up arming them and putting them in the Army as another wartime measure. Lincoln did not want to destroy the Southern plantation economy that had produced so many Whigs before the rise of the Republican Party, but he let Sherman march to the sea anyway... as a wartime measure.
The first socialist President will likely not want to end capitalism at first because they'll be worried about winning the war and keeping their electoral coalition united, but once the corporations that bankrolled Hillary back the new Confederacy (and they totally will, look at the hostility they already had towards Bernie before he dropped out), seizing their assets behind Union lines will be the most obvious of wartime measures they could take. They might not have been inclined to end American imperialism abroad overnight, but their need for international allies and the lack of corporations to placate will goad them into it as a wartime measure. They might be worried about the effects of the war on civil liberties, but they'll be able and eventually willing to ship "enemy combatants" to Gitmo... as a wartime measure.
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