I fucking love that he chose to call them stalinists. In addition to it being true, it send a fuck you to the alt-right and the alt-left (who love to talk up stalin as of late)

stalin also evetuanlly purged his own loyalists after becoming paranoid.

Too many people here just blindly hating on Bernie and nitpicking how "Stalinism is technically incorrect". Where's the Trump hate? Bring some of that shit out. I'll start.

Fuck Trump, MAGA, and their entire cult of personality.

The Democrats should OFFICIALLY declare the Republican Party dead, and only refer to the MAGA Party from now on. Do an actual press conference, and make an official announcement - the Republican Party no longer exists, and has been replaced by the MAGA Party. That will make the traditional Republicans absolutely crazy, and the Dems should keep it up.

Never use the word Republican ever again, refer only to the MAGA, or MAGA Nazi Party. On talk shows, interviews, sound bites, fundraising texts, etc., use the term MAGA Party exclusively. When asked about it, simply say casually and matter-of-factly "The Republican Party is dead, they are the MAGA Party from now on," and leave it at that. Make the MAGAs cry.

The GOP has become a Stalinist Party

They haven't killed remotely enough fascists to earn this distinction.

I cannot imagine being enough of a sycophant to wear a hat that says "Trump was right about everything". Nobody's right about everything, and Trump is less right about things than most people because he's incredibly stupid.

Hah use their communist rhetoric back at them

Oh, libs. When will you learn that the right is immune to these sorts of accusations? Nobody is swayed by this "Trump is a communist" rhetoric, the only people who agree with it are people who already hate Trump and would clap along with any comparison or accusation as long as it's negative. Trump has "Only Nixon could go to China" powers.

It's the same sort of thing as the Dems trying to attack Trump as weak on immigration and pass themselves off as border hawks. Liberals can't help but to concede this whole moral framework to the right and argue purely along technical lines of efficiency.

Of course the liberals clap along because it owns the "tankies," and in their minds, if they just punch left enough they'll convince everyone that they're "one of the good ones" on the left, as if they're not going to be labelled Stalinists anyway, like they did with Obama.

It's bad enough that it's not true, but even worse is that nobody buys it (who wasn't already "vote blue no matter who").

This rhetoric adds nothing of subtance to the political understanding of either contemporary Trumpism or the history of Stalinism. Sanders only serves to obscure the meaning of this critically important understanding. Fascism and Stalinism are not the same.

To be clear, Stalinism took hold in the Soviet Union as a result of its historic backwardness and international isolation. The failure of the revolution to take root in Europe (largely a result of the historic betrayal of Social Democracy in the Second International) created conditions for the consolidation of a nationalist clique and a bureaucratic degeneration of the workers state that formed from the victory of the October Revolution. That is Stalinism. This political form was responsible for mass murder of the old cadres of the revolution who opposed it, systematic betrayal of the workers movement internationally, collaboration with imperialism allowing for the restabilization of capitalism during its repeated periods of crisis, and ultimately the destruction of Soviet Union union and the restoration of capitalism in 1991. A detailed and correct historical understanding of this history is critically important for the working class as it enters into a new period of revolutionary struggle.

Sanders use of the term as a political slur wrongly directed at Trump confuses the issue, and ultimately gives capitalism a pass for its own crisis. Trump is not simply an evil individual responsible for wrecking America. He is the product of the terminal crisis of capitalism at the center of world imperialism. He represents a financial oligarchy whose wealth and influence has grown increasingly disconnected from social development and the process of production. The historic content of Trumpism has a stronger relationship to the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler than the national labor bureaucraticism of Stalin.

This is no small error by Sanders. This is a deliberate falsification that is calculated to confuse political consciousness and hinder the development of revolutionary conclusions. It should be clear to anyone who takes more than a second to think about it that the comparison to Stalinism is shallow. The historic content of Trumpism is its own.