To compare Sanders to the Russian revolution is really a stretch. As Noam Chomsky says, he's not really even a socialist (in the classic sense) but a New Dealer. In other words, a gradualist. The center has moved before. It seems obvious to me that it is moving again. I see no reason to deem it "realistc" to insist that the center must stay where it has been in the Reagan/Bush/Clinton era. The facts I face are demographic and an indubitable shift to the left. This is the "political revoluion" of which S speaks. That's rhetoric. It is very far from the Ruaaian revolution.
Nor am I so worried about a "Seven Days in May" coup d'etat or Roman civil war. Like Stalin, I think we have succeeded in minimizing the danger of what he called "Bonapartism" by dividing the military and subverting the enormous bureaucracy by buying off the leadership with revolving doors.
Have a look at Sy Hersh's article in the London Review of Books, in which retired General Staffers openly admitted sharing intel with Assad, via our own allies (Germany, Israel, and Russia). Why is this comforting? It was Realpolitik over Regime-change exceptionalism. The point is that they did it by scrupulously following orders (to share intel with allies). While I am aware that this incident could argue also for the Frankenstein view of an out-of-control military, I think it shows its deeply bureaucratic nature.
As an enormous bureaucracy, the military is conservative and insitutionally stupid, hard to change, but susceptible to manipulation..It is also far from monolithic. As Stalin knew, Bonapartism could be avoided by Caesar's policy: divide et vinces. Personally, I am more afraid - long-term - of secret bureaucracies (CIA/NSA) running under their own clandestine steam through drugs and armament-sales.
Singlepayer health care, free education, and trust-busting to not threaten these spooks at all; The sluggish military bureaucracy even less. It is hardly a "revolution" in the Russian sense, and the horrors of Stalin are not analogous.
As for movements and organization, it seems to me that is exactly what BS is doing. He has said so from the beginning.
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