I don ' t really care what Sanders did 50 years ago . I care what he does now , which hasn ' t been much other than divide liberals using platform points from the Democratic party . Sanders lack of original thought and lots of promises without a strategy on how to accomplish them . Anyone can call people what they want to hear and stand on their ideals , that ' s easy . The hard part is coming up with a plan that pushes the nation forward . Segregation is really a good example of a poorly handled social activism . As right as the cause was , the implementation of desegregation took the Democrats from being the dominate party to being a party that can barely win elections . Politics is all about human behavior on a large scale , not merely doing what you personally think is right . You have to consider how your views carry to the masses and long term backlash . Dems won in the 60 s , but at what cost ? We desegregated , but we also handed millions of voters to the Republicans who went on to start wars , deny climate change and wreck the economy . In hindsight it would have been smart to ease people into desegregation instead of polarizing them . The net result would be higher equality for blacks and all minorities by now . We sacrificed the long term future for a short term win because we didn ' t take human behavior seriously . Had we staggered the effort over a bit longer time to give people time to adjust we could have mitigated a lot of the negatives and reduced crime and backlash . Instead we would up with almost 30 years of increased crime and a police state backlash as well as Democrats losing southern and ' good christian ' demographics . You don ' t have to like it , but that is what happened .