With the news of Sen. Bernie Sanders dropping out of the race, the fate of the country now rests in the hands of a man who likes Fig Newtons because they’re small enough to sneak, which they are not. A guy who likes to sniff the hair of women without their permission. A guy who Obama brought on to mollify the country’s racists desire for “experience” on the ticket. A guy who voted for the Iraq War.
I get the sense that most Sanders supporters—the ones who aren’t very online, at least—did their grieving after Super Tuesday or the big Michigan loss, but some lingering resentment remains. Yes, Sanders’s campaign “pushed the conversation to the left” and forced a bunch of ladder-climbing Democrats to adopt sensible policies for the first time in their lives, but it sucks to officially lose the last presidential candidate willing to yell at the people and institutions that were built to make so many lives so miserable. And the future looks bleak no matter how you spin it.
After all, there’s a lot not to look forward to in this race. Hallow Obama cameos. Obnoxiously anxious #Resistance warriors pre-blaming fringe Bernie supporters for Trump’s potential victory. Bernie supporters getting mad about that. #Resistance warriors getting mad about them getting mad. Trump enflaming that division. Biden fucking up on the stump. “Veepstakes.” At least four years of the government “partnering with the private sector” to “solve problems” for “working families” when most Democrats—even Biden supporters—understand that establishing universal health care and housing programs and launching a Green New Deal is the only way out of our many hells.
But there’s a lot more not to look forward to if Trump wins. More mass death and unlawful imprisonment. The end of American democracy. Seeing this Tweet next January:
pic.twitter.com/JDS4zUXXJG
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2019
The obvious but sad choice is to vote for Biden in the general. As a “practical” matter, in his Twitter livestream Sanders said he’ll stay on the ballot in the remaining primary states in order to potentially collect more delegates that he can use to influence the Democratic party’s platform and rule-making decisions. That’s worth doing, though there will of course be pressure from the #Resistance to make no move that will appear to widen Biden’s enthusiasm gap and risk losing the election to Trump etc. etc. But changes to the platform and rules of the party will last past the general, and any hit to Biden’s enthusiasm numbers will likely be minor.
The slightly less obvious but worthy path forward for disaffected progressives is to work to elect good people to Congress. I’ve been dunking on the #Resistance here, but when Trump won they looked down the ballot and helped Democrats retake the House. The Senate is arguably in play. Participating in the races in Texas, Colorado, Alabama, North Carolina, and Maine will be more exciting than despairing over Biden, anyway.
The slightly less obvious but even more worthy path forward for the Left is to look even farther down the ballot to state legislature and city council races. The Leftists who believe in electoral politics are already doing this, but they clearly could use some help. Building power through state and local governments will grease the wheels of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s presidential run in 2024, when she will finally pull Excalibur from the stone and use it to defeat Donald Trump Jr. and his 17 vice presidential tigers in the thunderdome. That said, even this path requires working to change the Democratic Party, which will be a slow and barbaric process.
