For half a decade and counting, American politics has been dominated by the ideas, personalities, and followings of two geriatric outer-borough New Yorkers. One is the brash, narcissistic son of a Queens real-estate tycoon, who inherited a fortune and spent the nineteen-eighties and nineties compulsively stamping his name on as many products—buildings, casinos, steaks—as he could, a master huckster who rose to power after realizing that he could fuse the racist, reactionary politics of twentieth-century New York City tabloids with the racist, reactionary politics of the twenty-first-century Republican Party. The other is the self-assured son of two working-class Jews in Brooklyn, who left New York to become a child of the nineteen-sixties, eventually landing in rural Vermont, where he became a staunchly leftist mayor, congressman, and senator, and then a long-shot presidential candidate who turned millions of young people on to the kind of progressivism that the rest of his generation had discarded along with sit-ins, vinyl records, and tie-dyed shirts.
In history, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders will forever be linked, as the two politicians who offered the most immediate, assertive, and seductive responses to the American situation in the post-Obama era. Both mounted outsider campaigns for the Presidency in 2016. Sanders lost to Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries, but, after Trump’s shocking victory that November, it was Sanders and his followers, not Clinton, who remained on the scene.
Eventually, the hope that Sanders inspired on the left became directly related to the despair that Trump provoked. Trump sought to bring about a conservative kleptocracy in which power justified itself and a white-centric vision of what it means to be American was celebrated. Sanders wanted to address the inequality that continues to plague the country—through wars, financial crises, and actual plagues—and usher in a multiracial mass-movement politics which would force America’s powerful to make concessions to their fellow-citizens. If a single charismatic leader could push the country toward one of those visions, perhaps a single charismatic leader could push it toward the other—this was the theory that formed the basis of Sanders’s second Presidential campaign.
When the race for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination began, the policies that Sanders helped make famous—Medicare for All, free public college, the Green New Deal—were setting the agenda, and his followers were highly coveted by the candidates who entered the race. Figures who represented the next generation of the Democratic Party establishment—Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand—all began their campaigns supporting Medicare for All, and all made overtures to the left. Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke, newer faces still, spent the early days of their campaigns making big-change arguments that owed more to Sanders than to former Vice-President Joe Biden, the man they eventually endorsed. What happened between then and now will be debated and studied for some time. Sanders, at risk of being crowded out in a huge field, fought hard to retain the mantle of champion of the left—so hard that even a supposed ally such as Elizabeth Warren, who eventually modulated her support for Medicare for All, wound up an enemy in the eyes of many of Sanders’s supporters. Those supporters will insist that Warren and Sanders’s other opponents’ backing off of his signature health-care policy is a sign that they were never committed to it to begin with. But a with-us-or-against-us dynamic was established that would persist through the end of the primaries.
From the start, Sanders seemed to be running a campaign aimed at winning a plurality of voters, rather than a majority. He would consolidate the left and worry about the rest later. It almost worked. In the fall, a few weeks after suffering a heart attack, Sanders held a gigantic comeback rally in Queens—there are those outer boroughs, again—where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the rising Democratic star who has said that Sanders’s 2016 run turned her on to politics, endorsed him. His campaign found new life. As the early primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire approached, Sanders was up in the polls, raising historic amounts of money from small donors, and looking formidable. He won a split decision with Buttigieg in Iowa, and then won decisively in New Hampshire and Nevada, where Latino voters broke for him in huge numbers. Then the campaign turned south.
All year, Sanders had talked about remaking the electorate of the Democratic Party as his path to remaking the Democratic Party. He would win by attracting new, and younger, voters. As evidence for the viability of his approach, he pointed to his campaign events, where all kinds of people filled gyms and auditoriums and parks and arenas to see him. They held microphones and told him, and one another, their stories of debt and privation and injustice, and put their hopes in him to fix them. He had been campaigning for President for four years, and he was very good at sending people home thinking that they had just witnessed history. But the new electorate that he promised never actually materialized. When the Democratic primaries reached South Carolina, and then North Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, and Mississippi, black voters in those states voted overwhelmingly for Biden. This proved a fatal flaw in Sanders’s argument that he alone commanded the loyalty of the Democratic Party’s base. If black voters, who have voted Democratic for generations, weren’t considered the base, who could be? On Wednesday, just six and a half weeks since his victory in Nevada made him look like the prohibitive favorite for the nomination, Sanders announced the end of his candidacy.
Wednesday marks the start of Passover, the Jewish holiday that commemorates the flight from Egypt. The fact that Sanders would have been America’s first Jewish President was, for the most part, treated as a curious by-product of his candidacy rather than a stirring historical first, even by the candidate himself. Sanders hated deploying his biography in service of his politics. Still, he ended his campaign on Passover. Recently, after Biden had amassed an overwhelming lead in the delegate count over Sanders, I spoke with Max Berger, an activist who served as the director for progressive partnerships in the Warren campaign. “Bernie is Moses,” Berger told me, describing how the left would remember Sanders. He spent forty years wandering in the political wilderness, and brought the left to the edge of the promised land. Sanders has his enemies, and his detractors. But, in terms of how his supporters will remember him, this sounded right to me.
