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I think there are several factors that came together to account for the campaign’s success. And I want to underscore the point that it should be seen as a success; it was always a very long-shot possibility that Sanders could win the Democratic nomination, much less be elected president, though ironically perhaps many of us suspected that in some ways he would have been a stronger candidate than Clinton.

Of course, we all had to work as though it was possible for him to win, partly because a very long-shot possibility is still a possibility, and after Iowa the odds didn’t seem quite as long. Besides, otherwise, how could we hope to maximize the campaign’s potential?

But understandably, some people found it difficult to resist the exuberant optimism that encouraged greater expectations. (A feature of the Left’s position in the United States is that it tends to be stronger on optimism of the will than on pessimism of the intellect.) I often suggested that our model for working in the campaign should be Sgt. Pavlov at Stalingrad: our task was to try to generate as much support as possible wherever we were working at the moment, and it made no difference what opinion polls reported or what seemed to be occurring in other states.

Anyway, I want to stress that point because I’ve recently heard some nominally “progressive” commentators posit the opposite view, that the campaign failed. Some of those expressing it had unreasonable expectations, in part driven by what strikes me as a naiveté about electoral politics, a tendency to underestimate the institutional weight of the party apparatus and its linkages from the local to national levels and through institutional allies like most unions and the civil rights and women’s organizations.

Some who are eager to pronounce the campaign a failure are motivated by other ideological objectives. For example, Trotskyists and others who fetishize association with Democrats as the greatest sin in politics want to argue that Sanders would have been more successful if he’d run as an independent.

That’s a delusional position. In the first place, an independent candidacy outside the Democrat and Republican primaries would have received no attention at all to this point, which means we’d have wasted the last year, and almost none of the unions or other entities would have endorsed it.

Antiracist activists assert or imply that the campaign could have wrested the nomination from Clinton if it had been able to appeal to blacks more effectively, by which they mean if the campaign had given them special standing as ventriloquists of black voters.

The issue of “the black vote” and the Sanders campaign is more complex than what is implied by the construct; there are many black voters whose preferences, concerns, motives, ideological leanings, and institutional connections vary. I know we’ll discuss this later, but the going formulations of the apparent anomaly that Sanders didn’t win a higher percentage of black voters are themselves misguided.

Apart from those critics, other neoliberal Democrats and the commentariat have painted the campaign as quixotic from the beginning and consistently tried to trivialize Sanders and his base. That was only to be expected.

One of the contradictions in trying to use a national election campaign as an instrument of movement-building is that such an effort depends on the broad and immediate visibility that the corporate newsfotainment industry provides. But it’s foolish to expect a fair hearing and assessment from that quarter.

To some extent the campaign tapped into a general frustration in the electorate, a sense that neither regular Democrats nor Republicans address people’s concerns and anxieties.

It would be a mistake to consider all, or even most, of those supporters to be committed leftists or even people embracing sophisticated left critiques of neoliberalism. Many of them are people who are hurting and anxious economically. Motives for supporting the Sanders campaign were various, and, although I think skepticism about parties’ fealty to Wall Street certainly has been a central thread in Sanders’s support, it would be a mistake to try to ventriloquize that broad electorate.

I think the significance of supporters’ acceptance of the “democratic socialism” label is also very much exaggerated. Chatter about it reminds me of the banter that Occupy’s big success was having the New York Times write about inequality. For two decades or more, it has not made sense to think that the term “socialism,” however modified, carries any particular or coherent meaning or range of meanings for the vast majority of Americans.

I understand why Sanders invoked it as much as he did. It was a label already attached to him, and it was reasonable to assert control of discussion of it as an issue by introducing it himself. His adducing of Denmark to explain it or pacify anxieties about it early on seemed a little wonkish and politically ineffective to me, but I could appreciate why he’d do that as well.

However, enthusiasm for seeing the phrase appear in public discourse, I fear, is a testament to the Left’s marginality and capacities for wish-fulfillment and the dominance, even within the nominal left, of the conceptually thin, soundbite-driven premises of mainstream political discourse. I suppose this is what happens when even the Left embraces “branding.”

For the same reasons I never took to the gimmick phrase “political revolution.” I’ve had too many encounters, even in the campaign, with people who imagined that it has more concrete meaning than it does; it’s obviously effective as political rhetoric, but that is because it’s a condensation symbol that means quite different things to different people, and probably nothing really concrete or programmatically specific to most.

We do know that Sanders’s calls for free public higher education and national health care, as well as public investment and financial sector regulation resonated widely. The key issue is how we proceed going forward.

The campaign has large lists of potential activists who can be the base for subsequent, longer-term organizing, and there are multiple discussions occurring among the campaign’s inner circles and its close activist support base, e.g., the Labor for Bernie initiative, about next steps.