Our new issue, “After Bernie,” is out now. Our questions are simple: what did Bernie accomplish, why did he fail, what is his legacy, and how should we continue the struggle for democratic socialism? Get a discounted print subscription today !

Bernie Sanders has suspended his campaign. This marks the end not only of his latest run for president, but of a five-year battle for the future of the country. Consistently, Sanders centered this fight around a call for single-payer health care — the only sane and moral alternative to a system of private-sector insurance profiteering that kills, bankrupts, and leaves untreated millions of Americans. The reforms he called for are taken for granted in most of the industrialized world; they are modest, eminently rational, and consistently popular. And in recent months, we have seen just how necessary single-payer health care — and the socialist politics that drove the Sanders movement — really are. The United States has proven itself unusually vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the globe, and the culprit is clear: capitalism. It is capitalism that has driven cuts to government pandemic response programs. It is capitalism that pressures government officials to scale back basic suppression measures and open the company back up to vulnerable workers. It is capitalism that has decimated our country’s capacity to manufacture basic medical equipment and supplies and to keep grocery shelves stocked. And it is capitalism that has left tens of millions of American uninsured, unemployed, and on the cliff of poverty in the face of this pandemic. The Sanders campaign was the obvious solution to this crisis.

Why Did Bernie Lose? There will be no dearth of campaign postmortems in the months ahead, and some fraction of the second-guessing may even be plausible, but let us be clear: the Sanders campaign was ultimately destroyed by a political establishment led by capital and marching under the banner of the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders lost because our political establishment, having presided over decades of declining hopes and living standards for the poor and working class, has created an electorate that has rightly lost faith in democracy. Bernie Sanders lost because decades of deliberate propagandizing by the Republican Party, routinely accepted by an inept and complicit Democratic opposition, has entrenched among voters the self-fulfilling conventional wisdom that America is a center-right nation that would never elect even the most moderate democratic socialist. Bernie Sanders lost because decades of media consolidation has placed our most powerful ideological institutions in the hands of an ever-shrinking faction of oligarchs. And their control of the media, in a million overt and subtle ways, guarantees a basically insurmountable opposition campaign against any politician who steps a millimeter outside of Democratic orthodoxy. Bernie Sanders lost because the Democratic Party will always — if not deliberately, then at least in effect — be able to wage well-funded, highly sophisticated multicandidate opposition campaigns against insurgents, flanked by a seemingly endless network of NGOs, captured unions, astro-turfed “movements,” celebrity activists, and so on. Bernie Sanders lost because the institutions and system of neoliberal domination in the twenty-first-century United States, while showing clear signs of dysfunction and decline, have yet to collapse beneath the contradictions of capital; and until they do, no amount of activist enthusiasm or strategic savvy or socialist vision or political ambition is likely to prevail against them.