One Bernie Supporter’s Message of Hope and Solidarity

For those who still feel heartsick over the end of his campaign

Photo by Gage Skidmore

A few days after Bernie Sanders suspended his presidential campaign, with thousands of people dying from covid-19, I finally peeled the Bernie sign off my garage door. It felt like lowering the flag. It really, really sucked.

So…I tried looking at the big picture. And it looked like this: the smoke has cleared. The senator from Vermont is still standing , and he’s ready to fight. And the movement he started isn’t going anywhere.

To see how extraordinary that is, just look at what’s happened since the campaign began. The rich and powerful threw absolutely everything they had at Bernie. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars attacking and smearing him, while their employees in the media spent 24 hours a day trying to convince voters that he could never win. Wealthy donors pressured all the so-called centrist candidates to drop out of the race on the eve of Super Tuesday — something nobody ever does — and rally around their “nothing will fundamentally change” candidate. While Democratic party elites worked behind the scenes to undermine the Sanders campaign, a single billionaire spent a staggering 935 million dollars on a presidential run whose primary goal was to knock Bernie out, once and for all.

Even now, as the senator advocates ever more loudly for the same universal healthcare system that he’s championed for decades, those who profit from the status quo try to shut him down by saying he’s politicizing the pandemic.

But they can’t shut Bernie down. In the face of opposition that would flatten an ordinary man, he just keeps fighting the good fight. And he’s racking up victories that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago.

If you don’t believe it, just look at the difference between the current coronavirus legislation and the economic stimulus bills passed in the wake of the 2008 recession.

The 2008/2009 bills did little or nothing for poor and working-class Americans. Instead, they bailed out the multi-billion dollar corporations that had caused the recession in the first place. This time around it’s different. The current legislation still contains a huge grab-bag of goodies and loopholes for the donor class, but it also prohibits using taxpayer funds for stock buy-backs, fat executive bonuses, and union busting.

More importantly, the new law gives some actual relief for the ordinary Americans who are suffering through this pandemic.

It vastly increases the number of people who are eligible for unemployment, while significantly boosting their payments. It gives temporary relief from student loans and certain other debts, as well as putting a moratorium on most foreclosures and evictions. And it provides payments for those who can’t work as a result of contracting the virus, thus giving them a limited form of paid sick leave.

Why the change? Certainly the magnitude of this crisis calls for a greater response than that of the previous recession. But why not just give more money to big business? It almost seems as though politicians are starting to worry that catering to the one percent just isn’t enough anymore.

Once the rise of covid-19 made grass-roots organizing and fundraising impossible, Bernie’s campaign was all but over. Still, his impact on the national discourse is unmistakable. Emergency legislation that features paid sick leave and student debt relief?

Whose agenda is that?

Bernie’s ultimate goal has always been to build a mass movement to make government and the economy work for all Americans. That movement has just begun. It was never going to happen overnight.

I feel compelled to repeat an earlier point: A single billionaire spent almost a billion dollars to defeat Bernie, and render his populist movement irrelevant. And what do you know? Today, in the midst of this crisis, more people than ever are embracing Medicare for All. Bloomberg might as well have thrown that money in a huge pile, poured lighter fluid on it, and burned it.

One Bernie supporter I know, devastated by his withdrawal, nevertheless told me “I’ll keep fighting for a better world.” And so will I. Maybe you will too. As Bernie said, let us go forward together.

The struggle continues.