There has been a lot of learned comment recently that seems to be constructing a premature obituary not only for the Sanders campaign, but also a premature obituary for whatever influence it will have going forward. Jamelle Bouie's is probably the best form of the argument, but there are others as well. Bouie's is that every Democratic presidential primary campaign has some form of populist outsider insurgency that has a good run for a while, but that eventually succumbs to the power (and money) of the party establishment. I think that, generally, the analysis is sound, but I think some of the history on which it is based is flawed. (For example, casting banker-friendly neoliberal Bill Bradley as an "insurgent" against DLC golden child Al Gore in 2000 is really a reach, and Bouie seems unsure whether or not Barack Obama was insurgent, or whether only his candidacy was.) The history that I believe is unfortunately elided here is what happened between the presidential campaigns of 2004 and 2008, when an actual insurgency that failed as a presidential candidacy nevertheless transformed the Democratic Party and led it to success. Its leader was Howard Dean.

It's true that Dean's candidacy was heavily hyped at the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2004 and that, as soon as it showed any signs of real movement, it was crushed by the influence of an establishment that lined up behind John Kerry. However, the Dean campaign had two lasting impacts that still resonate within the Democratic Party. The first is the way the Dean campaign organized its voter outreach, particularly his use of the Internet in that regard, and the way it raised money. This established the template that the Obama campaign used to magnificent advantage in 2008. The second impact was not truly felt until after Dean's campaign had ended and Dean himself had ascended to the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, where he oversaw the 2006 midterm, the most forgotten landslide in recent American political history.

Under chairman Dean, and employing his 50-state strategy, the Democratic Party won back a majority in the U.S. House and deadlocked the Senate at 49-49, with Bernie Sanders and the newly independent Joe Lieberman caucusing with the Democrats. They also won a majority of the governorships. They flipped state legislatures in places like Oregon and New Hampshire, the latter result turning a 92-vote Republican advantage in the New Hampshire House to an 81-vote Democratic majority. This landslide did not have a lasting effect for a number of reasons. First, then-President George W. Bush simply ignored it and did what he wanted in Iraq anyway, and the new Democratic Senate majority did little to get in his way. Second, it has been obliterated in historical memory by the radicalized Republican sweeps in 2010 and 2014. But third, and most important, the Democratic Party establishment treated a successful insurgency in the same way it always treats a failed one. It pretended that it never happened and acted like it all had been some kind of mistake.

Even before Dean left the DNC, the party establishment and its kept press worked overtime to give credit for the success not to Dean, but to the inexcusable Rahm Emanuel, who'd overseen the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that year. In fact, Emanuel threw old-school fundraising techniques and establishment support behind some of the few Democratic candidates who lost that year—including Tammy Duckworth and Harold Ford, Jr. And, once the DNC was handed back to establishment Democrats like Tim Kaine and (gorp!) Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whatever legacy Dean and his landslide had within the party dissolved entirely.

So I don't believe that history entirely supports the contention that the Sanders movement will end when the campaign does, or that it will entirely disperse into activism on a number of different issues, but outside the party structure. This is not a force of nature. This is a conscious choice on the part of the Democratic party—and one thing that history does prove is that the Democratic party almost invariably chooses poorly.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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