Cast your mind back to only two months ago, when the Democratic presidential primaries still mattered. Bernie Sanders seemingly had an insurmountable lead over all his rivals, many of whom had already dropped out. Joe Biden, the current frontrunner, was a laughable competitor to the likes of Pete Buttigieg or Elizabeth Warren, to the point that many were writing Biden’s political obituaries. At that point, there was a real chance that Bernie Sanders might have won the primary, and eventually the Presidency. Flash forward back to the present, and Biden now has an unconquerable lead over Bernie Sanders, and now Bernie himself has done the unthinkable: not only suspending his campaign indefinitely but also endorsing Joe Biden.

Needless to say, all of us in the left are either outraged or simply demoralised, and personally I’m at a combination of both at the moment: demoralised over possibly the only hope of getting in a left-wing government through democratic means, and outraged at Bernie for endorsing Biden and thereby condemning America to four more years of right-wing rule (let’s be real here, Biden has zero chance of defeating Trump), and possibly turning many young people over to the Republican Party because they will not vote for any Democrat except Bernie. This is the ramifications of Bernie’s betrayal of his own voters.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we have seen the same old band of anti-electoralists proclaiming that they (and by they, they usually disguise the fact that it’s their own position with the mantle of Lenin) were right about electoralism, that socialists should not seek to win power by democratic means (and they proclaim this to be Lenin’s position even though his book Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder endorsed electoralism as a tactic). Such people are really a different kind of grifter to what Bernie Sanders turned out to be. Instead of dangling in front of young people the hope of putting socialism in power by the ballot box and deliberately dashing it as Bernie does, the anti-electoralist leftist (themselves usually larping revolutionaries who actively refused to support Bernie in the first place and thereby shirking their role in a titanic class struggle) dangles in front of the disillusioned leftist another false promise, that the “real” revolutionaries are right around the corner, that the time is right to wage a revolution, somehow without having a mass of people behind them.

What these people miss is that the whole point of the Bernie Sanders movement was to get precisely the numbers that none of the supposed “real revolutionaries” ever could, so that the grassroots movement would be well placed to take on capitalism at the eleventh hour. So no, I don’t believe electoralism was the problem, and so argue such is to be deliberately reductive as to ignore the failings of the movement itself and the left more broadly (the left admitting it’s own failings? you must be dreaming). Therefore the aim of this article is to explain the actual reasons why the Bernie campaign failed, why he himself surrendered.

Many on the left will point to the sabotage being committed by the Democratic National Committee, and they are of course correct in this regard. We know for a fact that the DNC has actively attempted to thwart Bernie Sanders’ campaign, as was revealed by Wikileaks in 2016, when we learned that Hillary Clinton conspired with the DNC to rig the primaries. Today, just as in 2016, the DNC were still prepared to rig the primaries, as we saw with their collusion with Pete Buttigieg and his attempt to rig the Iowa caucus, but that is not the only conspiracy at play here. Right before Super Tuesday, former President Barack Obama directly called Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, two of the most formidable centrist competitors to Biden, and ordered them to drop out and endorse Biden, thus giving Biden the high-profile boost needed to get low-information voters to come out in droves for Biden.

Unfortunately, this was not the only form of sabotage to be inflicted on the Bernie movement. We know now that people within Bernie’s own campaign were encouraging him to drop out of the race, including campaign manager Faiz Shakir and Justice Democrat congresswoman Pramila Jayapal. Now take stock of the fact that you have a Justice Democrat, and I would be naive to think she is the only one amongst them, encouraging the one candidate for President that the Justice Democrats could support to end is campaign, but what is even more shocking is that Bernie listened to them, or so it would be if we forget that Bernie is too soft to resist that.

As a matter of fact, the final irony is that greatest threat to Bernie’s campaign was not the faults of electoralism, but the fact that Bernie himself was far too weak-kneed and too nice to have made an effective leader anyway, and this is a trend I have noticed of a lot of these supposedly radical social democrats: they cultivate an image of being the nice old grandpa believing that’s what people want, and they’re usually too soft to actually criticise their opponents and end up making fatal concessions to their opponents. In Britain, we saw this with Jeremy Corbyn yielding to the Remainers in the Labour Party, and much like Bernie and Pramily Jayapal you had John McDonnell and Diane Abbott negging Corbyn into adopting a second referendum position, which had pretty much the expected consequence. In America, Bernie refused to go hard on his opponents until he had to, and in fact he reprimanded one of his own surrogates for accurately reporting on Joe Biden’s years of corruption, and consistently went on air calling him a friend. Now this wouldn’t be a problem if Bernie was saying “look I like him but I don’t want him in the White House”, but he didn’t even do that. Meanwhile, Donald Trump doesn’t care for decorum, and he actively insulted all his opponents, and yet won over his party and the country. It’s almost as though the old saying “nice guys finish last” applies to politics more than it does to dating.

When you remember this, it honestly becomes unsurprising that Bernie ended up losing the primaries, not but because the DNC tried to keep him out. Far from it. If anything, if Bernie actually had a spine he could have overcame the many obstacles placed in front of him because he would have actually won over the people. Instead, I’m convinced that the real reason Bernie lost was because he didn’t want to win. In fact, I have half a mind to think that he deliberately picked the height of his popularity to prostrate himself before Biden, because at that point it actually looked like he might win, and he must have been thinking “oh shit, I’m actually winning! this wasn’t part of the plan!”. If he actually intended to win, he would actually be doing something to the effect of helping him win. He could have twisted the arms of Elizabeth Warren or Andrew Yang to try and get them to support him in much the same way Obama or Clinton did with other centrists, but that would require a skill Bernie doesn’t have: playing politics. He wasn’t supposed to actually win. He was just supposed to win the youth vote, the ideological battle, or some other such nonsense. He was never intended to put food on the table, and yet he is still held up as a saint who is too good for this world.

The problem is that we have no time for saints, or frankly anyone else who doesn’t the actual nature of politics. The problem with electoralism is not that it’s impossible, but rather that to succeed in it requires skills that I’m convinced most leftists do not have: namely charisma, mental fortitude, discipline, a drive to succeed against all odds, and the ability to stand up for yourself when the time comes, and much of the American left lacks this. Bernie Sanders may have been able to persuade some right-wingers to sympathise with him, and that is a great feat, but he lacked the skills necessary to be able to run a serious campaign, and in his endorsement of Joe Biden, with his record of corruption, rape and bigotry (and in general standing against everything Bernie ever believed in), he has revealed himself to be not only the ultimate coward, but also a grifter of the highest order. In telling people to vote for Joe Biden he has literally made all those memes about Bernie wanting you to support the establishment come true.

You could balk, as Bernie attempts to in his weak and servile way, that the coronavirus pandemic demands that Bernie drop out. After all, saving millions of lives is more important than our petty politics, we are told. Evidently the DNC didn’t agree when it refused to heed the warnings of health experts and postpone the Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Wisconsin primaries, or when Biden encouraged Democrats to go out and vote in the primaries. If the coronavirus wasn’t reason enough for Joe Biden to suspend his campaign or at least call for the postponing of individual contests, why is Bernie convinced that it’s a valid reason for him to suspend his campaign? He may think that it’s a sign of compassion, and the Bernie faithful will remain convinced of that, but in reality it’s a sign of weakness.

As much as I will make clear that I will never trust a word Bernie says ever again for the rest of my life, neither am I willing to trust the online Marxist-Leninists who are now saying “fuck elections, let’s do revolution now”, firstly because I know for a fact that they’re not going to do it themselves. They are neither capable nor interested in doing anything other than sitting on their asses posting memes and dunking on anyone that doesn’t think along the same lines as their own rigid orthodoxy. Secondly, because many of these people who are trumpeting anti-electoralism weren’t even fans of democracy as a concept anyway (they pretend to be while also supporting the wholesale suspension of democracy in Marxist-Leninist countries). Thirdly, because I also know that many of simply refused to support Bernie even at his movement’s hour of need. They failed to recognise that the working class isn’t going to them, but is instead going to the Bernie movement, and that they should have followed the actual state of class consciousness as opposed to ignoring it at their convenience because Bernie is too much of a reformist for them. Because of this misguided analysis, they diverted their resources away from what was probably the most important class struggle of our time, and in this sense their selfishness and obstinate doctrinalism has rendered their own claptrap on electoralism into a self-fulfilling prophecy. What did they do instead? Rail against Bernie for not being sufficiently performative in his revolutionary zeal and let him fail so that a “real” revolution (read: a literal repeat of the Bolshevik revolution because these people are such larpers it’s unreal) will happen, even though we all know it won’t.

As disenchanted as we have all been as a result of Bernie’s actions, are we really so bereft of ideas that we are willing to listen to people who have no plan to get the necessary numbers of people to support their ventures? Every question of what to do next should consider how it is we get the numbers for anything we suggest to be possible. Readymade solutions like a wildcat general strike, a new mass party or a “real” revolution will be useless if they are not interested in dealing with the question of gaining that broad mass of support. For now, the focus should be on trying to organise outside the Democratic Party, or the Labour Party or wherever, and inside the communities of the working class around the issues most relevant to them. By doing this you can build that support with the added bonus of being able to educate them on the way capitalism actually works, and we will make progress as long as we are not looking for false messiahs amongst the dregs of the online left.