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On Monday, at Bernie Sanders’s rally to save Hahnemann University Hospital, the Philadelphia teaching hospital that was purchased and then run into the ground by California-based private equity firms, I asked a few attendees a simple and yet profoundly stupid-sounding question: “What is Netroots Nation?” The liberal and local press have been, over the past few days, making a big deal out of Bernie’s absence from the progressive conference (organized by the Daily Kos; held in Philly last weekend; about 4,000 attendees this year; cost for registration ranged from $255 to $895, with the latter being the “true, unsubsidized cost to attend”), which a few other presidential candidates, most notably Elizabeth Warren, did attend. “He’s letting Warren have the conversation to herself,” said Daily Kos spokesperson Carolyn Fiddler in an interview with the Guardian, “and I don’t know why he would do that.” People on the ground at Hahnemann, however, didn’t seem quite so concerned. “Netroots? I’m not familiar,” said Lamar, a Hahnemann patient who told me he’d checked out of the hospital to attend the rally and would have to check back in afterwards (he raised his wrist as he said this to show me his hospital wristband). “I’ve always sort of heard about it but not exactly known what it was,” said James, a software developer from Washington, DC. “I actually don’t really know,” said Maria Gutierrez, an oncology nurse at Hahnemann. “If I was to take a guess, I would guess it has something to do with a grassroots movement involving social media or an internet connection?” Will Bunch, in his coverage of Netroots for the Philadelphia Inquirer, tried to tell you on Monday that Netroots is where we choose the “president of the American left,” that Sanders’s absence was “palpable,” and that Warren successfully claimed a “moral victory” by attending the Daily Kos’s 2020 presidential candidates forum on Saturday and giving a speech and being enthusiastically applauded by the audience. While the things she was being cheered for were good and fine (an end to Trump’s immigration enforcement policies), the claim that Netroots Nation is where the American left selects its candidate is dubious. To say that is to argue that an expensive progressive confab moderated by longtime Bernie critic Markos Moulitsas represents the US left is to say nothing for or about the American working class, who absolutely have to be central to any movement for real political change — and who were on Philadelphia’s streets in the hundreds this week with Bernie Sanders. Absent from the rally in front of the hospital? Every other Democratic candidate, including Joe Biden, whose campaign headquarters is less than a mile away, and, though she was in the neighborhood for the weekend’s Netroots Nation conference, Elizabeth Warren.