BERNIE LOST BECAUSE HE’D ALREADY WON:

It was harder for Bernie to win on a tide of economic anger in 2020 than it was in 2016. If he could again run in 2024 (aged 82), after the post-pandemic crash which seems increasingly inevitable, perhaps he’d rediscover his mass appeal. The Sanders campaign of 2020 was slicker, more professional, more intelligent in appeals to minority voters. But the radical, revolutionary edge of 2016 was not as strong.

In a roundabout way, though, the Bernie of 2020 lost because he’d already won. He’d already created the revolution that other Democrats now must pander to if they are to have a hope of winning. Before Sanders’s 2016 run, Medicare-for-All was a dangerously subversive idea. Now every Democratic candidate supports it, one way or the other. It’s often said that Bernie has ‘dragged his party to the left’. That’s not exactly right. What Bernie did, like Trump, was expose the rift between the party’s voters and its leadership. This is in turn has forced the Democrats to come up with ever more inventive ways of speaking his language without fully committing to his agenda. Joe Biden’s policy platform is indeed very similar of Sanders’s. On Medicare, Biden may take a more gradualist approach, but it’s the same stated end-goal.