In his inau­gur­al edi­to­r­i­al for the first issue of In These Times, in Novem­ber 1976, Edi­tor & Pub­lish­er James Wein­stein wrote:

Sanders won the October 13 Democratic debate hands down, according to every major debate focus group. Yet that was not the conclusion of the media elites ,who declared Hillary Clinton the victor.

Cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism, this society’s sys­tem of prop­er­ty, invest­ment, resource- and labor-allo­ca­tion, is a polit­i­cal taboo. … It is [the major par­ties’] job to keep cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism out of — ​“above” — pol­i­tics, just as it was the job of the pre-Civ­il War Whig and Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ties to keep slav­ery out of pol­i­tics. They failed then because deter­mined peo­ple brought the real­i­ty of slave pow­er into the elec­toral are­na, giv­ing birth to the Repub­li­can Party.

So who are the ​“deter­mined peo­ple” of today tak­ing ​“the great issue of our time” and putting it ​“into the elec­toral are­na”? In These Times read­ers like Bernie Sanders, who dur­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic debate was ques­tioned by Ander­son Coop­er about his views on cap­i­tal­ism and answered thusly:

Do I con­sid­er myself part of the casi­no cap­i­tal­ist process by which so few have so much and so many have so lit­tle? By which Wall Street’s greed and reck­less­ness wrecked this econ­o­my? No, I don’t. I believe in a soci­ety where all peo­ple do well.

That mes­sage res­onates. On Octo­ber 13, Sanders won the Demo­c­ra­t­ic debate hands down, accord­ing to every major debate focus group. Yet that was not the con­clu­sion of the media elites, who declared Hillary Clin­ton the victor.

Tonight, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates will gath­er, not for a Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee-sanc­tioned ​“debate” but an MSNBC-host­ed ​“Demo­c­ra­t­ic Forum,” at Winthrop Uni­ver­si­ty in Rock Hill, S.C., to be inter­viewed indi­vid­u­al­ly by Rachel Mad­dow. The post-game show will no doubt pro­vide an oppor­tu­ni­ty to dis­cov­er whether the predilec­tion of TV’s talk­ing heads to declare Clin­ton tri­umphant was a tem­po­rary dis­or­der — or, on the con­trary, a per­ma­nent afflic­tion. Heads, Clin­ton wins. Tails, Sanders loses.

The establishment’s affec­tion for Clin­ton, the fêt­ed favorite of cor­po­rate Democ­rats, comes as no sur­prise to Sanders. Ten years ago, in 2005, after he had declared his inten­tion to run for the Sen­ate, I asked Sanders, ​“What role does the media play in explor­ing issues and set­ting the nation­al agen­da?” He replied:

The cen­tral issue is not just the right-wing slant of the cor­po­rate media. That’s obvi­ous. … The far more impor­tant issue is what they don’t cov­er. To the aver­age Amer­i­can today, the most impor­tant issue is why that per­son is work­ing longer hours for low­er wages and why his or her stan­dard of liv­ing has declined over the past 30 years. But for much of the cor­po­rate media it’s a non-issue. … The real­i­ty of people’s lives is not reflect­ed in the media, and there­fore peo­ple begin to ques­tion their very exis­tence, as if they were the only ones strug­gling hard. And as a result they think their prob­lems are unique to them, and are not social or polit­i­cal prob­lems that we as a nation can solve by work­ing togeth­er. The result of that is that peo­ple lose inter­est in the polit­i­cal process, don’t vote or sim­ply pay atten­tion to the cul­tur­al issues that the right-wing prop­a­gates. … [T]he cor­po­rate media is cer­tain­ly one of the main fac­tors in the depo­lit­i­cal­iza­tion of our coun­try and the low lev­el of polit­i­cal consciousness.

Accord­ing to recent Iowa polls, though Clin­ton is now ahead over­all, Sanders leads Clin­ton 59 to 21 per­cent among inde­pen­dents who sup­port a Demo­c­rat, and — most sig­nif­i­cant­ly for the future of the par­ty—67 to 23 per­cent among 18-to-34-year-olds who are like­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic cau­cus participants.

In the 1970s, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ist Orga­niz­ing Com­mit­tee (DSOC), lat­er joined by the New Amer­i­can Move­ment (NAM) — both groups with which In These Times’ found­ing staff were affil­i­at­ed — bet on a strat­e­gy of realign­ment where­by the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty would become a force for social democ­ra­cy. Poor naifs!

Still, 40 years lat­er, we can­not help but recall their small‑d demo­c­ra­t­ic aspi­ra­tions under the big‑d Demo­c­ra­t­ic tent as we watch Sanders ral­ly the nation and, as he put it dur­ing the debate, ​“mobi­lize our peo­ple to take back our gov­ern­ment from a hand­ful of bil­lion­aires and cre­ate the vibrant democ­ra­cy we know we can and should have.”