After a long intra-par­ty cam­paign, your side — buck­ing the odds, and fac­ing a hos­tile media and par­ty appa­ra­tus — does extra­or­di­nar­i­ly well. Your move­ment encour­ages mil­lions of Amer­i­cans to ques­tion the assump­tions of the neolib­er­al elite. Yet, in the end, your can­di­date los­es. What do you do?

So what if Bernie’s most fervent supporters disrupted the convention proceedings? A vibrant and healthy political culture is by definition messy.

If you are one of the ​“Bernie or Bust” del­e­gates at the Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­ven­tion — a con­ven­tion to which you have been demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed to sup­port Sanders — you march out of the con­ven­tion are­na chant­i­ng, with­out a shred of irony: ​“This is what democ­ra­cy looks like!”

If the Sanders move­ment is premised on an ​“inside/​outside” game, aren’t the elect­ed del­e­gates the peo­ple who are meant to work on the inside? It is easy to agree with Sarah Sil­ver­man when, from the con­ven­tion podi­um, she scold­ed: ​“To the Bernie or Bust peo­ple: You’re being ridiculous.”

But not so fast. The Bernie or Bust con­tin­gent comes from the tra­di­tion of Occu­py Wall Street, not Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty pol­i­tics. Their tac­tics are bound to rub some peo­ple the wrong way. Recall Occu­py Wall Street — with its fetish for hor­i­zon­tal­i­ty and its end­less­ly delib­er­a­tive meet­ings that exclud­ed peo­ple with fam­i­lies and jobs. It was a move­ment that frus­trat­ed many tra­di­tion­al progressives.

Yet, it bears remem­ber­ing that it was Occu­py Wall Street that made the 99% and the 1% part of the world’s polit­i­cal lex­i­con, not the hide­bound Amer­i­can Left. Sim­i­lar­ly, the enthu­si­asm and hard work of the Occu­py Wall Street gen­er­a­tion cat­a­pult­ed Bernie Sanders with­in grasp­ing dis­tance of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty nom­i­na­tion. So what if Bernie’s most fer­vent sup­port­ers dis­rupt­ed the con­ven­tion pro­ceed­ings? A vibrant and healthy polit­i­cal cul­ture is by def­i­n­i­tion messy. Get over it. That slight to polit­i­cal deco­rum is noth­ing com­pared to Deb­bie Wasser­man Schultz’s gross vio­la­tion of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee bylaws.

Clin­ton clinched the nom­i­na­tion, but the polit­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion will con­tin­ue in the guise of what the Sanders cam­paign is brand­ing ​“Our Rev­o­lu­tion.” Under that inclu­sive ban­ner, the cam­paign will deploy resources to more than 100 can­di­dates run­ning for pub­lic office this fall.

“If we are suc­cess­ful, what it will mean is that the pro­gres­sive mes­sage and the issues that I cam­paigned on will be increas­ing­ly spread through­out this coun­try,” Sanders told USA Today, explain­ing that Our Rev­o­lu­tion will encour­age grass­roots activists ​“to get involved, give them the tools they need to win, [and] help them financially.”

To nur­ture the grass­roots, Our Rev­o­lu­tion will pur­sue a 50-state strat­e­gy, begin­ning with a chal­lenge to the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty lead­er­ship in many of the states that Bernie car­ried in the pri­maries and cau­cus­es. Demo­c­ra­t­ic estab­lish­ment be warned: Expect Sanders’ sup­port­ers to run in par­ty precinct elec­tions from Ver­mont to Hawaii.

Since its found­ing 40 years ago, In These Times has advo­cat­ed an inside/​outside strat­e­gy vis-à-vis elec­toral pol­i­tics. On the out­side, we raise Cain, agi­tate, and describe the con­tours of a just and more demo­c­ra­t­ic future. On the inside, we pro­mote mean­ing­ful change with­in the exist­ing dom­i­nant insti­tu­tions. The inside game inevitably involves join­ing forces with peo­ple with whom we do not always agree. The alter­na­tive to pur­su­ing such a strat­e­gy is to cede con­trol of the pub­lic sphere to the rich and the powerful.