On the day of the Iowa caucuses in February, the now disgraced and retired MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews made a remark about Bernie Sanders’s chances of winning the general election that unintentionally captured the significance of both his campaign and his rise in American politics. “I’ve dealt with these guys most of my adult life,” Matthews said. “They’re usually the guys at the card table at an anti-war rally. There’d be some old guy with some old literature from this socialist party or that.”

“There’s always guys like that,” he concluded.

He was right. For over half a century—at small magazines and small organizations, on campuses and at town halls, in a handful of city council and state legislative seats, and even, once in a blue moon, in the halls of Congress—there have been people like Bernie Sanders hanging around. Before his campaign in 2016, we’d become accustomed to them grumbling or shouting from the sidelines of American politics. These were the rumpled, earnest figures that filled time on Air America or Democracy Now! and manned the Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader campaigns. They were gadflies and polemicists on the outside looking in, rendering judgments about a world that might be theirs to change someday, pending some breakthrough in mass consciousness, a final systemic collapse, and a revolution just over the horizon.

What Matthews didn’t say was that these judgments were typically correct. People like Bernie Sanders have been right about virtually every major question facing this country since the end of World War II. This is one of the great tragedies of the Sanders campaign—for a brief, bright moment, it was entirely conceivable that a “guy like that” might finally become the leader of the free world. But it was not to be. And for an entire generation of the American left—a generation that watched postwar prosperity give way to the precarity and inequality of the neoliberal economy; that was shaped by the movement against the war in Vietnam and reinvigorated by the movement against the war on terror; that brought the stridency of its opposition to late Cold War interventionism in South America and the Middle East to bear against torture, extrajudicial assassination, indefinite detention, and the erosion of civil liberties in this new century; that witnessed the end of the old civil rights era and the birth of a new era determined to see through what the last left unfinished; that sparked an environmental movement that is now civilization’s last best hope; that prompted consequential marches on Seattle and on Wall Street; and that can claim figures like Michael Harrington, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Noam Chomsky as not only inspirations but true contemporaries—this is where the road ends.

Much will be written, in the weeks, months, and years ahead, about how much Sanders was able to achieve in the road’s final stretch. Many will argue that socialism has been significantly destigmatized across an important share of the American electorate. We will hear reminders that a $15 minimum wage, free college, and other ideas deemed radical and unrealistic just a few short years ago, are now central to mainstream policy conversation. Some will point out that self-styled moderates and figures in the Democratic establishment, even while rejecting Sanders’s Medicare for All plan, have been pushed by the discourse surrounding it into support for dramatically expanding public health insurance in America through schemes that resemble the universal health care regimes in place across Europe. And so on.