I never will apologize to anyone for having voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary here in the Commonwealth (God save it!). His positions on most issues were closest to my own. Now that his last campaign for president likely has cratered, there are a lot of Democrats who seem content to spike the football, which is further proof that everyone should’ve been forced to go through the Eternal Sunshine procedure to forget the 2016 primaries ever happened. Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee, barring something unforeseen and awful. However, he is not going to be the Joe Biden of 1988 or even the Joe Biden of 2008. Bernie Sanders—and Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris, and Julian Castro, and Andrew Yang, and, hell, Jay Inslee—have seen to that. Biden’s natural political instincts are to go along with the predominant political dynamic and, for the first time since 1972, that’s a fair fight.



History will reckon seriously with Bernie Sanders. Bill Clark Getty Images

The two presidential campaigns Bernie Sanders has run have cleared the biggest space for progressive ideas that our politics has seen since the Great Society. His 2016 campaign opened 2020 up to progressive ideas and candidates. Now, in extremis, we are seeing the results of that clearing. Good god, the two parties are fighting in Congress over how much Free Money! each of us is going to get. That Bernie Sanders was able to run as strongly as he did in two campaigns is part of the reason for that, and it’s just pigheaded to deny that.

Certainly, there is a lot about his basic constituency that is impolite and unpleasant. (Anyone who’s out there arguing that Biden deliberately risked people’s lives by insisting that primaries still be held on Tuesday should be marooned on Mercury for the duration. It’s both vicious and stupid.) But the fact is that it has been a long time since unapologetic liberalism got a serious unequivocal hearing in one of our two major political parties. Bernie Sanders, in his own characteristically grumpy and stubborn way, has forced that issue, and now he’s done so at a time of serendipitous crisis as well. History is going to reckon seriously with him. So should we all.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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