The whole Bernie thing kicked off in 2015 with a memorable commercial. It was moving and well-produced and it called for a new kind of patriotism. The Simon and Garfunkel warhorse that was at its center rang with what Abraham called mystic chords of memory, but they were differently pitched, and they sounded more oaken and ancient, than the easy ones that made up familiar campaign tunes. Now that he has ended what is very likely his last campaign for the presidency, and now that he has done so with a strong endorsement of Joe Biden, if you take him all in all, Bernie Sanders will be reckoned with in political history as a significant agent of change.

Sanders gave clarity and focus to progressive ideas that had been all but drowned out by the counterfeit nostrums of modern movement conservatism. For over 30 years, the Democratic Party had run terrified away from its own best instincts and its deepest traditions. The 2016 presidential campaign looked to be another exercise in caution and prudence. Hillary Rodham Clinton was the obvious choice once Joe Biden decided not to run. As the saying goes, she had "cleared the field." In November of 2014, in the pages of this magazine, I wrote about the phenomenon of the cleared field and the possible vulnerability it represented to the favored candidate.

And there's Bernie Sanders—and that may be the key to understanding the whole phenomenon of the cleared field. Sanders is an independent who caucuses with the Democratic side in the Senate. He is an unapologetic liberal, an actual Socialist at a time when the word is thrown around to mean anyone who believes in repairing roads and fighting fires. He also seems to be the one candidate, even more so than O'Malley, who has taken to heart Dean's resistance to the idea of a cleared field, who has imbibed his fellow Vermonter's disdain for the notion that there is anyplace in the country where the Democrats shouldn't compete and that there is any issue on which the Democrats should decline to engage...

And that is a response to the worst thing about accepting as axiomatic the notion of the cleared field: It strangles debate. It makes effective coalition-building beyond the mainstream impossible. Change within nothing but acceptable parameters is stillborn, and the really serious problems affecting the country get sanded over and obscured by tactics. People whose lives have been ground up over the past decade have their appeals drowned out by the hoofbeats of the horse race.



And by god he did it. Even though his 2016 campaign ended sourly, and even though it inculcated in a large part of his following a kind of insufferable vainglory, the 2016 Sanders campaign went a long way toward making progressive solutions palatable for the first time since the Democratic Leadership Council and neoliberalism had led the party on its long, ragged retreat from Reaganism and the 1980 election. It gave the Democratic Party two viable wings for the first time since the election of Bill Clinton.

Bernie Sanders will be reckoned with in political history. Kena Betancur Getty Images

Just as the election of Barack Obama opened the Democrats to new possibilities in candidates, the Sanders campaign reopened the party to old ideas come new again. Between the two of them, over the last decade, they taught progressives and a big piece of the Democratic Party how to be impatient again. This impatience fueled the resistance to the Trump administration* and the 2018 Democratic win in the midterm elections, and it was reflected in the positions of all the other candidates in the 2020 presidential campaign. What Sanders created was a clearing, an opening for ideas that had fallen out of fashion, and for expanding those ideas to suit a new century and to confront new issues. In doing that, he is a pivotal figure in modern political history.



He left the race on Wednesday because, between the pandemic and Biden’s remarkable comeback in February and early March, there was no chance of his winning the nomination. And, unlike 2016, his departure this time around was graceful and conciliatory.

Today, I congratulate Joe Biden, a very decent man who I will work with to move our progressive ideas forward. On a practical note, let me say I will stay on the ballot in all remaining states and continue together delegates. While Vice President Biden will be the nominee, we must continue working to assemble as many delegates as possible at the convention where we will exert significant influence over the party's platform. Together, standing united, we will go forward to defeat Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in modern American history.

That is the single, immutable fact of the 2020 election. And it will be the single immutable fact of American politics no matter who wins in November. In 2016, the country took a dangerous turn down a dark road. Bernie Sanders, for all his flaws, was a light guiding the country to a better place.

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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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