What does Sen. Bernie Sanders want? Does he want to be a Democrat who fights hard inside the system for his beliefs while accepting the will of the majority? Or does he want to be a revolutionary who fights as an outsider and never gives up?

For a long time, Sanders wanted to be a revolutionary. He wanted big changes that weren’t possible within the existing two parties.

He identified himself as an independent socialist during his eight terms in Congress and two terms in the Senate. During his 25 years in Congress, Sanders was a champion of the underdog who refused to join the Democratic Party because he believed it was a well-intentioned, but flawed, institution that had sold itself out to corporate interests.

Bernie wasn’t perfect, but he was mostly principled. He argued against the wars, he argued against the deregulations that put our economy at risk, he argued for progressive policies that would make America more just, more equal and more prosperous. He got very little accomplished, but he kept speaking out. He was the conscience of the progressive left.

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Then he joined the Democratic Party when he launched his bid for the presidency a year ago. He knew that our political system gives very little space for third parties to be anything more than a place for the disgruntled to cast a protest vote.

He wanted more than that. He wanted to turn America around, and to do that he needed to turn the Democratic Party around.

Sanders succeeded far beyond any expectations. He built a progressive movement within the party and forced Hillary Clinton to address issues of inequality and economic justice. He moved the party to the left and motivated millions of people to be active and to vote.

So far, Sanders has received nearly 10 million votes in primaries and caucuses across the country, according to RealClearPolitics. He has won 21 contests, and has earned 1,494 pledged delegates (the delegates selected by voters as opposed to the superdelegates selected because they are party insiders).

But Clinton has done even better. She has won nearly 13 million votes. She’s won 27 contests, and has earned 1,768 pledged delegates. She’s won 57% of the popular vote and 54% of the pledged delegates.

Sanders put up a good fight, but Clinton has almost certainly won the nomination. She will go to the convention with a majority of the pledged delegates unless Sanders pulls off a miracle and wins 67% of the ones left to be chosen.

Voters in the Democratic Party have spoken, and they have chosen Clinton over Sanders. That doesn’t mean Sanders wouldn’t be a stronger candidate in November, when the nominee must also win the votes of millions of independents. But it does mean that the party has chosen her.

If Sanders and his supporters were democrats (in either the small “d” or capital “D” senses), they’d accept the results and move on to other battles, such as defeating Donald Trump in November, or electing more Democrats to the House and Senate, or work to elect more progressives at the state and local levels (where the Republicans have been cleaning the Democrats’ clock for years).

But Sanders isn’t accepting his defeat gracefully. He’s not accepting it at all. He’s encouraging his supporters to believe, somehow, that this election has been stolen from him. The fracas in Nevada last weekend over the seating of four delegates in a state that Clinton won handily at the caucus phase could presage a bigger and more desperate protest at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

What happened in Nevada and in the primary season so far isn’t a theft. It’s just hardball politics, where candidates and campaigns try to out-organize and out-strategize their opponents within a system with clearly defined rules. Clinton’s supporters were simply better at politics than Sanders’ supporters were.

“But the system is corrupt!” Bernie’s supporters say. Which may be true, but no one forced Sanders to enter the Democratic primaries. He knew the rules when he became a Democrat. He knew that many states allow only registered Democrats to vote in primaries and caucuses. He knew that many state parties have extremely complex rules about how delegates are chosen. He knew that the establishment in the Democratic Party wouldn’t support him, because he had been saying they were corrupt toadies of corporations.

He knew that the party would resist his revolution. That’s why he called it a revolution, and not merely a campaign.

These rules have been in place for years, if not decades. They are not some new trick designed to steal the election from Sanders. Arguing at the last minute that the rules should be changed is like a batter who’s swung and missed three times demanding that the rules be changed to allow a fourth swing. Arguing that the rules should be changed now that you’ve lost is not what democrats (in either sense) do.

None of this bickering would matter much, except that the Democratic Party is the only institution left in America that can protect us from the tyranny of Donald Trump.

Destroying the Democratic Party might be the only way to advance the revolution that Sanders and his people so desperately desire and that this country may need. But the revolution that would follow the destruction of the Democratic Party would be much more likely to be a fascist takeover from the right than an enlightened revolution from the left.

Right now, Bernie Sanders is very nearly the most powerful person in America. What he does next could decide the November election, and our fate. What does he want? To Bern it down? Or to bow out?