It was only seven weeks ago that Bernie Sanders was riding high off of his incredible early primary victories, winning the popular vote in Iowa and outright winning the pledged delegate counts in New Hampshire and Nevada.

After Joe Biden’s win with conservative South Carolinian’s, though, the tides began to turn; within a few days of Biden’s South Carolina victory, the entire Democratic political establishment coalesced around Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee. Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar swiftly dropped out of the presidential race, thus pushing much of their supporters over to Team Joe. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren refused to drop out until after Biden’s enormous victories on Super Tuesday and her embarrassing lose in her home state, and even then, refusing to support Sanders, despite the fact that she appeared more ideologically aligned with him than Biden.

Since Sanders dropped out of the presidential race, many pundits, commentators, and bloggers have provided their postmortems of the Sanders campaign, explaining what he did right and things that he could’ve done better. Most of the non-establishment writers, though, seem to agree on one thing: the neo-liberal, corporate-friendly wing of the Democratic Party stopped at nothing to defeat Sanders, and their plight was successful.

Bernie Sanders during a campaign event (source).

How did this all come about? Wasn’t Sanders doing so much better than Biden up until South Carolina? Didn’t Sanders campaign much more vigorously than Biden, holding more rallies and having a more robust ground game than the former vice president?

Yes, however, the primary victory still went to Biden, and we can thank Barack Obama for that.

No I am not resurrecting the #ThanksObama meme, where we made fun of Republicans for trying to blame everything on Obama. At least in terms of the 2020 Democratic primaries, though, we can certainly blame Obama for helping to secure Biden’s status as the presumptive Democratic nominee.

It all began in late 2019. Obama was aware that any overt behaviors to sway the course of the primaries would alienate progressives, the same group of people whom he betrayed after running for president as a progressive in 2008 just to lead as a corporatist neo-liberal after taking office. However, he made a special exception for Bernie Sanders.

According to Obama advisers, while the former president would only intervene if things got “too ugly” by “providing guardrails” during the primaries, and while Obama would work “to unite the party when the nominee is clear”, this general policy would be different for Sanders. In fact, Obama said privately that, if Sanders were running away with the nomination, he would “speak up” to stop him.

That is exactly what he did.

Fast forward to the first few primary contests earlier this year. Sanders was doing remarkably well, as previously noted, but as Biden won South Carolina, his first primary victory in the thirty years he has been running for president, Obama helped propel the remaining candidates to coalesce around Biden.

According to Politico:

As the race narrowed to Biden and Sanders, interest among pro-Biden Democrats for Obama to speak up spiked and the political press was on the hunt for any indications of Obama choosing sides. Obama had a delicate task. Everyone knew whom he preferred, and yet he could not be seen as helping organize the massive party-wide show of force in favor of Biden that emerged from South Carolina through Super Tuesday. Obama’s aides forcefully reiterated that he was scrupulously not intervening. But some of his aides now concede that behind the scenes Obama played a role in nudging things in Biden’s direction at the crucial moment when the Biden team was organizing former candidates to coalesce around Biden.

While Obama was careful to make his presence during the 2020 primaries as discreet as possible, the results were as bombastic as they could get: over the course of a few days, the primaries shifted from a Bernie blowout to a Biden bonanza, and we thank Obama for orchestrating this show.

One of the biggest gripes that progressives had during the 2016 Democratic primaries was that the Democratic Party establishment clearly had their thumbs on the scales in-favor of Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately, while the Party made it far less obvious this time around, they still worked undercover to push Biden to the nomination, despite his lackluster appeal, toxicity amongst progressives, and an inability to inspire or spark any sort of enthusiasm throughout the base of the party.

The incredibly unfair efforts that the Democratic Party undertook to propel Biden to the nomination, in conjunction with the corporate media’s constant propaganda that painted Biden as the more “electable” candidate who could beat Donald Trump, manufactured an obnoxious unearned victory for Joe Biden.

Barack Obama during his presidential inauguration (source).

It is hard to imagine that, twelve years ago, we were enthralled with Barack Obama, a man who inspired us to dream about “hope” and “change” in the midst of a crashing economy and a failed Republican administration, and that, a dozen years later, we see Obama’s current manipulative behaviors as totally unsurprising. It is an absolute shame that someone who sold the idea that change was truly possible just a few short years ago is now deemed a neo-liberal, corporatist failure in the eyes of progressives.

Now that Biden has all but secured his primary victory, many progressives are looking forward to 2024, under the assumption that Donald Trump will trounce Biden this November. It has got me thinking, though: if the Democratic Party establishment has demonstrated to the American people that they are willing to rig the elections to favor their preferred candidates, what hope do we have of securing a progressive nominee in 2024, or any other future presidential primary for that matter?

As I did in 2016, I will vote for the Green Party candidate in November, as Joe Biden is an unacceptable candidate for president, but I will continue to enthusiastically support and donate to Democratic candidates who are true progressives in future elections, but as the Democratic Party continues losing with their laughable hand-picked candidates, I strongly believe that we should send the message that our votes should not be taken for granted and that, if they continue demonstrating their apathy for young people, the working class, and progressives as a whole, then we should withhold our votes until they signal a true desire to change.

If the establishment continues tipping the scales in-favor of their preferred candidates, we should stop playing their games and refuse to endorse their anointed, milquetoast politicians.

The greatest power that we wield is our vote, and the Democratic establishment must finally stop taking us for granted.