How does one destroy a movement that has aroused so much hope for so many people? How does one dismantle, in a single blow, the credibility of a candidate whose challenge to the establishment is clear as day, while offering up nothing but the same worn-out mediocrity to a worn-out people? Over the course of the last few days, the media outlets have attempted to show us just how this is done.

In a sweeping condemnation by the media class, Bernie Sanders has been castigated, chewed-out, spit on, and condemned for the reports of sexual harassment on his 2016 campaign trail. It is as if the centrist establishment, still bitter about their inability to win over the American masses in the last election, is embarking on its final act of revenge against Sanders for his sins of exposing the rot and filth of the Democratic leadership. More than revenge, in fact, but calculated strategy: it is an attempt to shoot down any threat to the ‘respectable,’ tried-and-tested favorites of the Democratic establishment before the threat of any progressive alternative comes to the fore. It is, in other words, a re-run of their own blackballing of him two years ago.

It should certainly strike one as suspicious that the numerous articles instantaneously coming out on the Sanders campaign are published exactly in tandem with headlines such as: the threat of Bernie Sanders fans “poisoning” another Democratic primary or “Where Elizabeth Warren differs from Bernie Sanders“ or “Should the Left Unite Behind Elizabeth Warren? or “The Essential Difference Between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren,“ etc., etc. It should certainly strike one as odd that, as soon as the announcement of Elizabeth Warren’s bid for presidency, as well as the increasing disregard for transparently centrist showmen like Beto O’Rourke, a full frontal assault on Sanders has begun before his campaign has even managed to take off. The owners of the Democratic Party, now superficially catering to the political demands of the progressive left, first must tie up their own loose ends. The same media class whose conspiracy of silence around Sanders’ snuffing-out in the 2016 primaries now elects to engage in a conspiracy of the opposite sort: in a rapid-succession of blows designed to cripple something they couldn’t entirely kill before. Before they can proceed on their own, the establishment has learned its lesson: better to reckon with the problem before it even comes to a head. No scruples about opportunism or double-standards can be brought up — they make no illusory pretenses to taking a higher ground, seeing as, for them, opposition to Trump is the content of their progressivism.

Ostensibly left-leaning outlets are sure to “blame Hillary Clinton’s general election defeat to Donald Trump in part on personal attacks on Clinton,” attacks which were “first made by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and his backers.” For the establishment media, it is no secret that the Democratic Party is, to put it bluntly, dry and unpopular. This is hardly a secret for anyone anymore. The electorate is beyond the point of disillusionment — they already are profoundly disillusioned, are under no false hopes that the Center will deliver. But that is no problem for those in power. They can be perfectly aware of their own unpopularity and still maintain their positions, because their task is not to plant the seeds of hope, but to crush it wherever it appears: to, cynically, reveal the hypocrisies, the shortcomings, the insufficiency of movements before their own standards. It should be a surprise to no one that the establishment media, arrogant as ever, has poured all its energy into lambasting Sanders exclusively for that which manifests itself universally, not the least in their own ranks. It should be no surprise that they should seek to wipe the slate clean before their own racehorses are stabled. Sanders’ successes in the 2016 primaries took them by surprise — now they engage in a preemptive strike to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

But the target of this orchestrated assault is not merely Sanders. In fact, Sanders’ persona is only incidental, and it is not Sanders the individual who the establishment fears. The real aim of this attempt to quickly deal with the specter of 2016 is the progressive movement, which Sanders is emblematic of. What Sanders represented then and what he represents now is something which is irreducible to him and exists quite beyond him. In fact, it exists even beyond his specific policies, or his political platform (which, although something to throw support behind, is certainly nothing new). Sanders is a symbol, an icon. Disregarding the serious differences in their stances as they actually exist, if we were to imagine Sanders on one end, and Warren on the other, and we imagine, further, that they have adopted the exact same platform, there would still be an irreconcilable gap between the two candidates. The difference between ‘Democratic Socialism’ (no matter how vacuous or unqualified the term is) and ‘Accountable Capitalism’ is so tremendous that they cannot even be said to both occupy the same political sphere. And, of course, they don’t: Sanders represents progressivism, and Warren the leftist PR team of centrism. The Democratic establishment’s peddling of Warren is their attempt to calcify the discursive successes Sanders has been able to achieve, thus preventing any further development of the momentum which had been given the green light. Their feigned ‘agreement’ with Sanders, including the friendly demeanor they exercise towards him (recall Joe Biden speaking of how he “loves the guy”), is nothing but a sham designed at neutering the real core of his movement.

It was Sanders’ successes which breathed life into the DSA, and it is highly unlikely that a self-proclaimed socialist like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would have labelled herself such and won a congressional seat without this inspiration of hope in an invigorated American left. If the centrist leadership of the Democratic Party has learned any lessons since 2016, it is that the upending of more Joe Crowley’s will be dealt with only by doubling down on their corruption. Only, now it is done far more mischievously: their message is we can do the Left better than the Left can. Like parasites, they opportunistically turn the slogans and vigor of the left against the left, with the remainder being only a defeated resignation before the status quo.

The left has always stood at the forefront of the anti-sexist struggle, and it is a given that there are definite standards needed that must take serious and resolute action against sexual harassment of any kind. Nobody, not the least leftists, should like to exempt the Sanders campaign from this standard. But it is something of a curiosity that the media would focus on an issue, which today is a problem everywhere, on the Sanders campaign specifically — and especially at this time in particular, despite such claims of harassment being circulated around well before this past week. Sexual harassment is hardly something unique to the Sanders campaign, and there is absolutely no reason to believe it disproportionately manifested itself in it. So why the exclusive focus on holding Bernie Sanders responsible? Why the intensity of such an assault by the media on this instance alone?

The claim that will be made by the lickspittles of the ruling order is that they are only showing the hypocrisy of self-proclaimed progressives, and that such a report makes questionable Sanders’ feminist credentials (especially in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement). But this is nothing but pure opportunism, seeing as, first of all, it is bullshit (in every instance of pay inequity being reported, for an example, the Sanders campaign has corrected it), and, second of all, the message’s function is not to seriously combat sexism. If that were the case, the tone would not be one of relentlessly incriminating Sanders himself as a sexist, nor would it have reached such cretinous proportions as this. The one and only function of this elitist outcry at Sanders’ apparent responsibility for sexism on his campaign trail is to destroy faith in anything to the left of what is currently on the table. It is a message of demoralization: that even the leader of the progressive camp is, as it turns out, a sexist and therefore in no way eligible to stand against Trump. If this were not the case, i.e., if this was not an orchestrated hit-job on the left, then we should expect the same kind of scrutiny directed at the campaign of all the other candidates who have had problems in sexual harassment. Not only that, but there wouldn’t be such a clear attempt to rub salt in the wounds which have already been pointed out and addressed by Sanders himself.

The progressive movement, of which Sanders is a symbol of, is something the establishment wants to see in despair. They want leftists across the country to, shamefully, confront the fact that we are not yet living in a heaven on earth, and to therefore suck it up and accept the cynical truths asserted to be a given by those in power. The current campaign against Sanders is misleading — in its weaponization by the establishment, it is but is the centrist attempting to belittle and demoralize leftists who were encouraged by Senator Sanders’ message to take on the scoundrels and hypocrites in the Democratic Party. The message is: you claim to be on the left, and yet you share in the problems everyone else is experiencing. It is a reformulation of that tireless philistine wisdom: you claim to be a leftist, and yet you type on MacBook. It is a cyncial wisdom because the message is not of the speaker occupying a purer, or higher place exempt from the controversy at hand, but the exact opposite: it is the conservative message exclaiming the futility of trying to change the world, and pointing to the existence of present imperfections as proof of “the reality” of the world. Its message is: You dare to try and change the world, and yet you, like us, are beholden to its problems. You claim to struggle against gender inequality and sexual assault, and yet your campaign, like those you ran against, had instances of it. In this way, it is able to parasitically use the language of the left to destroy it. It skirts over the left’s own place in the actually-existing struggles today, namely, those which do more than simply wish away sexual harassment.

Like the internal DSA controversies over ableism, the demand made by the cynical observer is that the campaigns like Sanders’ must first be a perfect materialization of its own values before it can dare to engage in the world outside of it. It is the oldest trick in the book employed by spineless ideologues: appearing as an innocuous attempt to point out really-existing flaws and hypocrisies, in practice it demands only capitulation to the ruling discourse and the acceptance of such flaws and hypocrisies.

If Sanders’ campaign had a problem with sexual harassment, this is a problem that will have to be overcome, and this is something already addressed by Sanders among others. That much is clear. What is also clear, however, is that overcoming this problem has absolutely nothing to do with decrying a movement which stands for the guarantee of reproductive freedom, single-payer healthcare, paid family leave, and wage equity. They are doing much less than throwing the baby out with the bathwater — they are dumping out the baby and leaving the dirty bathwater. They are attempting to destroy the possibility of another progressive campaign, but in doing so, they are destroying the only real force capable of dealing with sexism as it exists institutionally, and are attempting to discredit further encroachments on the centrist leadership.

They think they have caught leftists with their pants down. But in reality, all they have shown is that the Democratic Party, far from being the party of hope and change, can offer up nothing except a more “accountable” capitalism, a more conscientious world. That is the extent of their willingness to appease the left. Only underneath do we find the content of what all this means: the depressed admission that every attempt to engage in something more than wishful thinking is doomed to failure. If half-assing progressive stances is something people see through, the professional bullshitter class have shown their own proclivity towards manipulation and marginalization (“Alas, despite what we thought he was, it turns out Sanders is just another sexist”).

The articles bitterly ruminating on the “personal attacks” by Senator Sanders and others are the same ones to recognize, soberly, that hacks like O’Rourke don’t meet up to the “litmus test on free college tuition,” although they are more than happy–in a desperate attempt to appeal to a younger generation–to showcase his support for the legalization of marijuana. Beto, who “doesn’t know if [he’s] a progressive,” is “for everyone.” He is for everyone — like the Democratic establishment, who, being for everyone, doesn’t want to be too hard on the billionaires — the “1%” of first OWS, then the Sanders movement; a 1% which Joe Biden assures us “aren’t the bad guys” (of course, we ought to be sympathetic to Biden here — it is incredibly difficult to view “those at the top as bad guys” when you are up there with them).

This is how the the centrist establishment operates: either bite the bullet and compromise (the deregulation of marijuana and of Wall Street, in Beto’s case) or end up with another four years of Trump. It exists–or we should say, parasitically subsists–on the perpetual thrashing of hope. The cynical ideologues of the ruling class, peddling those sanctified truths derived from ‘the experts,’ can hardly hide their contempt for democracy any longer: if they can’t win the people over, they resort to destroying the people’s faith in something better. To dissuade leftist pressures in the Party, the centrist Democrats resort to opportunistically kicking in its emblematic figures before they can offer something beyond the false dichotomy of right-populism and centrist technocracy. They know that, with Trump, they can at least survive by playing the role of the lesser of two evils. If anything, the Trump presidency has opened up the opportunity for anemic centrists to cast themselves as the sole guardians of democracy against right wing and–increasingly–left wing extremism, all the while slowly dismantling democratic institutions and neutering any real progressive momentum (just as Macron had in France, in his staving off of Le Pen).

The greatest threat to the establishment doesn’t come from the right, but from the left. And the Democratic Party knows this. Centrist Democrats like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry have both compromised with the emerging fascism, now conceding the necessity of restrictions on immigration to prevent the rise of the populist right. The centrists of the Party have shown that they are more than willing to cast off their own pretenses to the left and meet the right halfway when it becomes politically expedient — just as they have shown that talk about democratic choice for candidates became a joke after the primaries two years ago.

What the Democratic establishment wants, ultimately, is to have its cake and eat it too. They want to kick Bernie Sanders out of the limelight to make room for their preferred (i.e., bought-and-payed-for) candidates, but they realize there is a large part of the country that must be placated. Centrism, which is in itself already a compromise, thus peddles Elizabeth Warren to replace Sanders. If the latter comes out of this controversy disgraced, the Democrats are securing themselves with an established faux-radical on a short leash: their own Sanders in appearance, while still being able to pervert and impede the momentum Sanders symbolized. If it is a coincidence that these recent articles comparing the progressive credentials of Sanders and Warren (almost all of which, we should add, contain a clear preference for the latter) are cranked out amidst claims of Sanders’ negligence with regard to sexual harassment, then it is a very happy coincidence that just so happens to dovetail with the attempt to monopolize the playing field. All that it can appear to be is an orchestrated attempt by the establishment to discredit less tame candidates and secure a lane for their own.

The blackmail of the Democratic establishment is clear as day: progressives like Sanders should kowtow to its present leadership (which is the same thing as getting away from politics), or they alone will be held accountable to the same issues which are only symptomatic of something far deeper (and which only a radical politics, which seeks to get at the root of things, can address). Where centrists (and their pseudo-leftist lapdogs) seek to base their opposition to sexism and racism in thin air, the left sees word become flesh.

If anything has been revealed in all of this, it is not something surprising: we should expect no goodwill from establishment towards leftists in the future struggle. Sanders is an emblematic figure of the left, but he has–unlike figures like Richard Ojeda–the fault of simply being too polite. It is for this reason that, although there exists the pressing and immediate necessity of standing in solidarity with Sanders’ movement (and, simultaneously, taking into account and addressing the reports of sexual harassment), there is also the necessity of moving beyond him.

But this is not a task that can be arbitrarily wished into existence. Any idiot can tell you that Sanders is not the be-all end-all of a revitalized left. The real question is, ultimately, how his momentum is succeeded. And as it currently stands, the crowd on the side of Sanders is still an ambiguous one. Its character has not been sufficiently wrought out, and like any democratic movement, it is filled with contradictions that have yet to be developed to a critical point. The historical importance of the Sanders campaign is in its continuity from popular struggles like OWS (most observable in the prevalence of the same language — the 99% and the 1%) — he represents, fundamentally, the transit point by which grassroots progressive movements might find a political voice. The symbolic efficacy of a self-proclaimed socialist should not be played down, and this is something the establishment knows too well. This socialism, which is filled with petty bourgeois and purely opportunistic elements, is open-ended. But the fact of open-endedness is only an inevitable outcome of its arrest: its development is something to be worked out in the field of struggle. The stakes of what socialism will mean in the 21st Century is something which will not be discovered in the gossip-ridden echo-chambers of Twitter, where words mean less than shit, but in the actually-existing political struggle.

The meaning of socialism in the 21st Century, so far as it will amount to anything at all, will only be found out with the emergence of a revolutionary proletariat. But today, there is no ready-made proletariat to which one may just simply ‘appeal’ to. It has to, instead, be won out — which occurs in tandem with the development of the social antagonism. A socialism worthy of winning over and, ultimately, demarcating the proletarian from the petty bourgeois and opportunist elements in the People is something that can succeed only from within the present discourse of the People. That is why populism is not the ‘end’ of leftism anymore than OWS’s demands were, but it would be foolish and indeed reactionary to take sides against them for the sake of higher ends, for the basis of such ‘higher ends’ is nonexisting. Such “higher ends” can exist only in the whimsical fancy of metropolitan ‘socialists,’ i.e., the foremost retardant in the development of a socialist intelligentsia. Instead of risking their hide to take a side in actually existing antagonisms, they imagine themselves to be occupying a place exempt from it, thus refusing to see their own accountability in it. Any engagement with the world as it exists is to taint the purity of their positions (as dignified anarcho-hipsters); it is to immediately force them into, painfully, recognizing the premises of their very existence. It is is only from the insulation of their islands of pure ‘socialism’, i.e., in the recesses of twitter or academia, that the petty bourgeoisie can safely and surely conduct their mercenary work against the left as it struggles to be born. Sanders’ sin in the eyes of the hipster left is in engaging in this world of politics, i.e., in refusing to play ball with the self-masturbatory and ethereal discourse of the university.

What is necessary is thus no sort of resigned quibbling with the world as it actually exists, nor with the recognized inadequacies and inconsistencies of the Sanders campaign, but the intensification of the contradictions within them (i.e., the very thing that makes them ‘progressive’ or leftist in the first place). One cannot succeed Sanders’ horizon without passing through it. Just as Sanders is the animation of the limits of the horizon of OWS, a new proletarian socialism will place itself at the horizon of the democratic socialism symbolized up by Sanders. What Sanders achieves is, taken in itself, nothing particularly special — but what he achieves as per the lineage of progressive movements in the United States is the minimal conditions for a renewed proletarian subjectivity today: the demarcation of society along the lines of the people against the millionaires and billionaires, the 99% against the 1%.

In other words, it is bad and reactionary to, at a distance, cast down one’s criticism of its insufficient radicalism or its failure to apparently (because ‘leftists’ are only concerned with the appearance of things) materialize its demands of the ruling order. It is bad and reactionary to refuse to participate in it and dirty one’s hands in the development of a struggle which is open-ended. The ‘cancellation’ of Sanders by pseudo-leftists, who have, without coincidence, achieved a newfound vigor in the headlines made by CNN and MSNBC, can only amount to playing the Beautiful Soul — self-righteously disregarding political movements from their own secure position, so as not to face the stark reality that the world is not in perfect conformity with the contents of their head (i.e., that there is a lot of work to be done). Their complaint is that that left has failed to beautify itself, and that it can only engage in a critique of the world, it can only dare to step into the political arena, when it has perfected this process of beautification. Until this is complete (and it never will be), they are more than content with playing the establishment game of attempting to discredit Sanders’ campaign for its own inability to realize socialism here and now in the present. The alliance between the petty bourgeois left and the centrist establishment is already one well established, but now the tentacles of opportunism threaten to grasp at the very icons of the successes of the progressive movement.

It doesn’t matter what those on board the recent train of opportunistically sacking Sanders consider themselves — effectively, it is the same thing as capitulation to the ruling class. It is siding against the people. It is the same politics of Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden, or Beto O’Rourke. The enthusiastic and energetic assault against Bernie Sanders by the jackals of the metropolitan petty bourgeois left, which frames its disappointment in Sanders failing to be picture-perfect, objectively sides with the establishment. It matters little what they call themselves: anarchist, intersectionalist, Marxist, feminist. In refusing to dirty their hands in the world of practice, i.e., in refusing to recognize that the left will not be rejuvenated by #cancelling things which are #problematic, that there is in fact a world outside the narrow confines of the leftist’s head, they are effectively shills for the ruling order. In fact, they play a special function in it, employed as ideological shock-troopers by the academic establishment. That is the place of the pathetic pseudo-radicals of the American ‘left,’ that is their character. It is of absolutely no surprise that, come the first opportunity to do so, they focus their energy on doing the media’s dirty work on the ‘ground’ level: disparage, dispirit, demoralize.

They function as the auxiliary wing of ideological state apparatus, serving not to crush movements, but to crush hope in movements. That is the function of ideology today: not to provide a “positive vision of some utopian future,” but cynical resignation, an acceptance of “how the world really is.” This is precisely what is being undertaken explicitly by all the establishment media outlets and political pundits, but more subtly, by their allies in the opportunist pseudo-left. The establishment media has very little need to engage in this sort of work on their own. All they need to do is to say: bite!, and their pseudo-radical lackeys will bite.

It is the duty of the left to take seriously allegations of sexual harassment wherever they arise, and to fight ignorance and philistinism in its own ranks wherever it springs up. It is no excuse to downplay instances of it, even when it appears in our own backyard, just because it is, today, everywhere. But in the case of the recent barrage against Sanders, anyone who isn’t a turncoat or a scoundrel can recognize this as a clearly orchestrated attempt by the establishment to clear the field of any reminders of the hope in something other than Trump or in the current party leadership. It is an attempt to retake the reigns — to try and mitigate the chances of a leftist splitting the vote, of “poisoning another Democratic primary” (as if rigging it in 2016 wasn’t poison enough).

The struggle against the shortcomings and inconsistencies of the Sanders campaign and the struggle against the opportunists and the hypocrites of the Democratic establishment is one and the same the same fight. It is the deluge of the people, whose magnificent vengeance upon the Democratic establishment will leave it a smoldering ruin, which scares the metropolitan parasites shitless (because in that ruin lays the same fate of their own existence as a class). Like all social movements, Sanders’ campaign specifically, as well as those various struggles energized by it, is ambiguous. Like the People, it is ambiguous. Only through fidelity to the class struggle, through sharpening the contradictions within the People, do we combat both the philistines within and without. Only through fidelity to the social antagonism are the friends and the enemies of the People discerned more clearly. It is only in this constant splitting that a new proletariat will be forged, and with it, a socialism worthy of taking on a new era.