Would you vote Clinton, I asked, if only to stop the deportation of Hispanic immigrants or the introduction of policies that discriminate against Muslim Americans?

“That’s what a lot of people feel, but in my opinion, I do not believe that she is better,” Kurek said. “The things that we all fear in Trump we have already seen from Hillary Clinton. There’s no doubt in my mind that she would be bad if not worse. She’s pro-fracking. Our country is overheating. People are flooding. And we’re talking about building a wall. I think we have way bigger priorities that we need to focus on.” She plans to vote for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, or to write in Sanders if Ohio allows it. “I see that this world needs to change,” she explained, “and we’re the only ones that can do it.”

After several hours among the Bernie-or-Bust faction, the people who insist, at least for now, that they will not back Hillary Clinton, even to stop Donald Trump, I found that last assertion to be the common theme. Those present varied in their Clinton grievances, as well as what they liked most about Sanders, but almost everyone agreed that the Vermont senator and the movement to which he gave rise are “the only ones that can do it”––the only coalition that can transform an unjust America.

Due to their certainty about their own correctness, they see themselves as the most legitimate actors in U.S. politics, regardless of what happened at the ballot box or the DNC. A political rally in public space is, for them, the purest sort of civic participation. As one speaker put it: “This is what matters, not what happens in the arena.”

Together they chanted, “We are the 99 percent.”

In reality, like any political gathering at which participants insist on the need for a revolution that radically upends the existing order, those present did not represent a majority of Americans, let alone 99 percent, whether they are right or wrong.

They do not even represent a majority of Democrats.

“Tell me what democracy looks like!” a speaker shouted. “This is what democracy looks like!” the crowd replied in unison. In fact, democracy this year looks like this:

Jim Urquhart / Reuters

Sad!

That isn’t, however, how Bernie-or-Bust folks see it. They present themselves as democratic revolutionaries who represent the repressed voice of a supermajority-in-waiting.

Those who disagree with them are, by extension, treated as illegitimate—they are presumed to be oligarchs, or tools of billionaire donors like the Koch brothers, or allies of the Democratic establishment and Hillary Clinton who, in the telling of Bernie-or-Bust, stole the election. “They cheated. We’ve been swindled. We’ve been bamboozled,” rapper Core Element declared to cheers at the protest. The existence of principled disagreement with the Sanders revolution is never acknowledged.