The End of the Beginning for the Bernie Sanders Movement
THE END OF THE BEGINNING FOR THE BERNIE SANDERS MOVEMENT
THE FIGHT DOESN'T END IN NOVEMBER — THAT'S WHEN IT TRULY STARTS
EZEKIEL KWEKU
If his political revolution doesn’t want to stall out, it has to change. Sanders’s movement has to remake itself if it wants to have a chance to remake America.
The primary challenge Sanders has ahead of him isn’t to ensure the party unifies behind Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump will do most of that work for him. For all that has been made of the procedural and rhetorical hardball Sanders has been playing in order to get the nomination, his justification for his tactics — scrounging every pledged delegate and superdelegate he can find, deriding closed primaries, and alleging of corporate media bias — isn’t that Clinton is an illegitimate candidate. It is that a Donald Trump presidency would be, in Sanders’s words, “a disaster,” and that the best way of averting that disaster is for the Democrats to nominate Sanders.
Sanders has revealed people’s widespread dissatisfaction with the political status quo, and he’s shown that there’s a constituency both inside and outside the Democratic Party for the robust liberalism that he offers. But for his fledgling grassroots movement to avoid withering after the election, Sanders needs to figure out how to keep his supporters mobilized. Dissatisfaction with the system and the outcomes the system churns out needs to be channeled into either working outside the system or becoming a part of the system to change it from the inside. Engaging once every four years is not enough.
Sanders may not win the presidency, but if progressives up our game, history may remember him as the most important candidate of 2016.