There Are Three Political Parties in the United States

[Hortensis]

34. Oh, absolutely! We're not talking Democrats who used Sanders

to pressure the party to "do more." They're Democrats. They're us.

When it comes to Sanders's subset of Disgruntleds, we're talking about both those angry whites who went to Trump by way of Sanders to fight against too much equality and also the always intransigent leftists who refused to vote Democrat in 2016, 2018, and 2020 (also 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, etc). They all claimed to be "Progressive" because that's the label Sanders gave them, but half voted Republican in 2016 and the other half voted third party -- also to defeat America's progressive party.

Sanders didn't exactly have to drug his so-called "purists" to make them believe Democrats were corrupt and "just as bad." They always knew and insisted that, and that's what he used to scoop this leaderless group up when Elizabeth Warren decided not to run in 2015. She wouldn't have run a populist anti-Democratic campaign anyway, ceding the most intransigent to Jill Stein or some other anti-Democratic whackjob.