I told a bunch of libs a prophecy back in 2016 and again in 2020 that bernie sanders was not radical, and represented a deep compromise that a lot of people on the left put up with in order to have any kind of ideological penetration into mainstream political discourse; as well as an attempt stop the bleeding for a nation that a) absolutely doesn't deserve to have the bleeding stopped and b) was riding on the hope that literally any of the machinery of power worked as advertised so that maybe (real) incremental work could be done to bring things to a stable and less globally destructive place. That if (when) he failed, that represented a full break for a lot of people. He was a canary set out despite already knowing the mine was toxic - but when he came up dead that was going to be it. There would be no walking back from the increasing contradictions of capitalism, there would be no stopping the reaction to those conditions.

I wasn't fully radicalized - I hadn't abandoned electoralism entirely yet - but lots of smart and correct people said this was a pointless maneuver and a waste of emotion and resources, and would just disillusion new activists before they could make a difference. It still feels necessary, to have a public display that dispelled the illusion of business as usual that people still largely believed. It was and (for a shrinking number of Americans) still is a refuge and a cope that things work the way we're told.

I feel like Bernie managed to permanently damage the liberal establishment's air of civility and pragmatism, because suppressing the commie became more important - i feel like I saw the mask slip the most not for Trump, but for Bernie, and I think American leftists really needed to see that happen.

Any kind of retrospective defending or reflecting on Bernie as "correct" is bittersweet. Too little too late. Bernie fucking sucks. He sucked in 2016, and in 2020, and he was only useful because he was willing to publically attack capitalism and empire rhetorically. If he had gained power, if he had any agency to act on his heart he'd have done some stuff that would leave us in a maybe more stable position and perhaps more positive goodwill for socialism among the credulous - which might be a less fucked playing field for leftism, but nobody should pretend he was gonna save anything or spearhead the vanguard.

The canary is dead, and going "gosh their song was so pretty I wish they were still alive" feels really useless coming from the gasses that killed it.