1/ The Sanders movement was--and is--the most significant force on the broad left in the United States, still the world's most powerful capitalist state, in decades. If it failed to capture state power at the presidential level, now as in 2015-16, this is so not because of its

2/ supposedly excessive commitment to "electoralism". Just talk to some of the millions who have participated in demonstrations, pushed social movements forward, and deepened their involvement in unions. Without this movement, Ocasio-Cortez and many others are nowhere near

3/ DC, racialized immiseration of the sort you see in Flint receives significantly less attention, the DSA sees none of the significant growth it's experienced since 2016, and prospects for meaningful action on climate change are even lower than before. At root, Sanders was

4/ and is a democratic socialist with a penchant for Keynesian demand management. It speaks volumes about the devastation wrought by half a century of hyper-financialization that even this kind of position, which is not "radical" in any historically or politically meaningful

5/ sense, was thought excessive by so many, on the supposed "left" as elsewhere. And it is certainly not surprising that the capitalist classes, in the US and elsewhere, reacted with as much venom as they did, resorting, when push came to shove, to the customary mixture of brute

6/ coercive power, including the coercive power of law (involving even the US Supreme Court, with its deplorable and patently unjustifiable decision to force Wisconsin voters to risk their health during a f**king pandemic), character assassination, backroom deal-making, and

7/ crass opportunism. And all of this to upgrade the candidacy of ... Joe Biden, a man whose policies are abysmal, who was on the right wing of this joint criminal enterprise they call the "Democratic Party" a generation ago, and who seems almost destined to be defeated.

8/ Bottom line: Think what you will, but Sanders deserves a world of respect, the kind that very few others do.