cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21981134
God, I hate it so much.
I love Bernie. Bernie probably WOULD have won the general election.
But that's not the same as saying the primary was stolen. In 2016, he benefitted greatly from anti-Clinton protest votes, and was up against a woman who had spent the past ~20 or so years preparing for a presidential run, while he tossed his hat into the ring expecting to get a few minutes of airtime and ended up finding that the youth was finally ready to receive his message, and had to build a nationwide ground-game from the bottom up. It is a miracle that he got as close to the nomination as he did; and yet it was nowhere near close enough to lend credence to accusations of it being stolen from him. I wish it was otherwise - I wish unimaginative, comfortable, suburban moderates weren't such a massive vote in Dem primaries - but they are.
In 2020, he was outpolitiked, and as much as it was shitty that the moderates conspired to wait until the last moment to drop out and endorse the sole remaining moderate candidate, that, quite literally is politics. Negotiations and the forming of coalitions. The failure of the progressives to do the same and rally around Bernie was just the nail in the coffin.
I voted for Bernie twice, only because I didn't have a third chance to do so. I love Bernie. Bernie would've improved this country, even with Congress obstructing him at every turn. Bernie would have been a net good. But it wasn't the DNC which stopped him, or Clinton's mind-control machines.
We failed him.
And we must keep that in mind when (or if, considering our most recent general election result) the next progressive candidate comes around. We must not fail them the way we failed to come through for Bernie.