Movements: Eric Levitz

The Essential Work The politics of COVID-19 pick up where Bernie Sanders left off.

- Eric Levitz

THE BERNIE SANDERS CAMPAIGN was ahead of its time. Had the Democratic primary been held in the year 2040, the socialist’s overwhelming support among millennials and Zoomers would have made him the presumptive nominee by mid-March (for the purposes of this hypothetical, Sanders remains spry at age 98 and human civilization remains a thing in 20 years). Although the Vermont senator ended his 2020 campaign on April 8 with a smaller coalition than he’d assembled four years prior, his resilient hold on a supermajority of voters under 30— combined with that cohort’s exceptionally left-wing views in policy polling— suggests that the moral arc of the Democratic Party bends toward Sandersism.

It’s possible that his timing was off not by 20 years but by just a few months. Had our present nightmare come a bit sooner, that arc may have been much shorter. The Democratic primary was principally contested in a world that bears little resemblance to the one we now live in. By the time Joe Biden’s promise of a return to normalcy had lost all plausibility, though, Sanders’s “political revolution” had already lost the same. The covid-19 pandemic foreclosed America’s path back to some facsimile of the Obama era. Yet it did so only after Super Tuesday had all but foreclosed Sanders’s path to the Democratic nomination.