Bernie Sanders has transformed American politics. In his message yesterday to supporters, in which he announced the suspension of his 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, he argued that a “new vision for America is what our campaign has been about and what, in fact, we have accomplished.” The senator explained that: “Few would deny that over the course of the past five years, our movement has won the ideological struggle. In so-called red states and blue states and purple states, a majority of the American people now understand that we must raise the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour, that we must guarantee health care as a right to all of our people, that we must transform our energy system away from fossil fuel, and that higher education must be available to all, regardless of income.”
Read: What do progressives do now?
Many ideological battles have already been won—and others are likely to be won in the months and years to come, as policy makers wrestle with the reality that ideas once considered radical are now necessary responses to the coronavirus pandemic and the economic chaos it has spawned. But the greatest accomplishment of the Sanders campaign has less to do with moving good ideas out of the “radical” category and into the mainstream and more to do with inspiring the people who will carry those ideas forward. I am not alone in this faith. Just last week, when we spoke at length about the campaign he was then “assessing,” Sanders told me that “the future of this country does not rest with people who are 75 or 80 years of age. It rests with the young people. In terms of ideology, we are winning young people overwhelmingly. Overwhelmingly. I’m not just talking about my campaign. I’m talking about where the young people of this country are coming from. They are coming from a very, very different place, a very deep, different place than is the Democratic establishment.”