In the rush since his announcement, people all over the internet are rushing to lay all sorts of accomplishments at Sanders’ feet. A lot of them are hand-waving — Bernie was talking Medicare-for-All before anyone else, and that’s why we’re talking about it now — but there’s one thing in particular that is not only pissing this white guy off but is going to make a lot of other people angry: Claiming that the results of the 2018 elections were due to him.
Please don’t.
Those elections occurred because a certain man won the White House under an archaic set of rules invented to keep the early country together. Because of him, a whole lot of women marched and then took a big chance and ran in campaigns that weren’t in safe places. Because of him, scientists realized that couldn’t keep staring at their computer screens and microscopes but some would have to engage in politics to keep science alive.
Bernie did make some endorsements, but the results weren’t spectacular. Not too many of the endorsements by his Our Revolution group won. A lot of his endorsements later, like Tammy Duckworth, weren’t really daring picks. I know someone will try to argue that his picks drove the conversation left, but women in Oklahoma were running on education because the state GOP was failing them, women here in Texas were running because the state was shutting down health care for mothers, causing us to have the worst survival rate in the industrial world.
The point of this is that we should not paint Bernie as the savior of the party he doesn’t really want to be part of. There are plenty of people that did a lot of rescuing, as we see in the House Democratic makeup. Not only the winners, but those who helped them get elected, who showed up to vote when too many of us whites think we can take our ball home if we don’t win our particular battle. And those are the people who will guide this party, because they having invested their time in it.