It’s absolutely mind-boggling to me how many people *refuse* to engage the various reasons why Bernie lost other than “THE DNC HAD IT OUT FOR HIM”, then turn around and go “RUSSIAGATE IS EXCUSING HILLARY FOR RUNNING A BAD CAMPAIGN”.

An outsider politician who, for most of his ridiculously long political career, prided himself on *not* being part of the Democratic Party somehow managed to come in second *twice* in that very party’s primary.

That’s hella impressive, folks.

He managed to beat out multiple other long-established members of the party

AND A LITERAL BILLIONAIRE WITH THEIR OWN MEDIA EMPIRE RUNNING AGAINST HIM.

The amount of people who look at Bloomberg’s shit run and conclude “yup, CEOs stopped Bernie” is absolutely astounding.

I’m not downplaying the rich and their influence on politics.

But pretending like rich people are the only power base in the Dem party is just completely naive and will set you up for continued failure.

I’ll remind you, money in politics is a *very* real issue. Like, the last time we had an even moderately viable third party candidate, they were a millionaire who almost exclusively self-funded their campaign.

Then when they were done, that party’s funding/influence dried up.

But the fact that a capital-B-Billionaire like Bloomberg could be readily rejected by both the establishment and Dem voters shows “but the rich” is a one-dimensional analysis.

And we can’t afford that if we want to keep pushing the Dems left.

Another aspect to this flawed campaign is assuming that the majority of the Dem voting body were single-issue voters who desired further-left solutions, or that by providing either one of these, such voters would suddenly come out of the woodworks.

Turns out, not so much.

Turns out, after 4 years of Trump being Pissbaby in Chief, most of the Dem electorate, and many of the people who had previously tuned out, desired a return to “normal”.

“Normal”, I’ll remind you, is still super-fuckin-bad. But at least it’s not “Prez using the DOJ to prosecute political opponents and sell beans on Twitter atop the Resolute Desk” bad.

Bernie’s calculus failed to take any and all of this into account.

The fact that people continue to pound the drum of “Healthcare pls” memes shows that not only have they not learned this, but that they’ve decided to shit on the democratic process to avoid any self-reflection.

This is a great addendum touching on how Bernie's surrogates kneecapped his campaign. https://twitter.com/SysFin/status/1303698916852953090?s=19