Bernie Sanders Drops Out of Presidential Race

The writing has been on the wall that Bernie’s campaign was coming to an end for about a month now; since the COVID-19 pandemic began ramping up in the United States, the primary season was more or less over. And today, Bernie Sanders ended his campaign to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president. Now, Joe Biden is the only Democrat still running for the party’s nomination, so it’s all but guaranteed that he will be the candidate facing off against Trump in November.

I think this is for the best. As it stands, I’m not much of a Biden fan, but I think he represents less of a harm to our democracy than a Sanders presidency would. I don’t say this because Bernie branded himself as a Democratic Socialist — I actually think some of his ideas that have been branded as “socialist” are deeply American — this is a good opportunity to put preconceptions aside and evaluate someone based on their ideas rather than their labels. I felt like his candidacy was a threat to democracy because of he followers. His followers hailed him as a political diety who could do no wrong, they had a tendency to behave like outright fascists in their unrelenting defense of Sanders and unprovoked attacks on anyone who asked innocent questions about the logistics of their platform, and they maintained an aggressive intolerance for opinions that didn’t align perfectly with theirs (see: Deontologists vs. Consequentialists). Fascism does not belong to the far right, and the Bernie Bros were proof of that.

Distrubingly, many of Bernie’s supporters placed Bernie on such a high platform that they were not necessarily willing to vote for another democratic candidate should Bernie not secure the nomination. Given this, Biden will have to move a little more to the left to bring some of Bernie’s followers into his campaign (though he’ll have to be careful as to not alienate some of his most moderate supporters by moving too far to the left too quickly), and lot of people have said that combatting climate change is an issue where Biden could afford to adopt some more progressive policies to help encourage the Bernie Bros to join his campaign. I digress: there will be plenty more punditry to come in the following months.

All in all, Bernie has done a lot over the course of his career to move the political conversation in the United States to the left, and he should be proud of the way he has been able to bring some elements of his platform that were once considered radical into the mainstream. Even if he won’t be the president to enact the changes he’s fought for, he has still been instrumental in bringing them to fruition.