Liberties

Wednesday, April 8th…a date etched in black for socialists and progressives, marking the end of a beautiful fantasy. It was on that doleful day that Senator Bernie Sanders — acknowledging the inevitable, having depleted his pocketful of dreams — announced the suspension of his presidential campaign. It was the sagging anticlimax to an electoral saga that came in like a lion and went out with a wheeze. For months the pieces had been falling into place for Sanders to secure the Democratic nomination, only to fall apart in rapid slow motion on successive Super Tuesdays, a reversal of fortune that left political savants even more dumbstruck than usual. Taking to social media, some of Sanders’ most fervent and stalwart supporters in journalism, punditry, and podcasting responded to the news of his withdrawal with the stoical grace we’ve come to expect from these scarlet ninja. Shuja Haider, a high-profile leftist polemicist who’s appeared in the Guardian, The Believer, and the New York Times, tweeted: “Well the democratic party just officially lost the support and participation of an entire generation. Congratulations assholes.” (On Twitter, commas and capital letters are considered optional, even a trifle fussy.) Will Menaker, a fur-bearing alpha member of the ever popular Chapo Trap House podcast (the audio clubhouse of the self-proclaimed “dirtbag left”), declared that with Bernie out of the race, Joe Biden, “has his work cut out for him when it comes to winning the votes of a restive Left that distrusts and dislikes him. It’s not impossible if he starts now by sucking my dick.” Others were equally pithy. It fell upon Jacobin, the neo-Marxist quarterly and church of the one true faith, to lend a touch of class to the valedictory outpourings. Political admiration mingled with personal affection as it paid homage to the man