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 who had taken them so far, but not far enough. On its website (the print edition is published quarterly) it uncorked a choral suite of tributes, elegies, and inspirational messages urging supporters to keep their chins up, their eyes on the horizon, their gunpowder dry, a song in their hearts: “Bernie Supporters, Don’t Give Up,” “We Lost the Battle, but We’ll Win the War,” “Bernie Lost. But His Legacy Will Only Grow.” In this spirit, the magazine’s editor and founder, Bhaksara Sunkara, author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality, conducted a postmortem requiem on YouTube with his Jacobin comrades processing their grief and commiserating over their disappointment. Near the end of the ceremony, Sunkara declared that Bernie’s legacy would be as a moral hero akin to Martin Luther King, Mother Jones, and Eugene V. Debs. Which offered a measure of bittersweet consolation, but was not what Sunkara had originally, thirstily desired. “I wanted him to be fucking Lenin. I wanted him to take power and institute change.” But the Bernie train never reached the Finland Station, leaving the Jacobins cooling their heels on the platform and craning their necks in vain. Politically and emotionally they had banked everything on him. “Socialism is the name of our desire,” Irving Howe and Lewis Coser had famously written, and for long fallow seasons that desire lay slumbrous on the lips until awakened by Bernie Sanders, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, the former mayor of Burlington, Vermont, the junior senator of that state, and lifelong champion of the underdog. Where so many longtime Washington figures had been led astray by sinecures, Aspen conferences, and unlimited canapes, Sanders had been fighting the good fight for decades without being co-opted by Georgetown insiders and neoliberal think tanks, like a protest singer who had never gone electric. He might not be a profound thinker or a sonorously eloquent orator (on a tired day he can sound like a hoarse seagull), and his legislative achievement may be a bit scanty, but his tireless ability to keep pounding the same nails appealed to youthful activists that had come to distrust or even detest the lofty cadences of Barack Obama now that he was gone from office and appeared to halo into Oprah-hood. Eight years of beguilement and what had it materially gotten them? grumbled millennials slumped under student debt and toiling in unpaid internships. What Bernie lacked in movie-poster charisma could be furnished by Jacobin, which emblazoned him as a lion in winter. So confident was Jacobin that the next great moment in history was within its grasp that in the winter of 2019 it devoted a special issue to the presidency of Bernie Sanders, whose cover, adorned with an oval portrait of Sanders gazing skyward, proclaimed: “I, President of the United States and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of The Future.” Subheads emphasized that this was not just an issue of a magazine, a mere collation of ink and paper, it was the beginning of a crusade — a twenty-year plan to remake America. Avengers, assemble! At the public launch of the “I, President” issue, Sunkara rhetorically asked, “Is there a point in spending all day trying to explain, like, the Marxist theory of exploitation to some 18-year-old? Yes! Because that kid might be the next Bernie Sanders.” Alas, Jacobin made the mistake of counting their red berets before they were hatched, and now the issue is fated to become a collector’s item, a poignant keepsake of what might have been. Had Sanders remained in the race and won the presidency, Jacobin would have been as credited, identified, and intimately associated with the country’s first socialist administration as William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review was with Ronald Reagan’s. Jacobin could have functioned as its ad hoc brain trust, or at least its nagging conscience. From that carousel of possibilities the magazine instead finds itself reckoning with the divorce of its socialist platform from its standard bearer, facing the prospect of being just another journal of opinion jousting for attention. No longer ramped up as a Bernie launch vehicle, Jacobin must tend to the churning ardor
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