Thread by @KaivanShroff

THREAD: it’s time for the media to admit Bernie cost Hillary the election.

“Medicare-for-all will never happen if we continue to elect corporate Democratic whores who are beholden to big pharma and the private insurance industry instead of us,” shouted Dr. Paul Song, speaking at a rally for 2016 Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

As a member of the Hillary For America digital team, this vitriol coming from a male Sanders supporter was unsurprising. In fact, Sanders had so demonized Clinton and “establishment” Democrats that by the 2016 general election, an estimated 12% of his supporters voted for Trump.

5 years later, it’s clear the Sanders movement was just a moment – and one that arguably sent American democracy into its current decline.

Sanders’s organization ‘Our Revolution’ has recently announced that it will be pivoting. Instead of championing their founder’s implausible ‘Medicare for All” plan, the group will focus on Medicare expansion – a plan Sanders-progressives have lambasted for years.

High-profile Sanders supporter David Klion, for example, tweeted “…you have to support Medicare For All or else you’re a bad person.” Sanders’s signature health policy is not the only issue his legacy group is doing away with.

The group will also deprioritize issues like the Green New Deal, a favorite among Democratic Socialists, to instead focus on “modest alternatives endorsed by President Biden.”

To a so-called “moderate” these concessions are more enraging than vindicating as we watch our democracy teeter on the brink after 4 years of the Trump administration.

But for Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton would have become the first female president of the United States – and none of this would have happened. Instead we got the first president to be impeached twice.

The Sanders campaign created a narrative that anyone who put forth a real solution was not thinking big enough. This strategy was so effective that Hillary Clinton had to defend her progressive bona-fides, identifying as a “progressive who likes to get things done” in one debate.

It appears the fading Bernie movement admits the message is appealing as, 5 years later, they seek to rebrand as “pragmatic progressives.”

Maybe the lady who helped win health coverage for more than 8 million children knew more than the guy who got 3 bills passed in over 30 years after all. (2 of those bills were to rename post offices.)

Post-2016 debriefs centered around the notion that Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote by 3 million, was an inherently flawed candidate. “Bernie would’ve won” was a constant refrain from the Sanders-left.

Sanders lost the Democratic Primary yet again in 2020, suggesting that analysis was dubious at best.

Perhaps now that ‘Our Revolution’ has waved the white flag – conceding the futility of pursuing Sanders’s agenda – the pundit class will finally admit that Hillary would’ve won…if not for Sanders.

In 2016, Sanders sought to hijack the Democratic platform for policies his own group has now abandoned. He refused to concede to Clinton even after his nomination became a mathematical impossibility.

Sanders claims he did all he could to support Clinton in the general election, but in reality he was preparing for his Our Revolution book tour.

Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were similarly positioned candidates, committed Democrats with a lifetime of public service across various government roles; though Biden won and Hillary lost.

One explanation for the different outcome is that Sanders did not stand in Biden’s way, conceding almost immediately and quickly collaborating with Biden’s campaign team.

Mainstream press has largely let Sanders off-the-hook for his role helping Trump win the presidency. While we cannot turn back the clock, we can learn from history. Bernie Sanders sold his supporters false promises.

He used those false promises to undermine decades of progressive policy development and label accomplished change-makers as fake progressives. Then, after losing, he refused to heal the intra-party divisions he sowed.

And as a result, Americans elected a man who would come to incite a domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol by less than 100,000 votes.

To everyone saying this…I agree. We have lots of work to do — so let’s learn from the mistakes of the past…that’s the whole point.

https://twitter.com/brantre123/status/1433475214755643401