This is not about I told you so. I actually didn’t believe it would come to this. At odd moments I feared it, but I never really believed it. Nonetheless, I wonder . . .

We will never know how Bernie would have fared. We can spin the hypotheticals, crunch the pluses and minuses endlessly, but we’ll never really know. What we do know is this: Bernie didn’t just conduct a campaign; he led a movement that in several significant ways was parallel to the groundswell that carried the orange monster over the 270 mark. Sometimes centrism and incrementalism are not the safe choice. The Bernie phenomenon was unprecedented. If the Democratic party is to survive, let alone lead us out of the predicament we’re in, it must make a bold choice to embrace the future and stop clinging to its insistence on propping up the status quo.