You certainly don’t want to be branded as a #NeverBernie holdout or as suffering from Bernie Derangement Syndrome. Those people are totally powerless and irrelevant, which is why Bernie and his supporters keep yelling about them.

So you will bend over backward to give Bernie the benefit of the doubt on everything. You will become accustomed, slowly but inevitably, to parsing every crazy, offbeat thing he says—and boy is he going to say them—to show how it really sort of makes sense if you squint at it right. Or maybe the quote was taken out of context. Or maybe it was just a joke and what’s wrong with people, don’t they have a sense of humor? And when he says those Antifa thugs who beat up innocent people at a protest were “very fine people,” what he really meant was—well, you guys are going to have to come up with that excuse on your own.

You will get used to waking up every morning and finding that Bernie has tweeted some brain-melting idea that makes no sense at all—the U.S. government can’t run out of money because the airlines can’t run out of frequent flyer miles!—and it won’t even shock you any more. It will be just another Tuesday, and you will pray that President Sanders’s more sober advisers will quietly bury or water down this idea before it becomes policy.

And if Bernie gets to make a Supreme Court appointment, then it’s Katie bar the door, because you will get your own “But Gorsuch” rallying cry.