What did Sanders do wrong in 2016? It wasn’t challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. That was fair. Rather, it was his savaging her long after she had become the obvious victor. By May 3, Trump had become the presumptive Republican nominee, but Sanders withheld his endorsement for Clinton until July 12. The game was political extortion, threatening the Democratic Party and its candidate with chaos at the national convention if his demands weren’t met.

Interesting that some prominent leftists, Bernie people in the past, have recently moved to Warren, the other populist progressive. Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of the left-wing Nation magazine, sang Warren’s praises in a Washington Post column that barely acknowledged Sanders’ existence — and even those rare mentions seemed designed to appease the democratic socialist’s avid fandom.

An oddity of the Sanders phenomenon has been its obsessive need to lecture the public on the beauties of socialism. In a recent spiel, Sanders went to great lengths to brand popular Medicare as a socialist-style program.