With the defeat of the Bernie Sanders campaign, numerous postmortems have attempted to diagnose what went wrong and what could’ve, should’ve, and would’ve been.

Angela Nagle and Michael Tracey’s American Affairs essay, “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce: The Collapse of the Sanders Campaign and the ‘Fusionist’ Left,” aims to give a definitive reply, casting much of the blame on campaign mistakes and a fealty to left-wing cultural politics.

I agree that the Left has all sorts of alienating cultural practices, the product of years of insularity and a distance from the day-to-day demands and struggles of workers. But I’m not convinced that these factors were a primary, or even a significant, cause behind Bernie’s defeat.