The end of Bernie 2020 was crushing for anyone invested in the campaign. Not only were we easily smothered under the internal machinations of the Democratic Party brass, but all of the energy, data, and infrastructure of the campaign instantly went up in smoke around April 2020, leaving little trace behind. The demobilizing effect of the pandemic certainly had something to do with this, but it also became clear in the aftermath that Bernie 2020 was never made to last. Top-level staffers added a line to their resumes and moved on with their careers.

In their defense, that’s how most electoral campaigns end. But Bernie’s runs were supposed to be something different. In 2016, there was at least an attempt to translate the campaign into a permanent organization in Our Revolution. For various reasons, including the simple fact that the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) stole its thunder, Our Revolution didn’t pan out, but the basic impulse was a good one: use the electoral cycle to generate data, activists, and strategies that can be carried into a more permanent organization. Indeed, for those who always thought that the Democrats were never going to let Bernie win, this was the only reason to support Bernie’s candidacies. They were an unexpected and marvelous opportunity to organize on a mass scale.

To cut to the chase: recently Jacobin authors have both argued that Bernie should run a third time and also debated the merits of a new political organization. Jeremy Gong and Nick French believe we need a new democratic organization created by Bernie and the Squad, while Jared Abbott and David Duhalde think that first expanding the Left’s working-class base is the key task. While I agree wholeheartedly with the latter’s view that a new organization will likely repeat the faults of existing organizations, given the Left’s current class composition and related lack of mass appeal, I can’t help but think that a third Bernie run, if it’s going to happen at all, nonetheless offers an opportunity to build a new kind of left organization that can overcome current left parochialism. Sanders has an appeal that far transcends the Left’s (not to mention that of left institutions), and institutionally bottling whatever energy is left in the Bernie moment still strikes me as a worthwhile endeavor.