I caught Matt Karp (the writer) on Jacobin's YouTube show, where he talked about some of the topics in this article recently, and subsequently went to read this article. I thought it was the best post-mortem of the Bernie 2020 campaign there was.

Absent of the Blackbaiting that you'd get from garden-variety outlets, it cut right through to the facts.

On the video, he made even more salient points which were surprising to hear.

The Obama point is the big one. Some of us in the "further left than liberal" space note the symbolism of Obama as a huge obstacle to breaking through, like you have to navigate it the right way. Even Ta-Nehisi Coates did this in his writing (I don't peg him as being "super left" but you get the idea). The Black leftists with whom I've interfaced recently are very, very eager to tear that symbolism down, to un-memory hole a lot of his missteps. But that may be a wall too high to climb, IMO. Still worth trying.

Ultimately, the biggest disappointment about Bernie is that there is damn near no one else like him in elected office, and especially out of the pool of Senators (usually plucked to become Presidential candidates). Part of this is the gross gatekeeping of the Boomer (and older) generation (of which Bernie himself is part) in the U.S. government, but the other part is just the way the Democratic Party in particular operate. I'm glad Hakeem Jeffries was called out in that article.... that dude is basically going to trade on his "I can quote hip hop" ability to shill for austerity-loving Third Way bums, I can see it from here.

Thanks for sharing this.