I voted for Bernie in 2016 — but now I just want him to stop

It is time for Bernie Sanders to end his campaign for president in order to support Elizabeth Warren, Senator of Massachusetts and hopefully the next president of the United States.

He can do so having achieved what seemed just a few years ago an impossible goal. Sanders has reclaimed the Democratic Party from the “New Democrat”, “triangulated” “third way” that Bill and Hillary Clinton inflicted 25 years ago upon the party of Franklin Roosevelt, JFK and Lyndon Johnson.

Out from the vortex of The End of Welfare as We Know It and Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, Bernie Sanders has brought the Democrats and their base back to those who struggle for subsistence and respect.

He has addressed himself to young voters in a way that calls upon their idealism, their sense of fair play – and he has done it in a way that addresses their needs, that elicits their vision for the country, and that inoculates them from the alt-right messaging of the current Republican Party and its “strong-man” president.

Sanders continues to function as the Democratic Party’s moral voice, a trenchant advocate for something better than what we have, an inveigher with the competence and energy to call down the servants of dark money in his own party.

I can hardly remember the names of those midwestern “moderates” who shared the stage in debate with him a month or so ago – those dismayed, sweating white men who couldn’t imagine how the nation with the world’s largest GDP could possibly match, say, Denmark’s feat of providing healthcare for its citizens. Their time in the Democratic Party is done because of Bernie Sanders.

Twenty years from now, not one Democratic member of the House or the Senate will fail to proclaim universal healthcare as a fundamental American right.

But though Sanders has served his country so well in these ways, it is clear that he is not the one to carry his ideals into the White House. Over the past several weeks, it has become clear that he is not physically capable of it. Even were he to summon the strength for the coming campaign against Trump, eight years in the Oval Office looks like a bridge too far.

There is another old man in this race who lacks Bernie’s mental acuity and unstinting vision, but that doesn’t alter the growing sense that Sanders cannot serve us as president as far out as 2028.

And yet Bernie’s ideals – the same that energized his campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016 – have shaped the Democratic race in 2019. I hope that every registrant of the Democratic Party realizes the extent to which the swerve leftward Bernie and Warren represent has mobilized the media forces of darkest Republican hell.

I hope they realize that this time, we need not simply to vote but to canvass and register others and generally to knock doors and explain to our neighbors why Medicare-for-All is not some Soviet gulag but rather the logical expression of what Jefferson called every individual’s right to life and the pursuit of happiness – what the Constitution envisions as it calls upon us to “promote the general welfare.”

Like Bernie, Warren wants universal healthcare. Like him, she wants to forgive student debt. Like him, she wants public college and university to be free to those who earn a place. Like him, she wants for the wealthiest to pay much more to support such goals. Like him, she excoriates not only Trump but also Democrats who harp about “socialism” rather than engaging ideas that could improve the state of our union.

If there had not been a Senator Sanders, there would not now be a Senator Warren – or rather, not a candidate Warren. Elizabeth Warren was elected to the Senate in Massachusetts for the same reasons that now carry her to the forefront of the Democratic race. Bernie Sanders should regard her viability as his legacy.

Christopher Hanlon is a professor of US literature at Arizona State University