The substance of Elizabeth Warren’s political rhetoric is dominated by banks and corporations — obvious and odious targets, to be sure. She speaks positively, but vaguely, about labor unions. In 2013 she advocated for a minimum wage increase to $10 an hour over the course of two years — tragically modest in the time of Fight for $15. She’s helped make some mild reforms to student debt, but nothing so great as to be noticeable for a young person debilitated by loans. She’s made no great stink about socialized health care or higher education. Aside from financial regulation, it’s actually quite unclear what a Warren presidential program would be . . . 

This dandy little bit of self-plagiarism is from three years ago, when I attended a painfully nerdy and shamefully self-congratulatory event to “Draft Warren” into the presidential primaries. It was a farcical gathering of Type-A Tracy Flicks, barely worth the free booze, and even the assembled nerds quickly realized this Lisa Simpson of a dark-horse candidate wasn’t as inspiring to the masses as she was to them, and we all moved on.

And what we moved onto was Bernie — our indefatigable, unwavering, incorruptible Bernie! And we very nearly won, despite despicable sabotage from the DNC. Bernie was the leader of a movement that fundamentally ended the Cold War of the American mind; he changed the face of American politics, acted as midwife to a nascent insurgent left, and achieved more in a few months of mass political action than Elizabeth Warren did in her whole political life.