A little over four weeks ago, I stood in a crowd with thousands of others at a joyful and spirited rally in Boston Common ahead of a Super Tuesday vote many of us believed would consolidate Bernie Sanders’s hold on the Democratic presidential nomination. In a matter of days, a meek and hitherto hapless corporate establishment would rally around Joe Biden and tilt enough of the contests in his favor to resurrect his campaign from the dead, triggering the series of events that would ultimately end in Sanders suspending his astonishingly promising campaign for the White House and the elevation of yet another soulless liberal to the Democratic throne.

There will be no end of postmortems of the Sanders project and where it supposedly went wrong: by being too confrontational towards the party apparatus it sought to take over; by not being confrontational enough; by premising its strategy in part on winning over traditional non-voters or by failing to assemble a broad enough coalition beyond the younger demographics it performed so well with.

In truth, the cause of its fate is probably a lot more boring and politically nebulous. In a race so unavoidably shaped by the horrors of the Trump presidency, the defining issue became the ouster of the current Republican regime and Biden, for all the wrong reasons, became the principal beneficiary. While no election is ever exclusively about policies or ideology, the bogus notion of “electability” — in practice a rigged and self-defeating game devised to get ordinary people to second-guess their own preferences — became an all-consuming preoccupation for the pundit class and for many liberal voters. More so than at any other point in its long and ignominious history, the establishment of the Democratic Party has effectively conditioned a less than negligible portion of its primary electorate to think and behave exactly like the pundits who assured us all 2016 was a lock for Hillary Clinton — and will quite possibly deliver a similar result.