In his speech announcing his campaign’s suspension last week, Bernie Sanders noted that “over the course of the past five years, our movement has won the ideological struggle.” It’s true: a $15 minimum wage, health care as a human right, ending our energy dependence on fossil fuels, and free public college for all have become commonsense ideas in the United States.

A presidential campaign is an incredible opportunity for mass political education. This idea has often been rejected by the Left in recent decades, but the Sanders campaign showed it was true. Despite a media environment that was outright hostile, the campaign was able to successfully popularize universal social policy demands and lay out a foreign policy program far more opposed to US imperialism than any other Democrat’s.

This movement secured the support of two segments of American society that are key to the Left’s future: young people and broad swaths of Latino, Arab, and Asian immigrants, in places as far-flung as Iowa, Nevada, California, Texas, and Massachusetts. Bernie did so by articulating a vision that guaranteed healthy bodies, a decent living, and dignified lives unfettered by debt and free of endless means testing. And his promise of a just foreign policy that reflected a global view of humanity was deeply appealing, especially to those of us who still have close family and friends in countries that bear the brunt of US military attacks and unfair trade policies.