Nothing was as inspiring to me about Bernie Sanders’s 2020 run as the slogan he used to jump-start the campaign last fall. “Are you willing to fight for that person you don’t even know as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself?” he asked in his Queens rally speech in October. He was reviving the gist of an old slogan of the labor movement that badly needs remembering in the time of Trump and the coronavirus: “An injury to one is an injury to all.”

Bernie made it clear that the “us” in “Not me, Us” is all of us. Wider layers of the Left responded, gravitating to his campaign and identifying with it even more than in 2016. The Sanders 2020 campaign became a point of connection for people and organizations representing the whole range of struggles and causes that emerged in the Trump era and before it. I’m one of those people — the spirit of solidarity that the campaign, whatever its weaknesses, came to represent is the main reason I went from skeptic to supporter.

Since we have to plan a strategy for socialists in which Bernie Sanders won’t be the Democratic nominee, then I hope what we come up with builds on the spirit of that slogan. Unfortunately, I think a recent Jacobin piece by Dustin Guastella proposes a step in the other direction.