When it comes to political campaigns, all obituaries are also autopsies. In taking the measure of the campaign, commentators inevitably try to determine what was responsible for its demise. Bernie Sanders’s recently concluded campaign is no exception. As various political camps have begun putting forward their assessment of it, they have also attempted to diagnose what went wrong.

But in doing so, commentators have hardly acted like medical inspectors, carefully weighing the evidence to determine a cause of death. Instead, their conduct has more closely resembled that of an ancient haruspex, the Roman officials who divined the will of the gods from the entrails of sacrificed animals. Even across political divides, the method is strikingly similar — examining the campaign’s remains, they pronounce that their respective gods have been angered and must be appeased.

For liberals, the god in question is a politics of identity. They see Bernie’s attempt to run a campaign based on working-class demands and working-class power as a nostalgic attempt to revive class politics in an era that has left them behind. For today’s liberals, politics are now based around identity groups. Some of these groups, like liberal college-educated suburbanites, were ready for Bernie’s policies but rejected his vision of politics. If Bernie’s agenda is to succeed, they say, it must come to terms with the death of class politics.