The past five years saw the rise of two dynamic, unprecedented, and astonishingly successful experiments in left electoral politics. The last four months have seen both come to tragic ends.

In December, despite a remarkable result only two years earlier, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party was routed in a general election dominated almost entirely by the cul-de-sac of Brexit. This week, despite coming closer than ever to victory, Bernie Sanders suspended his second campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Faced with this state of affairs, despondent socialist movements in America and Great Britain are now left to pick up the pieces — political, emotional, and otherwise — and carry their projects into a future at once perilous and uncertain.

For some, recent events will be a reason to withdraw or disassociate from meaningful engagement with politics. For others, they will resurrect all-too familiar debates about the utility (or, as some would have it, futility) of electoralism. Both impulses are, albeit in varying degrees, understandable but wrongheaded. Withdrawal from substantive political engagement, whatever form it ultimately takes, may be a balm against future disappointments but is self-defeating for transparently obvious reasons. As for the old debate about parliamentary versus extra-parliamentary organizing, the standard cliché remains apropos: the two aren’t mutually exclusive, and abdicating responsibility for the former would be a peculiar reaction to the failure of two left projects that came so maddeningly and heartbreakingly close to transformative electoral success.