July 26, 2016, in the chapter titled “The Democratic Convention.” Sanders discusses having lost the battle for the Democratic nomination for President to Hillary Clinton and asserts that unlike some losing candidates he has no intention of fading away. The campaign, he insists, was never about him. Furthermore, he states what the campaign was all about: “We were about building a movement.”
April 13, 2018, in the chapter titled “The Political Revolution is Looking Great.” The 2018 mid-term election season is already underway, more than six months away from election day. Sander is holding training sessions for candidates from nearly every single state running for everything from Governor to local school boards. They are every one of them running on progressive platforms standing not only defiance of their eventual Republican opponent, but their Democratic opponents in the primaries. This is the epicenter of a progressive wave and Sanders explains, “During my run for President, I had talked about the need for a political revolution, about building a movement.”
This phrase, repeated twice verbatim, is just two of the multiple occasions that variations of the word “building” recur. The “we” in the title is not just set decoration or false modesty. This book is ostensibly a memoir about the failed attempt by Sanders to snag the Democratic nomination for President, but that campaign is merely backdrop. It is the set decoration and set design in front of which Sanders plays out a drama of revolution. What separates this book from other dramatic portrayals of revolution—such as, say, John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World—is that this is book about how revolutions really begin. Therefore, it does not contain fireworks, much less gunfire. It does feature dashing heroes, backstabbing betrayals or the pageantry of revolution by fire.
Sanders has written a book that is more comparable to what John Reed might have been written about the Russian Revolution if he had arrived in Russian in 1900 and written a book titled "Ten Years That Shook the World." The star of the book is Bernie Sanders, but the heroes are the book won’t be known for years, perhaps decades. This is a textbook for how to go about laying down the boring job of creating grass-roots organizations that build movement from the ground up. The conceptual figure here is not Sanders, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but the reality of building a movement casts her as a figure as likely to be cast aside, forgotten or risen to the level of figurehead by the time movement in theory has been actualized into a movement of action.
The vagaries of history played a great trick upon Bernie Sanders. It snatched an upset victory over Hillary Clinton away from him only to snatch an actual victory over Donald Trump away from her. With her loss she had nowhere to go, but Sanders could head right back into the Senate as a foundation for continuing to build his movement now blessed with a nemesis standing in such opposition to his progressive platform as to be almost Satanic. Thus, the elevation of Donald Trump to the Oval Office courtesy of the most bizarre vote-counting system ever devised ironically and paradoxically may have potentially given Sander and his movement an even greater opportunity for building than had he actually become President himself.
