Whether you’re a Feel the Bern kind of person or supported Hillary throughout, we should all agree that Bernie brought an important issue to the conversation that had otherwise been largely ignored in institutionalized politics: economic inequality.
The Tea Party Movement that began in 2009 started as something of a populist revolt, though skeptics, and rightfully so, also saw the big money behind it: The Billionaire’s Tea Party. All the same, by 2010, dozens of self-proclaimed Tea Party members were in Congress. By contrast, the 2011 Occupy Movement lived hard and died fast, never making real headway in DC, with the exception of a brief stint on K Street where protestors occupied the buildings of lobbyists as a statement against the influence of money in politics.
Without Bernie’s unwavering, and, for some, somewhat relentless hammering of the issue, outcry against America’s widening economic chasm would not have made its way as it did into campaign debate, news coverage, and everyday conversation.
Granted, several obstacles remain: we have yet to see the extent to which a Hillary Clinton administration will continue to push for that progressive of an agenda (I’m too desperately optimistic to even consider a Trump agenda), and the ability for any sort of substantive policy change to take root, a steep obstacle in today’s partisan politics.
But in this moment, there is reason to recognize and appreciate that inequality, which is at unprecedented levels since the eve of the Great Depression, is at least on the agenda in ways that have largely escaped institutionalized politics outside of the usual nod to the “middle class.”