I hear the frustration of Bernie supporters. I too am frustrated at the cultural and institutional conservatism that has created a country where the accident of birth determines economic fate.

In 240 years we’ve had a few shifts of the kind candidate Sanders advocates, but not under the circumstances we face now. The first was the 14th Amendment, made possible by a war in which 2 percent of the population died. The arrival of modernity at the turn of the 20th century produced the Progressive Era – led not by the “great commoner” William Jennings Bryan but by Republican Teddy Roosevelt, and it resulted in modest change like the income tax, attention to the environment and the beginnings of labor protections. Franklin Roosevelt was not a revolutionary – he just kept trying things to pull the country out of the Depression, backed by overwhelming Democratic majorities. Lyndon Johnson worked an evolution – but in a time of expansion, when prosperity allowed a generosity of spirit. We answered the moral challenge to which he and the courts called us: extending civil and voting rights and rolling back immigration restrictions that had stood for decades.

One guy with deep but spotty support is not going to get done what we want done. Barack Obama faced a desperate economy, but Mitch McConnell manipulated Senate rules to his advantage – and that was before his caucus fine-tuned obstruction. We face an economy that doesn’t work for tens of millions of people, but we aren’t desperate enough for a Bernie revolution. Maybe if Covid19 kills 2 percent of the population, we will be.

In the wake of his primary loss in Michigan and elsewhere on Mini-Tuesday, Bernie should continue his campaign. He has every right and perhaps the obligation to allow the process to play out and for his supporters to express themselves by the ballot. But at the end of the day, only a united opposition can bring down this incompetent sociopath.

Virginia just completed its first progressive legislative session ever. It ripped out voting restrictions, eliminated barriers to a women’s right to choose, repealed a raft of discriminatory laws, instituted some gun controls, raised the minimum wage, approved environmental restorations, and passed a truly historic redistricting proposal (written by Democrats when they were in the minority and embraced now by Republicans). Civil War monuments will be coming down.

The General Assembly was able to do so because a broad swath of the Democratic Party was repulsed by Trump and worked without pause through three elections to defeat Republicans, erasing a two-thirds GOP majority in the state House and reversing a 7-4 GOP majority in the U.S. House. Last week the state’s Democrats, as representative of the party composition as that of any state, voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden.

Virginia is a progressive model: a state trending Democratic that a Republican hasn’t won statewide since 2009, partly because the GOP has shrunk its base in embracing Trumpism.

Now is the time for progressives to take what they can get. Let the primaries play out, and then let’s unseat Donald Trump and his Senate Republican majority in the fall. Don’t pull a fucking Ralph Nader.