Feeling the after-Bern.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Bernie Sanders - Editorial

In our cover story this month, Christopher Cook reports on what's next for the Bernie Sanders revolution.

Cook covers Bernie's new organization, Our Revolution, which hopes to channel the energy that fueled the Sanders campaign into a long-lasting movement for progressive change. It's a difficult task, as the defection of core staffers just as Sanders was announcing the launch of the new group makes clear.

To read the mainstream media coverage, you might think the whole progressive movement Sanders spearheaded was falling apart. But this is not the first time a campaign has struggled to make the transition from the "fierce urgency of now," as President Obama put it on the stump in 2008, to the long slog of building and sustaining a lasting political organization.

The Sanders campaign, like the Obama campaign before it, brilliantly knit together savvy political organizers and social media strategists with young, motivated activists who were new to electoral politics and passionate about their candidate and their cause.

When Obama for America became Organizing for America, all the air went out of the room. Instead of a nationwide organization of progressives, ready to respond to events and hold the new President's feet to the fire, as he had urged them to do, Organizing for America became a vehicle for Democratic Party fundraising.

Bernie Sanders supporters could be forgiven for fearing that the same thing is happening again. The Democratic Party took them for a bumpy ride, courting the passionate young activists who showed up on the platform committee and at the convention hall in Philadelphia, and adopting many of their goals, and then drowning them out with chants of "USA! USA!" when they protested the party's continued endorsement of militarism and planet-destroying energy policies.

Other progressive candidates have tried and failed to turn their campaigns into effective organizations. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition floundered. Howard Dean's Democracy for America--headquartered down the street from the Our Revolution offices in Burlington, Vermont--has not had a big impact. And then there is the uncomfortable alliance between active politicians in Washington and activists on the ground. Dean endorsed Hillary; his Democracy for America endorsed Bernie.

Our Revolution may...