Perhaps the most important book about the Trump era is not a book about Donald Trump but a book about Bernie Sanders.

In 2016, the American people were aching for answers — and weren’t willing to go with the obviously corrupt, degraded, warmongering Clinton machine. They could have gone with Bernie.

But then Bernie Sanders said — hey, if I don’t win the nomination, I’m in with Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer and Wall Street.

Who’s deplorable now?

In Bernie and the Sanderistas: Field Notes from a Failed Revolution — Jeffrey St. Clair gives voice to the disillusioned ones — those who were were screamed at, ripped apart, demeaned, kicked to the curb and generally treated like lice — not by Trump supporters but by Lib Dems supporters of Bernie and Hillary.

Not because we supported Trump — but because we didn’t support Hillary.

The reality was that outside the bubble in 2016, it was much easier for the disillusioned ones to be with Trump supporters than with the Lib Dem mob.

Trump supporters shop at Tractor Supply.

Lib Dems crawl out of their basket and scream, then crawl back in.

The low point of the book comes when St. Clair admits that “I had finally begun to warm to Bernie Sanders.”

Yuck.

“One must, I suppose, tolerate Bernie’s ongoing backing of a bloated military budget, especially for the production of fighter jets and aircraft carriers, because it means jobs for Vermonters,” St. Clair writes. “That’s merely called ‘bringing home the bacon’ and all politicians do it, more or less. Sweep aside, for a moment, Sanders’ bewildering votes for draconian federal crime and anti-terror laws, even one that savagely eviscerated the right of habeas corpus, a minor infraction, apparently, which has hardly been noticed, even on this, the 800th anniversary, of Magna Carta.”

But then, a couple of months later, St. Clair comes to his senses.

“Bernie had no plans to humiliate Hillary,” St. Clair says. “He’s been an accidental agent of her anxiety and he always intended to keep it that way. Bernie refused to go negative, and pledges to support the eventual nominee of the party — Hillary.”

“I should have known better. There was that insistent voice in the back of my head with the familiar Anglo-Irish accent, the one saying: ‘Jeffrey, what’s happened to your bullshit detector?’ Yes, the shade of Alexander Cockburn, sometime summer resident of Vermont and longtime critic of Sanders’ special brand of political impotence. “Bernie and the Pwogs,” Alex snickered, ‘Really, Jeffrey, you’re slipping.’ And, of course, he’s right. Pull the Sandersmobile into the garage for inspection, pop the hood and you’ll soon discover the vacuous truth: no engine, just an exhaust pipe, pumping out rhetoric. So much talk, so little action. The deeper you look at Sanders, the less substance you see.”

Single payer supporters know the exhaust side of Bernie well.

In fact, the push for health care reform was a mirror image of the campaign. Sanders raised the single payer flag, but when push came to shove he got in line and supported the insurance industry written Obamacare.

Show me an independent candidate for President, and I’ll show you?

“Truly independent campaigns, the ones that forcefully challenge the neoliberal dogma and imperialistic militarism of the Democratic Party from the outside, are crushed, their candidates and supporters vilified and demonized,” St. Clair writes. “Go ask Ralph Nader.”