This election, Clinton supporters argued, was about stopping Trump. In fact, it is now clear that it was about stopping the growing movement in this country in the direction of genuine populism. Speaker after speaker who took the stage on the first night of the Democratic National Convention had to fight to be heard over chants of “Bernie, Bernie.” There was little applause for most of the speakers, but Sanders’ reception, when he finally got to speak, made it clear that he was the real popular choice for the Democratic nomination.

What the party apparently didn’t realize, however, was that Sanders’ popularity was not a product of his extraordinary charisma (almost anyone would seem charismatic compared to Clinton). It was a product of his populism. No one in the mainstream media got that that was what this election was really about. That’s what Trump and Sanders had in common. Independently of whether Trump’s populist rhetoric is sincere, it was the source of his appeal.

Liberals are considered to have won the culture war. Gay marriage is finally legal, state after state is legalizing marijuana, and for the last eight years, we have had what not so long ago was actually unthinkable –– a black president!

Some of Trump’s rhetoric may be racist, but his racism is not why he’s popular. There’s always some racist or other vying for the Republican nomination. Yes, racism still exists in this country, but it’s on the wane. Yes, police are murdering innocent black people, but they have always been doing that. The existence of the Black Lives Matter Movement shows that increasing numbers of Americans will no longer tolerate it.

What’s important, Sanders asserted when he conceded the Democratic nomination to Clinton, is keeping the revolution he started alive. Hillary Clinton, he announced, must be the next president of the United States! Did Sanders receive death threats from the DNC, or was he just not very smart? Sanders didn’t start the “revolution.” He simply rode a wave of populism that had been building long before he announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president, and nothing was more antithetical to that movement than the Clinton campaign.

An anthropologist from Mars, to use a phrase of the late Oliver Sacks, would have a hard time making sense of the DNC’s support of Clinton in the face of Sanders’ clear majority of popular support. Both Sanders and Trump tapped a vein in this country. The party that won the election was the party whose candidate did that most effectively. Clinton clearly did not do that. Polls suggested that if she were nominated, she would lose.

So why did the party push her candidacy so relentlessly? Because her nomination would halt the progress in the direction of genuine populism. Halting that progress was more important to the party than was winning the election. Big business controls politics in this country and it is not about to surrender that control to a population that has had enough of it. Trump’s populist rhetoric is likely empty, so the possibility of his election is not so threatening to the forces that control this country as is the specter of Sanders’ election.

“Trump must be stopped!” Democrats chanted over and over. But this anti-Trump rhetoric was simply smoke and mirrors designed to conceal the real agenda of the party, which was to stave off the revolution in the direction of genuine populism. Democrats, the party bigwigs, that is, would rather lose with Clinton than win with Sanders. They are the people who benefit from the status quo. They are not about to see that change.

It is changing, though, whether they like it or not, and no amount of smoke and mirrors will stop it.

(This piece originally appeared under the title “Smoke and Mirrors in Philadelphia,” in the 27 July 2016 issue of Counterpunch. Yes, that’s right, I called this election before it happened, so not everyone in the media got it wrong.)