I wish that Bernie Sanders supporters who are outraged and embittered by the impending nomination of Hillary Clinton would take a moment (or longer) to appreciate what they have achieved over the past year. The Democratic party has put forward the most progressive platform in its history, including planks to:

• raise the federal minimum wage to $15/hour and tie it to inflation
• abolish the death penalty
• close private prisons
• expand Social Security and Medicare
• make public colleges and universities free for over 80% of Americans
• invest heavily in alternative energy sources and tax fossil fuels

​That's just a sampling of the list (which I got from Bernie Sanders's website). This is a huge achievement, not because everything (or even most things) in a party platform becomes law but because the party platform becomes the benchmark. You change a country like the United States one platform, one election at a time, and Bernie Sanders and his supporters have done more to demand and effect that change than anyone else in this election cycle.

No, Bernie Sanders will not be President. But the fact that Hillary Clinton has always been the favorite of the DNC, and will be the party's nominee, is not evidence that the system is corrupt. She has been a loyal, successful Democrat her entire professional career. No one should be surprised that the DNC, or the millions of registered Democrats who voted for her, prefer her to a man who didn't officially join the party until 2015.

The point is not that who leads the party is irrelevant. It's that on Thursday the leader will pledge to fight for the most progressive platform in her party's history. It's that progressive positions have become more normalized, shifting the center leftward. It's that Democrats have a new baseline against which to measure progress. And that's because of Bernie Sanders and the millions of people who voted for him.

Friday night I saw V for Vendetta. I thought it was stupid and shallow, as I think most comic-book movies are stupid and shallow, despite their pretensions to Deep Thoughtfulness. Because this is not really a post about V for Vendetta, I shall say only that it is a 2005 film, based on a 1980s graphic novel, that stars Hugo Weaving as a masked, one-man wrecker of fascist dystopias (a cross between Guy Fawkes, Edmond Dantès, and Britain's most boring Shakespearean actor), and refer those who wish to know more to its Wikipedia page.

Why do comic-book movies so outrage my inner Grinch? I could tick off a bunch of reasons, beginning with filmmakers who take their themes far more seriously than their incoherent screenplays deserve. (To pick once more on V for Vendetta, someone please explain how our hero, despite wearing body armor thick enough to stop hundreds of bullets, can spin and flip and slice and dice through an army of frantically reloading fascists, like some wet dream from The Matrix.) Of course, writers have been imagining impossible heroes at least as far back as Gilgamesh; I have no illusions that contemporary blockbusters are special cases, beyond what the CGI can supply. And frankly, if my only objections were aesthetic ... well, who cares about my snobby tastes?

But Friday another more troubling objection occurred to me. V for Vendetta is typical of its genre in the lip service it pays to Über-Values such as freedom, justice, and popular sovereignty—the good guys aren't just exacting brutal vengeance on the bad guys, they're empowering the masses! Yet which of these movies has any real faith in the abilities of human beings—not superheroes but ordinary people and the institutions they create—to solve human problems? Governments, businesses, religions, the media—in plot after plot they are the root of the world's evil, or at least corrupted enablers, and humanity must wait for a savior from elsewhere. Born of despair, not hope.

Why is any of this relevant outside popular culture? Just listen to the rhetoric of our current political saviors, certainly on the right and, I fear, increasingly on the left. Is not the appeal of Donald Trump and—at least to hear his most fervent supporters—Bernie Sanders that of the superhero? The incorruptible ideal. The mighty man who will revitalize our institutions not by working within their structures but by blowing them up.

From this perspective, Hillary Clinton's greatest challenge this election season has nothing to do with email servers or philandering husbands. It is convincing voters that the institutions we have built—and especially our government—hold solutions to our problems. She needs to make the case passionately and proudly. And if elected, she—and her colleagues in office—need to solve problems. There are no superheroes to take the lead.