For months now, my Facebook feed has been clogged with inspirational posts about Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders getting arrested at a civil rights rally. Bernie Sanders’s modest tax returns. Bernie Sanders with a bird. Now that the delegate math is stacked against him, my Facebook feed is full of panicky moralistic posts about how Bernie or Bust is going to ruin everything, that it’s time for Sanders supporters to give up on ideological purity and unify behind the presumed nominee.

But the case for giving up on Sanders is turning out to be as difficult to make as the one for nominating him. Could it be that the Bernie or Bust movement, however righteous or quixotic, is not about Sanders at all, but another symptom of a high-rolling advertising-driven culture that has eroded all our trust in the social contract? I mean, if you’re looking for someone to blame, Edward Bernays is your man, not Sanders—and certainly not anyone who plans to write in Sanders’s name on a general election ballot.

Bernays, who was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, is the one who brought advertising into everyday life, not as billboard and print ads but as real events. In other words “public relations,” a term he also coined. Bernays kicked off his “torches of freedom” campaign for the American Tobacco Company in 1929 by hiring women to pose as suffragists in the Easter Sunday Parade and light up on cue. The point was to convince more women to smoke, but the whole campaign was dressed up as a grass-roots political movement. In 1954, “the father of spin” was hired by the United Fruit Company to set up local media in Guatemala that would coordinate with the CIA to topple the democratically elected government.

But corporate accounts were only a side-job for Bernays. His career really took off when he set up shop in Washington, D.C., with the motto “If you can use propaganda for war, you can certainly use it for peace.” Working for every president from 1924 to 1961 (besides FDR), his notion that politics should be treated as a form of lifestyle advertising inspired a new generation of political consultants. It was Dick Morris, for example, who convinced Bill Clinton in 1994 to drop the platform he won on and adopt, in Morris’s words, a “consumer rules philosophy.” This formulation is misleading. As Adam Curtis argues in his award-winning BBC documentary “The Century of the Self,” this formulation is misleading. In the world of advertising, it isn’t the consumer that is king. It is the unconscious. Consultants like Morris have worked hard to convince leaders in both parties that they should ignore the better angels of our nature and speak directly to our unnamable fears and desires.