Читать книгу Bigger Than Bernie - Micah Uetricht - Страница 7
ОглавлениеContrary to conventional wisdom about the viability of class politics in the beating heart of global capitalism, Bernie Sanders’s rhetoric—calls for justice, equality, security, and shared prosperity in the form of free education, affordable housing, free high-quality health care, full employment, a secure retirement, and a clean environment for all—hasn’t scared off masses of people. Instead, by polarizing politics along class lines, insisting that the reason many are denied these basic rights is that wealth and resources are captured by the top of society and kept there by design, Sanders has inspired the masses: 13.2 million voted for Sanders in the Democratic Party presidential primary in 2016, and his 2020 presidential campaign broke records for individual donations and volunteers.
Even his adversaries are often forced to respond to him— some, mostly Democrats, by half-heartedly adopting his popular demands in order to appeal to a constituency that is clearly moving left on key issues like Medicare for All; others, both Republicans and Democrats, by reviving the Cold War specter of authoritarian socialism to scare people into opposing an ambitious vision for social and economic change.
Socialism is now on the tip of the nation’s tongue. In 2015, when Bernie first began running for president, it was the most-searched word on Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. Tens of thousands have joined the Democratic Socialists of America, and millions more talk about the merits of socialism over capitalism in conversations with their friends, families, and coworkers. Democratic socialist politicians are running and winning at the local, state, and national level. The sun is rising again on the idea that capitalism cannot provide the freedom and prosperity that it promises, and that the wealth created by all belongs to all.
What’s most important about Sanders, however, isn’t the policy ideas he’s popularizing, or even his role in detoxifying the word “socialism.” Yes, Medicare for All and tuition-free college as well as full medical and student debt cancellation would transform millions of lives. Likewise, the fact that socialism is no longer anathema has opened up new possibilities in politics (and has significantly increased socialist magazine subscriptions and socialist magazine employment, for which we are both grateful). But what matters most is how Bernie has promoted the idea that nothing he or any other candidate can do in office will win the kind of change we need without a political revolution of millions of people, a mass working-class movement taking to the streets and workplaces and fighting on its own behalf.
Sanders has played an important role in sparking that movement, and demonstrated that electoral politics shouldn’t be seen as something contrary to or apart from its development. “He has absolutely infuriated the liberal establishment by committing a major crime,” said Noam Chomsky in an interview with the Intercept. “It’s not his policies. His crime was to organize an ongoing political movement that doesn’t just show up at the polls every four years and push a button, but keeps working. That’s no good. The rabble is supposed to stay home. Their job is to watch not to participate.” Sanders’s greatest contribution to American politics is that he continues to convince people that their own participation is necessary to win a better society.
If socialists had the opportunity to design the ideal scenario leading up to a viable democratic socialist presidential campaign, we would have scripted something very different. Ideally, a campaign like Sanders’s would have been the culmination of a long path paved with many smaller victories. Socialism would already be a powerful movement in electoral politics, the workplace, and civil society, and the candidate would rise organically through the ranks of this dynamic, popular, and organized movement.
Unfortunately, both socialism and working-class movements were nowhere near ascendant when Sanders first ran for president. Instead, in a strange feat of reverse-engineering that few socialists saw coming, his campaign helped revive those movements.
After decades of marginalization and defeat, US socialist politics are entering a new era. When future histories of the American socialist movement are written, Sanders will play a prominent role. How does his life fit into the broader trajectory of the American Left?
On the one hand, Bernie’s formative years aren’t that different from many people his age on the Left. Born to a Jewish immigrant family (a demographic that has played key roles in the history of the American Left), he dove headlong into the political upheavals of the 1960s, joining the civil rights and socialist movements. As those upheavals subsided, he, too, retreated momentarily—to the idyll of rural Vermont. That story tracks closely to what we hear from many fellow travelers who were young and active during the last period of American social unrest and mass agitation.
On the other hand, especially after the 1970s, Sanders has managed throughout his career to stand both outside the main currents of the socialist movement and outside the American political mainstream. He has largely walked alone, remaining politically independent of the Democratic Party and avoiding its open embrace of neoliberal policies and abandonment of the labor movement, while also carving a successful path as an elected official. We should be grateful he did; otherwise, Sanders wouldn’t have been able to hold the unique position he has held over the last four decades, culminating in his presidential runs and his contribution to the revival of socialist and working-class movements. Sanders’s unique political biography has a lot to teach us about how to weather periods of left marginalization and defeat by remaining true to leftist principles—and how to strike again when the iron’s hot.
Socialism and Sanders
Socialism has a long and storied history in the United States— never dominant, but at times popular and powerful.
Thomas Paine, one of the country’s founding fathers (and its most radical), was an ardent critic of economic inequality and rule over the many by the few. Socialism didn’t exist as an ideology in the late eighteenth century, but Paine believed in a society shaped by the ideals of democracy and equality, and even proposed the creation of proto–welfare state programs and taxing the rich. In the early nineteenth century, American utopian socialists inspired by thinkers like Robert Owen and Charles Fourier worked to create enclaves apart from society where labor was undertaken for the common good and not for profit, and where each community member had a say in the decisions that affected their lives. Those experiments didn’t have much staying power, but they were important early efforts to realize the values of socialism in the United States.
As the Industrial Revolution progressed and the world saw the rise of an industrial working class toiling in factories and mills, especially throughout Europe and the United States, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels began writing, arguing that those workers had both the strategic power in society as well as the material self-interest to fight for and win socialism. In the second half of the nineteenth century, workers throughout the United States, many of them influenced by Marx and Engels’s theories but most simply interested in winning better lives for themselves and their families, began organizing unions to fight for dignified working conditions and fair pay—and waging some of the bloodiest battles in all of world history against bosses, police, and even soldiers.
Those battles ebbed and flowed past the turn of the twentieth century, with major strikes and union organizing kicking off in railroads, steel factories, and other industries, and even citywide general strikes like the one in Seattle in 1919. The Socialist and Communist parties also grew during this time, with the socialists electing over a thousand officials all over the country—from the “sewer socialists” who led Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for decades to two members of the US Congress.
The most prominent socialist political leader during the first decades of the twentieth century was Eugene V. Debs, whom Bernie Sanders cites as a personal hero. (Sanders made a documentary about Debs in the 1970s, and reportedly has a framed portrait of Debs in his office in Washington, DC.) Debs led militant strikes as an officer with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, prompting the New York Times to denounce him as “a lawbreaker at large, an enemy of the human race” in 1894. He first read the works of German socialists like Marx, Engels, and Karl Kautsky when he was imprisoned for his role in organizing a strike. Thereafter, he devoted himself to the cause not just of unionism, but of socialism.
Debs ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket five times—at his most successful in 1912, he won 6 percent of the popular vote. But Debs was steadfast in his belief that the task of the Socialist Party was not merely to win votes. It was to awaken the American working class and create an independent electoral expression of class struggle happening on the ground. “I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out,” Debs said—a sentiment echoed in Sanders’s campaign slogan “Not Me, Us” over a century later. Victory for workers would remain elusive unless workers organized themselves.
In 1918, Debs was arrested for speaking out against World War I. The country had been whipped into a pro-war hysteria, and federal authorities charged him with intending to “cause and incite insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny and refusal of duty in the military,” and for trying “to obstruct the recruiting and enlistment service of the United States.” He knew that his antiwar agitation would likely result in his imprisonment, but he did it anyway, telling a crowd gathered in Canton, Ohio, “The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.”
Debs ran for president for a final time from behind bars in 1920, receiving, incredibly, over nine hundred thousand votes. But his incarceration delivered a blow to his health from which he never recovered. He died a few years later, in 1926.
For nearly a century, no American socialist has proven as popular a leader as Debs—not until Sanders began his first campaign for president in 2015. Debs was an important inspiration for Sanders, not just because of Debs’s socialist politics, but because of the way he communicated them. Debs’s biographer Nick Salvatore writes that he “remains the classic example of an indigenous American radical. He was not born a Socialist, and he did not reject American values when he became one.” Sanders, too, would speak about socialism in distinctly American tones, combatting the widespread notion that socialism is an exclusively foreign concept that could never take root in American soil—while also remaining critical of the role of the United States in perpetuating war and inequality around the world.
Shortly before Sanders was born, another burst of labor militancy kicked off. During the Great Depression, workers struck in enormous numbers. In 1934, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Toledo, Ohio, all saw massive general strikes, while autoworkers in Flint, Michigan, famously sat down on the job and occupied their factories a few years later. This period led to the explosive growth of the labor movement. Communists, socialists, and other leftists played key roles in these fights. And elected socialists were still around too— including one, Vito Marcantonio, who was representing East Harlem in Congress at the very moment Bernie Sanders was born a few miles away in Brooklyn.
That explosion of working-class organizing was the impetus behind President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, the massive (and at times contradictory) project that remade American life in the 1930s and vastly improved the material well-being of millions of people throughout the country. Socialists and Communists would play key roles in every aspect of the New Deal, from organizing the working-class upheavals that spurred Roosevelt to pass pro-worker legislation to even working in some of the newly created New Deal agencies under Roosevelt. While Jim Crow white supremacy, sexism, and other oppressions weren’t ended by the New Deal, and some of the new labor reforms actually helped tame expressions of working-class militancy, the New Deal would become an important reference point for Sanders’s own politics over half a century later—showing, at the very least, that it was possible to undertake a massive mobilization to extend social rights at the federal level.
Sanders was born while Roosevelt was still president, on September 8, 1941, in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish parents. His father had immigrated from Poland, and his mother’s parents were from Poland and Russia. The family was not impoverished, but money was a constant struggle for his paint salesman father and the entire Sanders household. “It wasn’t a question of putting food on the table. It was a question of arguing about whether you buy this or whether you buy that,” Sanders recollects. “I remember a great argument about drapes—whether we could afford them.”
Sanders has contrasted his upbringing in a rent-controlled apartment to that of Donald Trump, who is roughly his same age and also grew up in New York City. “I did not have a mom and dad who gave me millions of dollars to build luxury skyscrapers and casinos and country clubs,” he has said. “But I had something more valuable: I had the role model of a father who had unbelievable courage in journeying across an ocean, with no money in his pocket and not knowing a word of English.”
Sanders’s father had left Poland in 1921. “He came to escape the crushing poverty that existed in his community,” Sanders explains, “and to escape widespread antisemitism. Needless to say I would not be with you today if he had not made that trip from Poland because virtually his entire family there was wiped out by the Nazis.”
Bernie grew up in a milieu that was given to left-wing politics. His parents weren’t radicals—more like New Deal Democrats, who according to Bernie’s brother, Larry, “understood that the government could do good things.” But many Jewish European immigrants were radicals, playing key roles in the labor movement and in the Communist and Socialist parties and other radical organizations in the first half of the twentieth century. Those immigrants’ children and grandchildren often went on to play a sizable role in radical politics in the century’s second half. When McCarthyism and the Red Scare kicked off not long after Sanders’s birth, many reds who were expelled from the labor movement and blacklisted from the entertainment industry were descendants of Jewish immigrants.
Sanders’s mother died when she was forty-six after a difficult bout of illness. This experience was Sanders’s first brush with the intrusion of financial worry into people’s most private, painful moments, leading eventually to his embrace of national health insurance. As a New York Times reporter writes, “As his mother’s health declined and his family struggled to pay for medical treatment, he was spending more time attending to her than in classes at Brooklyn College, suffering through what his brother called ‘a wrecked year’ leading to her death.” After that year, Sanders transferred from Brooklyn College to the University of Chicago. His father died almost immediately thereafter, in 1962.
Newly parentless, Sanders found his footing in Chicago just as the student and civil rights movements took center stage in the country’s politics. Student activists like him were important drivers of the upsurges of the sixties, joining the civil rights movement’s efforts to win voting rights and end Jim Crow, and fighting the Vietnam War. Bernie was “radicalized by the grinding poverty he saw for the first time in places such as the city’s South Side.” He later described his time in Chicago as “the major period of intellectual ferment in my life.”
Sanders joined the civil rights movement in Chicago. In 1962, as the president of his college’s chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), he led a sit-in at the University of Chicago. For thirteen days, student members of CORE occupied the university president’s office to demand the school end its policy of housing segregation in the off-campus buildings it owned. The administration agreed to create a committee to look into the issue, but according to Sanders at the time, this was not sufficient to resolve “an intolerable situation when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments.” CORE continued to pressure the university, picketing its buildings that refused to rent to African Americans.
In 1963, the University of Chicago finally gave in and ended its racist housing policy. But the struggles for racial justice in Chicago weren’t over. Months later, Sanders joined a protest against racist education policies in Chicago. Starved of public investment, crowded black schools were being supplied with temporary trailers to use as classrooms. Sanders went to protest the installation of these trailers and was arrested on the spot, his legs chained to those of black protesters. He was taken to jail, and bailed out by the NAACP. His arrest was captured by a photographer for the Chicago Sun-Times, his face in a grimace as police drag him away from the protest.
Later that year, Sanders traveled to Washington, DC, to attend the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—Bernie’s other personal hero— gave his famous “I have a dream” speech. Many Americans remember the line from that speech about not judging people by the color of their skin but instead by the content of their character. Few remember that King praised the “marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community” and warned that “the whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright days of justice emerge.”
At the helm of key positions in the civil rights movement were socialists like A. Philip Randolph, who had cut his teeth in the Socialist Party and as the leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Bayard Rustin, whose activist life included stints in the antiwar movement, Communist Party, and Socialist Party. Even King called himself a democratic socialist. He had been recruited to the Montgomery Bus Boycott campaign by a labor organizer, E. D. Nixon, who had honed his politics and skills in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. King’s final speech, the night before he was murdered, was delivered to Memphis sanitation workers who were on strike.
The socialist traditions of mass action and of struggle from below were also integral to the civil rights movement’s strategy. That movement overturned the white-supremacist Jim Crow order not simply by electing politicians sympathetic to civil rights (though it did that, too), but also by marching, getting arrested in civil disobedience actions, launching boycotts, and going on strike. Sanders’s participation in the most important American social movement of the twentieth century helped shape his views on the necessity of mass movements to win social change.
“My activities here in Chicago taught me a very important lesson that I have never forgotten,” Sanders said at a 2019 rally in front of 10,000 people in the city. “Real change never takes place from the top on down. It always takes place from the bottom on up.”
In Chicago, Sanders’s activities were not restricted to the civil rights movement. He also joined the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), the youth section of the Socialist Party. “It helped me put two and two together, in my mind,” Sanders said later about his time in the YPSL. “We don’t like poverty, we don’t like racism, we don’t like war, we don’t like exploitation. What do they all have in common? … What does wealth and power mean? How does it influence politics?”
This early experience with the socialist movement clearly made a deep impression—so deep that Sanders persisted in calling himself a socialist for the rest of his life, through all the decades during which the term was toxic. That persistence in claiming the socialist label led many to write him off as an eccentric over the years, but by refusing to give it up, Sanders helped popularize socialism decades later. His political steadfastness and stubbornness paid off.
When Sanders left the University of Chicago, he never rejoined a socialist group (though he did occasionally give speeches, for example, at Democratic Socialists of America conventions). But you can see the perspective he gained from joining that group stamped on his entire subsequent political career.
One thing Sanders inherited from the socialist tradition is a fundamental belief that the rich are not your friends, that we need to combat the wealthy and powerful rather than cozy up to them to make social change happen. Because a small number of elites benefit from our political and economic system as it is, Sanders believes they will never voluntarily give it up. The way to advance the interests of the vast majority is through conflict, not around it.
His rhetoric identifies social problems, then names the small group of powerful people who are creating those social problems, and says we have go to battle against them. That rhetoric stands in stark contrast to the dominant approach of the Democratic Party, even of its “progressive” wing, which is reticent about that need to name and shame and fight and dispossess the great hoarders of wealth in our society. Consider the difference between Sanders and the progressive 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren. She said on the Democratic Party presidential debate stage in 2019, “I don’t have a beef with billionaires,” before suggesting they “pitch in.” The Sanders campaign, by contrast, made bumper stickers emblazoned with the words “Billionaires should not exist.” Warren’s approach assumes that the ultra-rich can continue to exist without distorting our politics or immiserating wide swaths of the country. Sanders says the ultra-rich can’t stay ultra-rich.
While Sanders clearly thinks he has an important and unique role to play in the fight for a better world as a high-profile politician, he also constantly emphasizes that the election of one person, even one who has solid political and moral commitments to fight for the many, not the few, isn’t enough to change the world. To do that, we need a mass movement of working-class people. The power of the capitalist class is immense; to overcome it, we need to not just win elections but collectively assemble as millions of people marching in the street, engaging in strikes and boycotts, pressuring politicians, and pushing back against the inevitable retaliation for our victories. This is the socialist argument about how progressive change happens under capitalism: not through the independent actions of benevolent leaders, but by the working class coming together as a class and fighting for itself.
Could Sanders have developed this kind of analysis about the way change occurs under capitalism without joining a socialist organization and participating in a mass grassroots movement? It’s possible, but highly unlikely. Both endeavors give their members and participants a political education about how the world works and a base of experience in making that social change happen that is not found elsewhere. These experiences shaped Sanders’s conception of power in society and sharpened his clarity about which side he was on.
Against the Current
In 1968, the zenith of the decade’s activism, Sanders moved to Vermont. The New Left felt like it was on the march forward; in hindsight, we know that it would soon go into decline. In some ways, Sanders was ahead of the curve. Before the rest of the movement petered out, he became “captivated by rural life” and headed northeast. Many would eventually follow suit, whether to other rural idylls, urban progressive enclaves, or just away from their previous lives as activists.
Bernie didn’t hold a “real job” for years—a biographical detail that opponents try to wield as a cudgel, but which probably resonates with rather than repels downwardly mobile young people today. He made documentaries that he sold to schools and universities, and occasionally wrote for alternative newspapers. Sanders gives a rosy, even petty capitalist gloss to those years in later tellings of his life’s story: in Our Revolution, he calls his radical filmmaking “a reasonably successful small business.”
His friends tell a different story. He was evicted from one apartment, his electricity turned off at another. A friend of his at the time told a journalist in 2015 that Sanders worked a bit as a carpenter, but “he was a shitty carpenter.” He was on unemployment benefits for a while, and was living “just one step above hand to mouth,” another said. Hardly the typical life plan of an aspiring future president.
Sanders eschewed material possessions, a “real job,” and a stable existence. This wasn’t much different than many of his generation post–New Left. The upsurges of the student, civil rights, and antiwar movements began to wane in the 1970s, and some former activists sought personal and political fulfillment by heading “back to the land,” trying to create new, egalitarian worlds by leaving mainstream society behind, sometimes on rural communes, in states like Vermont. Sanders was no hippie, but much as the 1960s movements shaped him into a socialist and activist, the disillusionment of the 1970s shaped him, briefly, as a kind of dropout.
But it is here that Sanders began swimming against the main currents of the Left at the time. At a time when many others in his demographic had begun swapping protest signs for fermentation cookbooks, Sanders’s passion for politics found its first electoral expressions. Shortly after arriving in Vermont, he decided to run for Senate and then governor on the ticket of a small, left-wing third party in Vermont, the Liberty Union Party, in 1972. He ran for Senate again on the Liberty Union ticket in 1974, and then for governor again in 1976.
This wasn’t the path chosen by someone who valued winning political power above all else. He never cracked double digits in these elections. But even while reflecting on those campaigns years later, Sanders had no regrets. “The issues that I and other Liberty Union candidates raised during that campaign helped play an important part in the election results and eventually resulted in changes in public policy,” he wrote in his first book, referring to issues, such as property tax reform and better provision of dental care for poor children, which were eventually taken up by the Democratic winner of the governor’s race. “Despite our [winning] a paltry one percent [of the vote], the Liberty Union made an impact on major legislation.”
This was a repeat of a scenario that had played out in high school, when Sanders ran for student body president and lost, only to watch the victor adopt his proposal for the school to raise funds for Korean War orphans. And it also foreshadowed what happened in 2016, when Sanders’s first presidential campaign came up short but nonetheless caused a massive political sea change. Sanders has won plenty of campaigns— but crucially, the ones he’s lost have also moved the needle.
His tenure with the Liberty Union Party gives us another glimpse at how deeply the demands and vision of socialism informed his politics. The Liberty Union Party called for mass decommodification and nationalization. “I favor the public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries,” he said in one interview in 1973. On another occasion, Sanders wrote an open letter to one of his state’s senators, published in a Vermont newspaper:
I would also urge you to give serious thought about the eventual nationalization of these gigantic companies. It is extremely clear that these companies, owned by a handful of billionaires, have far too much power over the lives of Americans to be left in private hands. The oil industry, and the entire energy industry, should be owned by the public and used for the public good—not for additional profits for billionaires.
“We have got to begin to deal with the fact that corporations do not have the god-given right to disrupt the lives of their workers or the economic foundation of their towns simply because they wish to move elsewhere to earn a higher rate of profit,” he said in a press release in 1976. In that press statement, he floated the idea of capital controls, where the state blocks the free movement of capital, prohibiting businesses from moving elsewhere and taking jobs and the economic life of a region with them. Capital controls, decommodification, nationalization—these are radical ideas, and they testify to Sanders’s roots in the socialist movement.
Sanders left the Liberty Union Party in 1977, frustrated that it was too narrowly focused on elections. “The function of a radical political party is very simple,” he said in his resignation letter. “It is to create a situation in which the ordinary working people take what rightfully belongs to them. Nobody can predict the future of the workers’ movement in this country or the state of Vermont. It is my opinion, however, that if workers do not take power in a reasonably short time this country will not have a future.”
Perhaps if Sanders had lived in a country with an electoral system that didn’t maintain a two-party stranglehold, he would have found electoral success earlier. Jeremy Corbyn, the former British Labour Party leader to whom Sanders is often compared, holds similar politics to Sanders and has a similar history of involvement in important leftist movements throughout his life, from solidarity campaigns against apartheid in South Africa to opposing wars. He got involved in electoral politics just after Sanders, but Corbyn had a labor party to join; when Sanders was on the margins of Vermont politics with the Liberty Party, Corbyn won his first elections for Labour.
Radicals in the United States have long wrestled with the question of what to do about the Democrats, a party that has never come anywhere close to being a true workers’ party, and has always made compromises with capitalists that prevent it from embracing a full-on fight for the working class (a question we will take up at length in Chapter 4). Neither of the two basic choices has been good: stifle your criticisms of the party and join them, viewing the Democrats as the only game in town and the only party through which you can get anything done; or stick to your principles and work through third parties that never win. The former has been a recipe for conservatizing progressives and socialists; the latter, a recipe for political marginalization and demoralization.
Sanders, however, managed to largely avoid the pitfalls of both and blaze his own independent political path.
Leaving the Liberty Union Party did not spell the end of Sanders’s involvement in politics. He ran for mayor of Burlington as an independent in 1980 and won—the same year Ronald Reagan captured the presidency and the Right saw a national upsurge. Sanders’s eight years as Burlington mayor are a fascinating study in local left governance. He won office by a mere ten votes, and immediately set to work using his position to improve living standards for average Burlingtonians.
His list of accomplishments as mayor is long. At a time when so much of the country was moving rightward, Burlington under Sanders’s mayorship raised taxes on wealthy developers, expanded affordable housing (which included the establishment of a pioneering community land trust), fought for rent control, supported municipal workers’ unions, expanded public funding for youth programming and the arts, fought utility companies, instituted feminist measures in local government, outlawed discrimination in housing, became one of the first cities to hold an official Gay Pride parade, and stopped a massive condominium development from taking away a large plot of public land on Lake Champlain.
But his tenure didn’t just focus on local issues. Nationally, Sanders spoke out consistently against Reagan’s savage budget cuts. He also used the small city’s mayoral office to speak out against the president’s blood-soaked interventions in Central American countries like Nicaragua and El Salvador. After the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua overthrew the country’s brutal Somoza dictatorship, the Reagan administration backed the Contras, a group of right-wing militants responsible for destroying the country’s infrastructure, numerous rapes and sexual assaults against Sandinista supporters and other Nicaraguans, and mass bloodshed across Nicaragua.
In El Salvador, the United States sought to avoid a similar revolution by propping up a brutal, bloodthirsty right-wing dictatorship that could claim almost no backing from the Salvadoran people themselves. The result was some of the worst human rights atrocities ever committed in the Western Hemisphere, including the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero while he gave mass in 1980; numerous massacres of innocent civilians in villages like El Mozote, where nearly a thousand were slaughtered, and the rape and murder of four American churchwomen, both in 1981; the massacre of six Jesuit priests along with a housekeeper and her daughter at the Central American University in 1989; and a constant stream of bullet-riddled, tortured bodies that piled up on streets throughout the country.
The Central America solidarity movement was nowhere near the size of the civil rights movement or the movement against the Vietnam War, but it was an important movement across the United States opposing Reagan’s foreign policy. Typically, few mayors weigh in on foreign policy issues of any kind, but Sanders held numerous Central America solidarity teach-ins and rallies in Burlington. In 1982, he spoke at a rally of hundreds at City Hall against US intrusion in El Salvador, and pushed a ballot initiative against intervention in the country. He also established a sister city program with Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, and even went to Managua, Nicaragua, as mayor and attended a pro-Sandinista rally in 1985.
“I plead guilty to, throughout my adult life, doing everything that I can to prevent war and destruction,” Sanders told the New York Times in 2019 after the paper attacked his mayoral record on Central America. “As a mayor, I did my best to stop American foreign policy, which for years was overthrowing governments in Latin America and installing puppet regimes. I did everything that I could as a mayor of a small city to stop the United States from getting involved in another war in Central America trying to overthrow a government.”
All this history is worth revisiting not just for what it says about Sanders’s approach to governance, but also for what it suggests about how newly elected left officials can approach their time in office. Regardless of whether an official is a small-town mayor, city council member, or a member of the House or Senate, it’s possible to use their elected office to both pursue a robust, pro-working-class agenda for their immediate constituencies and speak out against the reactionary policies that benefit the wealthy few and hurt the many, as well as join movements against imperialist bloodshed around the world. Sanders managed to do all of the above as Burlington’s mayor, at a time when the Right was in power across the country.
During this time and afterward, Sanders was not a member of any party, formally accountable to no one but himself—and still he managed to blaze a trail to political success that would eventually lead to two presidential campaigns. In the annals of astonishing and improbable American political success stories, Sanders’s ranks high.
When Sanders first won Burlington’s mayoral election, neoliberalism had taken hold of US politics. Neoliberalism is the economic philosophy, hatched in the mid-twentieth century—but finding expression beginning in the 1970s and increasing in the 1980s—that held that the majority’s needs could best be served by allowing private capitalist markets to expand into every crevice of society. For neoliberals, state interventions in the affairs of business are only desirable insofar as they buttress this expansion, ensuring maximum profits for business owners. This is justified by the “trickle-down economics” theory advanced under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, which posits that profits for the wealthy are naturally reinvested into society, creating brighter opportunities for all further down the economic ladder.
Neoliberalism imagines workers as entrepreneurs, selling their labor as a commodity the way a business sells commodities, in an environment of supposedly free exchange, not skewed by power imbalances or marred by exploitation. The winners in this exchange are simply the most successful entrepreneurs. Neoliberalism thus promotes the idea of meritocracy: the best players always win the game, and wealth and success are proof of inherent talent and superiority. Collective bargaining rights, the welfare state, and redistribution of wealth represent unfair compensation to the undeserving losers. If you want a better life, work and innovate harder.
The rise of neoliberalism has been disastrous for workers in the United States and helped defeat and dismantle the movements that won so many gains in the New Deal era and the 1960s. It broke the strength of American unions, as employer attacks (combined with conservative strategies by unions themselves) led to concessions like cutbacks in pay, benefits, and working conditions, and eroded workers’ faith and investment in their own unions. Since the dawn of this process in the 1970s, American workers’ wages have remained relatively flat, while productivity has soared—at six times the rate of worker pay. Capitalists’ profits, meanwhile, have likewise skyrocketed. Austerity has been the order of the day, with tax giveaways for the wealthy, massive cuts to already meager welfare benefits, privatization of public goods, and erosion of workers’ rights.
In the latter decades of the twentieth century, Democrats became enamored of neoliberalism. If Sanders had chosen to pursue a political career through the party, he might have been forced to accommodate their worldview—especially without a left-wing working-class movement at his back of the type that is beginning to reemerge today. Luckily for us all, he chose another path.
Outsider in the House
Bernie Sanders graduated from the mayorship to run for Vermont’s sole House of Representatives seat, winning in 1990. The first words out of his mouth, just minutes after he discovered he was going to be a national politician, were:
You all understand that it is not going to be Bernie Sanders or any other member of Congress that’s going to bring about the change that we need. What we need in this country is a mass movement of tens of millions of people who are prepared to stand up and say we want national healthcare. We want the millionaires and the multinational corporations who have not been paying their fair share of taxes to start paying. We want money going into education and environmental protection. And no more Star Wars [Reagan’s boondoggle missile defense program] or stealth bombers.
He became the only political independent in the House at that time, striking a deal with the Democratic leadership to remain outside the party but caucus with them and receive committee assignments according to his seniority as if he were a Democrat (though last in line in his class of representatives). That deal again reflected his special ability to thread the needle of maintaining political independence from both the Democrats and Republicans while avoiding political marginality.
Meanwhile, the Left as a whole was still lost in the wilderness. Neoliberalism was already on the ascent by the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Those events prompted wild celebrations of the free market and led to what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history”—capitalism had won. Critiques of inequality were passé, greed was good, and there was no alternative. Attacks on the American working class intensified. Social welfare programs were being eviscerated nearly as zealously by Democrats like President Bill Clinton as by his Republican predecessors Reagan and George H.W. Bush. The labor movement was under assault, with unionization and strike rates dropping steadily. The progressive causes to which Sanders had dedicated his life were losing ground.
Still, he stayed busy in the House. Sanders opposed the first Gulf War. He fought the brutal “welfare reform” bill—led by the Republicans but supported by many Democrats, as he noted at the time. He spoke out against executives’ bonuses at Lockheed Martin. He decried the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia of the rightward-moving Republican Party under Representative Newt Gingrich’s leadership as Speaker of the House in the last half of the 1990s. He was one of the cofounders of the House Progressive Caucus in 1991. And as he would for the rest of his career, he fought for a single-payer health care system.
Sanders often brought righteous anger to the House floor. In a speech in 1992, he said:
In case you don’t know, and you haven’t seen the latest polls, the American people hold the president of the United States in contempt, they hold this institution in contempt, they hold the Republican Party in contempt, they hold the Democratic Party in contempt … We are spending $270 billion a year on the military, but we don’t have a major enemy. I know it hurts your feelings. I know you’re upset about it. I know you’re hoping and praying that maybe we’ll have another war. Maybe somebody will rise up. But it ain’t happening. The Soviet Union doesn’t exist! The Warsaw Pact is through! Who you worried about? Iraq? Panama? Who you worried about? I’ll tell ya who I’m worried about. I’m worried about the fact that our workers are seeing a decline in their standard of living. They want to see our industry be rebuilt … The American people want to see our kids educated. They want a Head Start program. They want their kids to be able to go to college. They want to wipe out the fact that 5 million children in this country go to bed hungry. They want childcare for their kids. They want decent education. Let’s have the guts to give some leadership to this country. The Cold War’s over. Let’s reinvest in America.
Sanders’s tenure in the House spanned sixteen years. Those years were bleak ones for the Left, regardless of who held the presidency. The anti-corporate globalization movement started picking up steam in the mid-1990s under President Bill Clinton, and reached its zenith when it shut down the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle through mass protest. The trade deals protesters were criticizing, which gutted democracy in the United States and around the world and hurt workers both at home and abroad, have long been the target of Sanders’s criticism.
But the movement’s momentum evaporated after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The Bush administration beat the drums of war, first mobilizing to invade Afghanistan—which, in a lapse of judgment Sanders did support, along with every member of the House but one, California’s Barbara Lee—then mobilizing in 2002 to invade Iraq. Millions around the country and the world took to the streets to oppose the Iraq invasion; the global protests on February 15, 2003, may have been the largest global protest in human history. Sanders opposed the Iraq invasion—again, unlike many Democrats—along with Bush’s other giveaways to corporations and attacks on civil liberties like the USA PATRIOT Act.
When he ran for Senate and won in 2007, Sanders took up issues similar to the ones he had in the House. He also fought to expand community health centers and defend the US Postal Service and Social Security from privatization and dismantlement. (He cofounded a Senate caucus called, fittingly, Defend Social Security.) He held public hearings on worker abuse and outright slavery in the tomato fields of Immokalee, Florida—hearings organized with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a labor rights organization for Florida farmworkers that first put on the map the issue of labor abuses in the state’s tomato fields.
Sanders has a strong legislative record in Congress, but his fundamental goal has always been to shift the terms of public debate rather than hammering out compromises to pass legislation. “One of the most important roles I can play in Congress is to raise issues that, for a variety of reasons, other people choose not to deal with,” he wrote in Outsider in the White House. “Just shifting the framework of debate can have enormous consequences.”
Perhaps his most famous act as a senator came in opposition to the leader of the Democratic Party. In response to President Barack Obama’s extensions of George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, on December 10, 2010, Sanders engaged in a nine-hour filibuster denouncing the tax cuts and the country’s rampant inequality. “I’m not here to set any great records or to make a spectacle,” he said at the speech’s outset. “I am simply here today to take as long as I can to explain to the American people the fact that we have got to do a lot better than this agreement provides.”
Progressives who were irate at Obama’s willingness to extend such a massive giveaway to the rich were elated. On the evening of Sanders’s filibuster, Politico reporter Shira Toeplitz wrote, “The left’s been looking for a new hero. Tonight they latched onto one: Sen. Bernie Sanders.” (In a sign of the kind of dismissive coverage of Sanders that the paper of record would later give his presidential campaigns, a New York Times reporter managed to write an entire article about the speech that noted Sanders jumped up and down at one point because his legs were cramping, and that he had oatmeal and coffee for breakfast beforehand, but said absolutely nothing about the actual political content of the speech.) The filibuster came less than a year before the Occupy Wall Street protests put economic inequality on the map in the United States. Sanders, as usual, was ahead of the curve.
Aside from the panoply of progressive policy measures Sanders fought for in the House, he also pioneered new ways to talk about major political issues. Sanders’s foreign policy record has been imperfect: not only did he vote in favor of the Afghanistan invasion, but he has also hedged in the past on Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine (though his record is unquestionably one of the strongest on Palestine in Congress). But overall, his anti-imperialist instincts have been strong throughout his career, and they have only grown stronger in the last half-decade. He led the charge on invoking the War Powers Resolution in March 2019 to stop US involvement in the Saudi war on Yemen, and took bolder progressive foreign policy stances than any major presidential candidate in recent history in his 2020 campaign (for example, denouncing military intervention in Iran and Venezuela, denouncing the 2019 right-wing overthrow of democratically elected Bolivian president Evo Morales as a “coup,” and proposing to leverage US aid to Israel in opposition to its occupation of Palestine and abuses of Palestinians).
Sanders has also long fought to support veterans, especially in the Veterans Administration. He became chair of the Senate Veterans Committee in 2013, and has endeavored to stop attempts to privatize the VA. “Some may see it as incongruous for a strong progressive to be a fierce advocate for veterans’ rights. I don’t, and never have,” Sanders wrote in Our Revolution. “I will continue to do everything that I can to make sure the United States does not get entangled in wars that we should not be fighting. But I will never blame the men and women who do the fighting for getting us into those wars.”
The soldiers on the front lines of America’s imperialist wars abroad, the ones who come home missing limbs and with post-traumatic stress disorder, are often poor and people of color. This is thanks in large part to the military’s reliance on economic conscription. In a country where social rights such as health care and education are expensive and elusive, the military attracts personnel with promises of social and economic opportunities that should already be guaranteed. Members of the armed forces report that these benefits are the number-one reason they elected to join up. In his support for rank-and-file soldiers while opposing war, perhaps Sanders takes to heart that Eugene Debs line from the 1918 speech that landed him in jail: “The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.”
Sanders’s strategy is far more likely to draw soldiers and veterans to join the antiwar cause, for which they are uniquely powerful spokespeople, than blanket anti-veteran sentiment on the Left. But it’s also politically shrewd, in that it prevents the Right as well as liberals from scoring cheap points by attacking him as unpatriotic. The rhetoric of such attacks is jingoistic and absurd, used as a bludgeon against antiwar activists, but it can have emotional purchase, particularly in reactionary times when hawks are whipping up pro-war sentiment. Sanders’s record of support for veterans prevents opponents from using that “anti-troop” canard against him when he agitates against war.
Sheer Force of Will
Without a unified mass movement to represent, Sanders marched to the beat of his own drum for decades. He stayed remarkably consistent in his politics during those years, seemingly through sheer force of will. All the incentives in US politics were for him to move rightward, to abandon his working-class politics following the trajectory of the Democratic Party, but he refused.
This should be a key lesson for current and aspiring leftist elected officials. In the long term, being consistent and steadfast in politics is not only morally correct, grounding politics in compassion for the working class and belief in ordinary people’s right to live with dignity and security. It’s also the strategically savvy thing to do. Objective political conditions change, and only those leaders whose principles remain unchanged can take full advantage of new openings and possibilities.
One central reason why so many people have flocked to Sanders’s presidential campaigns is they respect and admire his political consistency over the years. The movements that helped spur Sanders to political action as a college student began dissipating around the time his political career began, but his refusal to abandon progressive demands—even at a time when the movements that had previously advanced them were weak—has paid off.
During his presidential campaigns, videos circulated widely on social media of Sanders repeating the same message about grotesque economic inequality in this country, from his time as mayor of Burlington to his tenure in the 1990s in the House to his time in the Senate to the presidential races. Voters find this consistency appealing. They trust him because of it. They see him as distinct from the politicians who embraced “ending welfare as we know it” when those policies were in vogue in the Democratic Party in the 1990s but back away from them now, or supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq but say they’ve now changed their minds, or who used to dismiss single-payer health care as a pipe dream but have suddenly begun considering it (or pretending to).
The clear lesson here is for leftist candidates to stick to their guns when it comes to progressive policies. Even if they pay a short-term political price for doing so, they’ll gain the respect of ordinary people over time. Their perceived authenticity will help them make a convincing case that they represent an alternative and inspiring way of doing politics.
Much of Sanders’s reliability owes to his own personal eccentricities. It takes an exceptionally strong-willed person, as well as one with raw political talent, to navigate the halls of power while purposefully rejecting all the entreaties and potential rewards of mainstream politics in favor of remaining independent and committed to a left political project— perhaps especially when that person is going it alone. There’s a reason Sanders called his book Outsider in the White House: in his lifetime, there hasn’t been anyone like him in American politics, mostly because the organized movement of people who think and act like Sanders has been in severe decline since shortly after he became politically active.
But since Bernie first assumed political office, stagnating wages and rising living costs have tested millions of people’s patience with the status quo and produced a political and economic crisis that has finally begun to bring masses of people around to his point of view. Things have reached a boiling point in the new century. The 2008 financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, labor uprisings in Wisconsin in 2011, and the 2012 Chicago Teachers Union strike further eroded popular tolerance for business as usual, creating new openings for left-wing politics. Sanders was personally willing and able to provide electoral leadership to a movement getting back on its feet.
The unexpected popularity of Sanders’s insurgent bids for the presidency owed to both objective factors—worsening material conditions, which formed the basis for a potential resurgence of class consciousness—and subjective factors, particularly his constancy and apparent authenticity, which made him a natural leader for a country hungry for a break from politics as usual. Sanders was the right guy in the right place at the right time, but he also took advantage of that confluence to make a profound impact on American political culture.
Sanders’s open identification as a democratic socialist gave people a new vocabulary to match their evolving political understanding. Most people who supported Sanders in the 2016 Democratic Party primary and plenty who didn’t but warmed to him over the coming months and years became more amenable to the idea of socialism, loosely defined. It helped that Fox News and the right-wing establishment, resting on their laurels after the twentieth-century collapse of the Soviet Union, began to slander everything as “socialism” that didn’t fit their aggressive conservative agenda, unwittingly inoculating millions of people and vacating the term of the ugly associations it had adopted during the Cold War era.
Luckily for those of us who are younger than Sanders, we don’t have to endure the same isolation that he has throughout his career. There’s a rising socialist movement in this country. And for the first time in decades, working people are no longer resigned to suffering passively. They are searching, listening, and increasingly they are fighting back. What that fight might look like in the decades to come is the subject of the rest of this book.
