Image by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen.
Did we hallucinate Bernie Sanders’ primary campaigns in 2016 and 2020? If you read centrist and liberal media from the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, it was easy to think so. The New York Times’ op-ed board, in their November 6 cri de coeur, writes, “Democrats have struggled for three elections now to settle on a persuasive message that resonates with Americans from both parties who have lost faith in the system—which pushed skeptical voters toward the more obviously disruptive figure, even though a large majority of Americans acknowledge his serious faults.” Bernie’s name was nowhere to be found in that piece, nor was it in Thomas Frank’s November 9 Times op-ed about the need for real leftist populism.
Astoundingly, in Dissent, a social democratic journal, the historian Michael Kazin penned an entire piece advocating a revival of leftist populism which failed to mention Bernie Sanders at all. Echoing the Times, Kazin only wrote, “Since the Great Recession, as authoritarian populists on the right gained strength across Europe, social democrats posed no coherent alternative and won only, as in the United Kingdom, when their opponents proved to be wretched failures at governing. Both across the Atlantic and in the United States, the left and center-left kept losing native-born voters without a college education who view the current and future economy as a craps game rigged against them.”
It’s as if Bernie never ran for president—on a wildly popular platform, and as the most popular politician in the U.S.—twice. One almost has to wonder if there’s an unspoken ban at some outlets on invoking Bernie’s name or the legacy of his electoral campaigns. If there is, that’s a problem. Because like it or not—and many establishment Dems did not, as we saw in their frantic efforts to kneecap Bernie’s campaigns, not once but twice—Bernie offered the only viable path forward for the Left and the country as a whole. His was, and is, the sole approach to politics adequate to the task of combating and disarming right-wing pseudo-populism. As Milan Loewer, a researcher at the Center for Working-Class Politics, wrote in Jacobin, “In the face of widening inequality, trust in the political establishment has never been lower; fewer people than ever identify with either party; 70 percent of Americans believe that powerful interests are rigging the economic system; only 40 percent of lower-income Americans believe that it is still possible to achieve the “American dream”; and almost no one believes that the country is ‘headed in the right direction.’”
The NYT op-ed board, ruminating on the challenges facing the Democrats, declared, “If the Democrats are to effectively oppose Mr. Trump, it must be not just through resisting his worst impulses but also by offering a vision of what they would do to improve the lives of all Americans and respond to anxieties that people have about the direction of the country and how they would change it.”
In Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 campaigns, and in his message from right after the election, he did just that. He wrote, in a tweet which merits being read in its entirety, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right. Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago. Today, despite an explosion in technology and worker productivity, many young people will have a worse standard of living than their parents. And many of them worry that Artificial Intelligence and robotics will make a bad situation even worse…”
Over the last few months, Bernie and AOC have been barnstorming the country on their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. They are drawing bigger crowds now than Bernie ever drew in his two campaigns for president—tens of thousands of people are filling stadiums across the country, even in deep-red areas. The rallies, a wildly popular source of hope in these dark times, have now drawn over 107,000 attendees nationwide. Bernie and AOC’s fundamental message remains unchanged: we need Medicare for All, a large increase in the minimum wage, legislation to guarantee the right to join a union, debt relief, public childcare, well-funded public education, free public college, high taxes on billionaires, public election funding and the reversal of Citizens United, and large investments in social programs and relief for the working class.
While it’s too early to say anything definitive, a path forward for the Left now seems to be fitfully emerging. Susan Crawford won the Wisconsin Supreme Court special election on April 1 in a stinging repudiation of Musk and his millions. Dan Osborn recently founded the Working Class Heroes Fund to recruit working-class candidates for political office. David Hogg’s Leaders We Deserve PAC recently announced a $20 million initiative to primary centrist and right-wing Democrats—a promising start, although nowhere near sufficient to win what will undoubtedly be a hard-fought battle against the party establishment. The 50501 movement is organizing large-scale nationwide protests against the Trump administration’s agenda. Shawn Fain and Sara Nelson are leading a more militant unionizing agenda. Bernie and AOC’s rallies are giving progressives a sense of hope and common purpose, and they are also helping organize for local candidates and the midterms. And AOC seems to be laying the foundation for a potential 2028 presidential run. In general, the Left has a great deal of fodder for organizing: Elon Musk, a cartoonishly evil man, is wrecking the federal government, causing chaos and major problems for millions. The economy is on the verge of a recession, and unsurprisingly, the Trump administration hasn’t fixed the cost-of-living crisis which working people are suffering through today.
Sanders’ previous campaigns illuminate the way forward. They demonstrate that it is best to fight fire with fire. To combat right-wing faux populism, which offers little more than rhetorical sops and culture wars, the best thing is genuine leftist populism. Perpetually courting elusive, unreliable white suburban “moderate” Republicans is a dead end. It is neither possible nor desirable to win elections by hemorrhaging working-class voters and attempting to compensate with members of the professional and managerial classes. The mathematics simply doesn’t work.
Bernie’s authenticity—and his steadfast commitment to economic justice and avoiding culture-war traps set by conservatives—attracted disaffected members of the working class. He understood the power of a good story: his rhetoric featured villains and heroes and blended statistics with the grand sweep of American history. At rallies, he called people to the microphone to share their stories and provide testimonials. This helped people to see how their personal struggles connected with our society’s collective problems.
Hindsight is 20-20, of course, but Bernie was not perfect as a politician. He had a distaste for making things personal. He didn’t want to play hardball or go for the jugular, both with Biden, a creature of the Democratic establishment whom he repeatedly referred to as his “friend,” and with Clinton’s emails scandal, which could have demolished her campaign, but which Bernie refused to use to his political advantage. And the 2020 Sanders campaign seemed to underestimate the Democratic establishment: it was blindsided by centrists’ rapid consolidation behind Biden and their usage of Warren to split the progressive vote.
What’s done is done, and Bernie is almost certain to not run for president again. But what is vital to remember given the “memory-holing” of both Bernie campaigns in the centrist press, the attempts to repress the memory of alternative paths which we might have taken, is that none of this is inevitable. The immediate prospects for the next year and a half are bleak. But Trump and his minions are vastly overreaching. Each new move they make to sow mayhem and torpedo the American economy only undermines the bases of their support. If the political pendulum punishes Trumpism severely in 2026 and 2028, as seems increasingly likely, the third time may finally be the charm for Bernieism.
