Bigger Than Bernie. Micah Uetricht
deal for insisting and then proving that a different kind of politics in the United States was possible. That contribution alone will likely reshape the US political landscape for decades to come, putting long-dormant left-wing ideas back into play. But as important as Bernie’s politics and policy proposals are, they won’t change the country and the world on their own. And they may not even be the most significant part of his legacy as a political figure.
What matters even more than Sanders’s vision of socialism is the movement Sanders has helped set in motion. Sanders doesn’t only argue for free public health care and college or a Green New Deal. He says we need a political revolution in this country to achieve those policies. The Sanders presidential campaigns have never been just about getting one man elected to the White House. They’re about building a movement of millions that can long outlive and outperform any single electoral campaign.
So those of us who support Sanders and are inspired by his call for political revolution—and by the rise of other democratic socialist politicians like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the recent teachers’ strike wave, the surge in the organized socialist movement, and everything else that has taken us all by surprise over the last few years—have to ask: What lessons should we draw from the Bernie Sanders moment? And how can we take all the energy that his candidacies have generated to build a movement that is bigger than a presidential candidate, bigger than a few dozen newly elected socialist representatives, and bigger than anything the US Left has seen in decades?
Not Me, Us
During one Democratic Party primary debate in June 2019, Bernie Sanders acknowledged that his opponents had some good ideas. Yet despite a preponderance of well-meaning plans, he asked, “How come nothing really changes? How come for the last 45 years wages have been stagnant for the middle class? How come we have the highest rate of childhood poverty? How come 45 million people still have student debt? How come three people own more wealth than the bottom half of America?”
He answered his own question. “Nothing will change unless we have the guts to take on Wall Street, the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the military-industrial complex, and the fossil fuel industry. If we don’t have the guts to take them on, we’ll continue to have plans, we’ll continue to have talk, and the rich will get richer, and everybody else will be struggling.”
Sanders was arguing that the missing ingredient is class struggle. It’s the only way to actually realize plans that improve life for the majority of people at the expense of the tiny minority who currently run the show.
Sanders doesn’t talk explicitly about what socialism means all that much. But it’s clear from his advocacy of class struggle that he shares the broad outlines of a socialist analysis of what’s wrong with capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system in which a small group of people own things like factories, companies, and money itself, and everyone else has to sell their labor to them in exchange for a wage, which they use to buy what they need to survive. Through their labor, workers create a surplus that is funneled into the bosses’ pockets as profits rather than being used for the good of everyone.
The problem is that all of the capitalists’ decisions are driven by profit. If they don’t make enough of it, their enterprises collapse. And the easiest ways to maximize profit are to pay workers less, make them work harder, avoid regulations, skimp on taxes, and expand into new markets by doing things like privatizing public goods, all of which are bad for the working class. So these two classes are locked in struggle—and since the capitalist class is more powerful, the working class always gets the short end of the stick.
Under capitalism, the nation’s (and the world’s) tiny minority of economic elites has grown unfathomably rich by soaking up the wealth generated by working people while those working people’s wages have remained stagnant and their lives have worsened. Those economic elites will not give up their power without a fight. The fight must be waged by millions of ordinary people, taking action at their jobs and at the ballot box, in the chambers and in the streets. Sanders’s 2020 campaign slogan, “Not Me, Us,” signals his intention to use his campaign to incorporate people into that fight, rather than merely convince them to vote for him on the basis that he’s competent and morally upstanding.
At that same June primary debate, candidates were asked which single policy they would make a legislative priority if elected president. At that point Sanders already had a number of detailed flagship proposals, but he nonetheless rejected the premise of the question, saying, “We need a political revolution.”
A political revolution is a tall order. But it’s one we have some ideas about—ideas that have come from watching the massive groundswell of support for policies like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal; interviewing organizers and newly elected officials who aren’t afraid to embrace those policies and use electoral campaigns to build the kind of bottom-up movements that Sanders has called for; seeing the surge in strikes and other kinds of militant labor organizing by workers across the country; witnessing the emergence of robust movements against the racism, sexism, and xenophobia that have been stoked by Trump but existed long before him; and participating ourselves in the new American socialist movement as members of the Democratic Socialists of America and staffers for the socialist magazine Jacobin.
Nobody saw it coming, but the Sanders campaign has given us all a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform our grotesquely unequal and unfair society, which is teetering on the brink of irreversible climate catastrophe. If we’re going to seize that opening we’ll need to build a mass, multiracial, working-class movement—one that’s bigger, and more radical, than Bernie.
When we say that nobody anticipated the political transformations of the last few years in the United States, we include ourselves in the ranks of those taken by surprise. We’ve both had our ideas about what’s politically possible in America radically transformed by the Sanders campaign— Meagan by becoming a socialist in the first place, Micah by realizing that socialism can actually become popular in America, the stuff of mass politics.
Sanders has showed us that socialist ideas don’t have to remain fringe. If we talk about them the right way, millions of people will support them. In fact, given how miserable the status quo has become for so many, and given how dissatisfied so many people are with tepid, center-left solutions to our collective problems, huge numbers of people could be interested in socialism precisely because it is such a bold ideology. Maybe, we’re at a moment when people are actually hungry for bold, uncompromising ideas from the Left—not terrified of them.
And not only have we learned that there is an appetite for Sanders’s robust political program and an openness to his “democratic socialist” label, we’ve also learned that the alternative—advancing a feeble, centrist political program against a vigorous hard-right populism—doesn’t work.
The entire argument made by liberals and some progressives in favor of running Hillary Clinton for president against Donald Trump in 2016 was that, while she was perhaps a less than ideal candidate given her long history of equivocation and occasionally outright reactionary politics, she would at least be the safe bet to defeat Trump, who represented a uniquely barbaric threat to the United States and the world. As everyone now knows, this “electability” argument turned out not to be true—the electable candidate was not elected. The Democrats’ preference for this “safe” strategy over the years not only culminated in Trump’s victory but has resulted in devastation up and down the ballot, from the halls of Congress to state houses and governorships throughout the country.
This failure on the part of the Democratic Party should shape how we approach electoral politics going forward. Americans are not excited by, and thus are not driven to vote for, candidates who defend the status quo. If Americans are going to reject the rabidly racist and xenophobic politics put forward by pro-corporate Republicans, they can’t just be offered a slightly nicer, more diverse, less reactionary version by pro-corporate Democrats. They need a bold alternative political vision informed by clear moral principles that stands in stark contrast to what’s on offer from Trump and the Right.
Sanders offered that in 2016, and the next generation of left-wing politicians and electoral organizers can offer it going forward,