Bigger Than Bernie. Micah Uetricht
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