The progressive surge that ignited in 2016 offered a challenge to the Democratic party and posed practical questions. Will it last, or is it a flash in the pan? Who will lead the insurgents as they try to reach the next level and enact their transformative vision for American politics?
Bernie Sanders—the man who struck the match—does not have a clear answer. A pair of phone conversations with him showed the questions that remain for the movement he inspired may be even more fundamental than worrying about its future.
“You use the word ‘the left.’ I’m not quite sure what that means,” Sanders said in one of our interviews for this book.
Sanders knew the progressive movement he helped galvanize isn’t necessarily a unified force. He had no clear heir, and the leaders that have emerged in the space have demonstrated vastly different priorities.
While progressives may not be entirely on the same page, in the nearly ten years since Sanders launched his first presidential campaign, they have unquestionably become a force. The work Joe Biden, a mainstream Democratic president, has done to cater to progressives suggests they will have an ongoing, important role in the party. And, from taking down local machines, to pressing for reforms in the primary process, and pushing through their legislative priorities in a hostile Congress, it’s also evident they have already had immense impact. These gains, however fragile they may be, and the efforts of Biden, Barack Obama, and others to build an alliance with progressives within the Democratic Party, are a profound tribute to the political significance of the movement Bernie Sanders shaped.
While Sanders was reluctant to characterize the larger left, he knew what he wanted his own movement to be. For Sanders, progressive politics should focus on economics and policy rather than identity.
“The struggle for America is the need to bring together the working-class, low-income people in this country who form the vast majority of our people. It is not identity politics. Alright? It is not seeing that a Black woman goes to the moon. That’s fine. It is to make sure that Black kids in America—they have the opportunity to get a college education, they get health care as a human right, they get jobs that pay them, and everybody else, a living wage,” Sanders said, adding, “Our job is to bring people together around an agenda that works for all workers.”
By explicitly rejecting “identity politics” in favor of socialist economics, Sanders chose a side in a debate that raged among progressives as they strived to build a winning coalition amid a series of new movements like MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and the push for transgender rights. Sanders also dialed in on the central rift within the Democratic Party and the question that bedeviled the Democratic Socialists of America in their electoral work: whether to operate within the Democratic Party or outside of it.
In his three Senate races, Sanders ran as a Democrat in the primary, won the nomination, and then declined it before running as an independent. During his 2016 presidential campaign, he briefly enrolled as a Democrat to participate in the New Hampshire primary before promptly un-enrolling. Sanders’s contortions frustrated many mainline Democrats who viewed him as an invading force.
While Sanders was not exactly a Democrat, he clearly was invested in the party’s future and saw it as the best vessel for progressives’ ambitions. Indeed, pulling the party leftward was the overriding goal of his presidential bids.
“Obviously, what my presidential campaign was about was taking on the entire Democratic establishment,” Sanders said to us. “You know, we had almost no support.… When I ran the first time, I had one senator supporting me. Second time, I think one senator, a few members of the House. So, we were taking on the political establishment, taking on the economic establishment of the country, taking on the media establishment.… We took them all on, but that is not only the right thing to do in my view for the Democratic Party, it’s good politics as well.”
In conversation, Sanders revealed why he’s so focused on changing the party’s establishment. To Sanders, the failure of Democratic leadership to connect with the working class was a major part of the country’s shift to the right in the Trump era.
“The idea that working-class people are increasingly voting for these right-wing Republicans—corporately owned Republicans—is extremely painful to me,” Sanders explained. “It just speaks to the degree that people perceive—and with some degree to be truthful—that the Democratic Party has become a coastal party, run by elitists and not a party dedicated to needs of working families.”
These comments alluded to the personal struggles at the root of Sanders’s political project. But forging a personal connection wasn’t necessarily a strength for Sanders either. He had long disdained personality-driven discourse as “political gossip.” He had a deep aversion to sharing his own story.
While rallies with hour-long speeches railing against economic inequality were a core feature of his campaigns, Sanders’s advisers struggled to get him to tie experiences from his own life to the conversation. As Sanders prepared to run for president a second time in 2020, Mark Longabaugh, one of the top consultants from his 2016 campaign, drafted a plan. It was informed by mistakes from Sanders’s first run and encouraged the candidate to make a more personal appeal.
Among the staff the document became known as the “Human Bernie Memo.” It outlined a plan for Sanders to “highlight biographical elements” by announcing his campaign in Brooklyn.
“The symbolism of announcing where Bernie Sanders was born allows us to contrast a son of working class, immigrant parents with a man (Trump) raised in Queens who inherited a fortune and was raised in privilege,” the memo said. In a nod to the energy of the new generation of progressives, Sanders’s team hoped to have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by his side from the very beginning of the race (although the memo misspelled her name “Octavio-Cortez”).
Longabaugh ultimately did not join Sanders’s 2020 team. However, Sanders seemed to have taken the memo to heart and went on to share more on the trail about his personal life. Sanders kicked off his second campaign with a speech at his first alma mater, Brooklyn College. In those remarks he alluded to how his upbringing shaped him.
“My experience as a child, living in a family that struggled economically, powerfully influenced my life and my values,” Sanders said. “I know where I came from, and that is something I will never forget.”
That was about as close as Sanders ever got to telling the story that many of those closest to him knew had inspired his political mission. His parents were both Jewish. Sanders’s father was an immigrant from Poland and his mother was the daughter of Russian émigrés. Both of them died when he was a young man.
Watching his mother suffer from an illness drove Sanders’s obsession with health care. That central tragedy of his youth also prompted Sanders to leave Brooklyn for Vermont.
In his interviews for this book, Sanders explained how his personal story crystallized into his ideological project.
“I come from a working-class family and, throughout my political life, being the mayor, congressman, senator, presidential candidate, what I’ve always felt my mission was, was to stand with the working class of this country and take on the oligarchy which has so much economic and political power,” Sanders said.
For Sanders, turning the Democratic Party into an organization that represented working people would be the culmination of his life’s work. And yet, even as he had become one of the most prominent members of that party and exerted an undeniable influence over it, in conversation, Sanders admitted he wasn’t sure his mission would succeed. His cynicism was rooted in an acknowledgment of the institutional inertia of the Big Dem establishment.
“I think the Democratic Party today—right now—is in a pivotal moment and it has to make a very fundamental decision. In a sense, it’s what our campaign … the presidential campaign, was about,” Sanders explained. “The decision is, do you become a party which stands for the working class of the country, which involves the working class in the decision-making, which creates a grassroots movement, or … do you remain a corporately controlled party beholden to your wealthy campaign contributors and to the corporate media as well. And that’s really the struggle that we’re in right now.”
Despite his withering assessment of the party, Sanders had a positive relationship with its leader at the time, President Joe Biden. As he expanded upon his own conception of “the left,” Sanders indicated it actually included the Biden agenda.
“It means demanding the wealthy start paying their fair share of taxes.… It means a lot of what was in the American Rescue Plan on an emergency basis and what’s in Build Back Better, which means dealing with the basic needs of our people in terms of, you know, in my view, Medicare for All, guaranteeing health care to all people as a right,” Sanders said. “It means making public colleges and universities tuition-free, forgiving student debt. It means creating millions of jobs, building the affordable housing that we need.… Transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel to save the planet, home health care, that agenda.”
With Biden’s efforts to court progressives, the good feelings were mutual. Sanders even came close to joining the administration.
During Biden’s first years in office, a wave of unionization was making headlines and hitting some of the country’s biggest companies including Amazon and Starbucks. Sanders, who made backing labor a core part of his presidential campaign, was in the thick of it. He met with workers at union shops and held rallies for their strikes and drives.
Sanders claimed Biden reached out to him about joining the cabinet as secretary of labor. It was a story the White House did not refute and perhaps the most dramatic example of Biden’s efforts to make overtures to the Democratic Party’s progressive wing.
Sanders, through an inadvertent slip of the tongue, seemed almost wistful that he had been unable to take the job.
“I wanted to be—you know, gave thought to—becoming labor secretary,” Sanders said, catching himself mid-sentence.
He went on to explain what got in the way: the battles over Biden’s legislative agenda and the slight Senate majority Democrats won in 2020 made it imperative for him to stay in his Senate seat. At the time, Vermont had a Republican governor who would have been able to pick Sanders’s replacement.
“You know what, I would’ve been appointed if we hadn’t ended up winning those two seats in Georgia … where the balance of the Senate hung,” Sanders said with a raspy chuckle. “So, clearly, I had to stay in the Senate.”
It’s easy to see why Sanders would be particularly interested in the Labor Department. The resurgent union movement made him think the tide was turning back to “New Deal” politics, mid-century progressivism, and the unifying focus on workers’ economic interests that he yearned for. Yet, as he described that dynamic, it was impossible not to notice that he seemed to be subtly comparing Biden to the only president who might be described as an icon of the left: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
“I think we are seeing the beginning of what we saw in the 1930s. The conditions are different, but I think in the 1930s, during the Depression, you know, with the support of President Roosevelt, you saw a huge increase in labor union membership,” said Sanders. “So I am not … unconfident that we may see the same thing in the coming years.”
Sanders’s comments provided vivid proof of how, under Biden, the Democratic Party was teetering between a new coalition with progressives and the infighting of the past. Just as Sanders was positioning Biden as a progressive leader who was playing the Roosevelt role and bringing the country in a new direction, he turned back to his deep skepticism about the Democratic Party establishment.
“I think people are tired of the growth of inequality, the growth of oligarchy, and they’re prepared to stand up, and fight back, and move toward trade unions,” Sanders explained. “I think that is just a major, major step forward for the country. If the Democratic Party is smart—which I don’t know that it will be—it could be a real political advantage.”
Sanders continually pointed to the fact his vision of the left, with its focus on transformative economic policies, was “enormously popular.” He was not wrong on that front. When we spoke, polls showed that about 70 percent of Americans supported a public health care system. While the “Medicare for All” brand was somewhat more polarizing, it was supported by a majority of the country too. Student debt forgiveness was even more popular.
That appeal was, in Sanders’s view, key to Democrats’ hopes of stronger victories in the future. It also was, in no small part, attributable to his work. However, even as Sanders believed the country would be eager to accept his platform, he conceded progressives will have to navigate between transformational change and achieving incremental victories—particularly with the GOP back on the rise.
“Unfortunately, given the fact that we now have Republicans controlling the House … we’re not going to be able to do what needs to be done,” Sanders said. “So if we do the best that we can do right now, on one hand, on the other hand, we continue to raise consciousness about the real solutions facing the crises in the country today.”
And Republicans weren’t the only ones standing in the way of the progressive agenda. Sanders also criticized “conservative corporate Democrats in the Senate,” alluding no doubt to the radical centrists, namely, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema.
While he was concerned about continuing to grow the progressive footprint in Washington, Sanders recognized it has exploded since his first presidential campaign.
“I’m very proud of the fact we have elected more strong progressives for the House of Representatives than in modern American history,” he said. “The House is now far more progressive, for example, than it was when I was elected there in 1991.”
Securing those gains weighed on Sanders’s mind.
“Well, I’ll tell you what worries me very much is that there are now Super PACs raising a whole lot of money to defeat progressives in the House and elsewhere,” he explained. “I tried to have the DNC outlaw Super PAC money in Democratic primaries, but without success.”
Sanders believed progressives’ battle with the “corporate Democrats” in the establishment was far from over. “I think we have gotten them very, very nervous,” he said, adding, “I think they’re going to do their best to try to defeat us.”
Though he was reluctant to talk in personal, emotional terms, Sanders dropped his guard somewhat in discussing the threat the establishment might pose to the new progressives in Congress who he helped inspire.
“I have played a role in many of those campaigns and will do my best to make sure that they get reelected,” said Sanders. “They’re going to be facing a lot of money … and we will stand with them.”
Bringing up “the Squad” prompted an uncharacteristically intimate moment from Sanders.
“I am very fond personally of the new progressives who are in the House, the Squad and the additions that we have seen in recent years. I really am,” Sanders said, adding, “On a personal level and a policy level, I think they are a breath of fresh air for America. I think they are giving hope to their generation and to the American people, so I feel emotionally and politically very close to them.”
Yet, when it came to talking about his own part in the progressive story, Sanders retreated to his insistence that politics should not be personal. “I don’t wanna talk about legacy. Okay?” he said gruffly during one of our conversations. “You got any other questions?”
After a brief pause, Sanders allowed himself to contemplate the future. His concerns weren’t about the judgment of history. He acknowledged that’s beyond his control, and moreover trying to tip those scales is contrary to his nature. What Sanders wanted to leave to the world was a message and a model for politics.
“It is what it is, and people make their determination,” Sanders said of his legacy. “What’s important for everybody in the progressive movement is to educate, to organize, to stand up to enormously powerful, public forces, and to create the kind of nation we know that we can become.”