An interview with
Bernie Sanders on Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez's victory, Jeremy Corbyn's success, and why his policy agenda is winning
in states across the country.
Daniel Denvir
In the wake of several recent
successful challenges from the left to centrist, “establishment” Democrats,
most notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, Vermont senator Bernie
Sanders isn’t on record telling anyone “I told you so.”
But Sanders has long argued
that “better than the Republicans” isn’t enough for Democrats (or anyone else)
to win elections — a bold political vision is needed to excite voters enough to
turn out for candidates. We can’t know what will happen with progressive
challengers like Ocasio-Cortez and Maryland gubernatorial candidate Ben Jealous
if and when they take office. But their campaigns seem to vindicate Sanders’s
basic argument about the appeal of unapologetic, “anti-establishment” politics.
In a recent interview with
Daniel Denvir for Jacobin Radio’s The Dig podcast, Sanders discusses
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other recent shakeups within the Democratic Party,
and why a bold political vision is good politics. You can subscribe to Jacobin
Radio here and
support The Dig here.
DD
What do you make of Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez’s victory? Do you think the Democratic establishment is
honestly reckoning with what it means for American politics that a democratic
socialist knocked off one of the most powerful men in Congress?
BS
No, I don’t think the
Democratic leadership fully appreciates the significance of Alexandria’s
victory. She has gotten a lot of attention, and her victory was
extraordinary. She ran a really smart, grassroots campaign. She knocked on a
heck of a lot of doors. She had great volunteers. It was a brilliant campaign.
But it’s not just Alexandria.
On the same night that
Alexandria won, Ben Jealous took
on the Democratic establishment in Maryland and became the Democratic
gubernatorial nominee. On that same night, several young people in the
Baltimore area, progressives, defeated incumbent members of the state senate in
a huge upset.
We are seeing that type of
activity all over this country: people who are running progressive, grassroots
campaigns are doing very, very well taking on establishment politicians.
DD
House minority leader Nancy
Pelosi recently
insisted that socialism is not ascendant in the Democratic Party.
What’s your response to that?
BS
Socialism, capitalism — these
are big words that can mean different things to different people. If you look
at what Alexandria was talking about, what I talk about, what other
progressives talk about, by and large, they are very popular, not only among
people who consider themselves Democrats or progressives but the American
people as a whole. It’s important to understand that the ideas that I fight
for, that Alexandria fights for, are very popular ideas.
For example, right now we have
a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, which is essentially a starvation wage. Nobody
can live on that. When we advocate for a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage, the
American people support that.
When we talk about pay equity
for women, the American people overwhelmingly support that. When we talk about
Medicare for All — an idea which seemed kind of radical a few years ago — that
is now mainstream, with a pretty good majority supporting it. The American
people understand that health care is a right, not a privilege; that Medicare
is working well for seniors right now, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t
be expanded to every man, women, and child, with the result of not only
providing health care to all people but saving this country substantial sums of
money on health care. Because right now, we spend far
more per capita than any other country.
When we talk about the greed
of the pharmaceutical industry — that you’ve got five drug companies last year
making $50 billion in profits, paying their CEOs outrageous compensation
packages while one in five Americans can’t even afford the drugs their doctors
prescribed — the American people are with us. When we talk about demanding that
the wealthiest people, who are doing phenomenally well, start paying their fair
share of taxes, the American people support that.
When we talk about making
public colleges and universities tuition-free, the American people support
that. They support immigration reform. They support criminal justice reform. In
Philadelphia, Larry
Krasner has done a great job in that area.
You could label these things
any way you want, but I call it basic ideas dealing with social, economic,
racial, and environmental justice. The American people are there with us on
them.
DD
Your colleague, Sen. Tammy
Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois, suggested
on CNN that the ideas espoused on the campaign trail by Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez could not succeed in places like the Midwest. What’s your
response?
BS
Alexandria gave a good response.
She said, in many of the Midwest states, we either did very, very well in the
Democratic presidential primary in 2016, or we won them. We won Indiana. We won
Michigan. We won Wisconsin. In a couple, like Illinois, we lost by very
few. The ideas we are talking about make sense in every state of the country.
Four years ago, in the 2014
midterm elections, we had the lowest voter turnout in seven decades. We had
something like 36 percent of the American people voting. When ordinary
Americans get demoralized and give up on politics and don’t vote, Republicans
do very well. Four years ago, if you recall, Republicans swept the House and
the Senate, and they did very well in state legislators’ and governor’s races
all over this country because we had the lowest voter turnout in seventy years.
When you ask people, “Is
health care a right of all people?” people say, “Yes.” There’s no reason we
don’t join every other major country on earth in guaranteeing health care for
all people. When you talk about the absurdity of hundreds of thousands of bright,
young people today not being able to afford a higher education, while millions
of people leave school deeply in debt — I have talked to so many young people
and middle-aged people who left school, $50,000, $100,000 in debt. For what
crime? Getting an education.
These are not radical ideas.
When you talk about the ideas, people say, “Yeah, that’s right. That’s what
we’ve got to do.” Then they come out and vote, and progressives and Democrats
win. When you don’t have a program that appeals to working people and ideas
that get people excited, when you have low voter turnout, that’s the
Republicans’ dream. That’s when they win elections.
DD
This sounds like a strategy
that emphasizes expanding the electorate instead of attempting to appeal to,
say, suburban Republicans they hope are offended by something Trump says.
BS
I don’t think it’s an
either-or. There are many people in this country who are offended by the fact
that the president of the United States is a pathological liar, that the
president of the United States is a racist and a sexist and a xenophobe.
You don’t have to be a
progressive to be disgusted and outraged when the Trump administration is
tearing little children three, four years of age from the arms of their
mothers. All across this country, conservatives feel that same sense of
outrage. They understand that is not what America is supposed to be about.
There are a lot of folks out
there, moderate Republicans, who are appalled by Trump’s behavior and are
prepared to vote for Democrats. But most importantly, we have to understand
that we have one of the lowest voter turnouts of any major country. We have to
speak to those working people who are white and black and Latino and Asian
American and Native American and talk about issues that make sense to them. If
we could raise the voter turnout up from the 36 percent it was four years ago,
to a measly 50 percent in 2018, Democrats would then control both the House and
Senate — that I am absolutely sure of.
The goal is to organize and
educate, but you cannot do that unless you talk about issues that are
meaningful to working people.
DD
There’s always a lively debate
on the Left over electoral politics. A lot of people in Democratic Socialists
of America advocate supporting candidates in Democratic primaries, as they did
for your 2016 run and with Ocasio-Cortez, but also believe it’s necessary to
build a more radical, independent power base outside of the Democratic Party.
You rose up through elected
politics as an Independent and remain an Independent. In Vermont, the Progressive Party, which formed to
support your run for Burlington mayor, now has elected officials across the
state. What do you think is the right balance to strike between building
independent power and running within the Democratic Party?
BS
It didn’t quite work that way
in Burlington. Way back when, in times of ancient history, in 1981 — I know
that’s kind of George Washington’s time — but when we won in 1981, we did what
I believe in. We did coalition politics. We put together a coalition of workers
and unions, of environmentalists, of women.
Out of that came the
Progressive Party, which is doing quite well in Vermont right now. I’m sure the
Progressive Party has more members in the Vermont state legislature than any
other third party in America. That is because they have done a good job in
focusing on the needs of working people.
There may be some exceptions
to the rule in this or that community around the country, but the action has
got to be within the Democratic Party. We have been trying, with some success,
to not only open the doors of the Democratic Party to working people and young
people, but change the party’s rules as well. In the 2016 Democratic
presidential primary, you had superdelegates exerting
an enormous amount of power. If my memory is correct, Hillary Clinton had five
hundred superdelegate votes before the first real vote was cast in Iowa.
DD
Which made the nomination seem
a lot like a coronation.
BS
Exactly. We’re about
three-quarters of the way through a very laborious process of the Democratic
National Committee changing that rule and eliminating the ability of the
superdelegates to vote on the first ballot. That would be a step forward.
We are dealing as a nation
with voter suppression. Everyone says, “Well, those are Republican states. It’s
Alabama, it’s Mississippi, it’s Wisconsin.” Well, guess what? It’s New York
State as well. If you wanted to vote in a Democratic primary in New York, you
had to change your party registration six months before the primary date, which
is totally appalling.
What you have in New York
State is a collusion between the Democrats and Republicans as an incumbent
protection policy. That has to be changed. We’re working on changing it.
There are a lot of ways that
we are making progress, not only by electing progressives, but by changing
rules — by trying to open the doors and bring people in.
DD
What lessons might the US
learn from the fight in the UK against
Theresa May, led by the Labour
Party under Jeremy Corbyn?
BS
Corbyn ran a very smart
campaign. It was not unlike what we are trying to do in this country. He took
on the entire establishment of the Labour Party, who had moved very far to the
right and became very establishment, and said, “In the UK, our job is to
represent working people and have the courage to stand up to the wealthy and
the powerful.” He came forward with a very progressive agenda that caught the
imagination of workers and young people alike. They ended up not winning, but
doing a heck
of a lot better than people had expected that they would.
Corbyn had to take on not only
the conservatives, but he had to take on the establishment of the Labour Party.
That’s not unlike the situation that we as progressives are in here in the
United States.
We have to speak out on an
agenda that makes sense to working people. Understanding that we are living at
a time of massive income and wealth inequality, that we have a political system
that, as a result of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, is a
corporate system allowing billionaires to buy elections — in the midst of that,
candidates have to be bold. They have to have the courage to take on the big
money interests who have so much power in our society today and to stand with
working people. When you do that, people will do not only well in politics and
win elections, but it will improve life in the United States of America.
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