Bernie Sanders often argues,
“Beating Trump is not good enough.” This is an understatement. The world quite
literally depends on us winning a political revolution. Only Bernie has a plan
for that.
W e have a decade to transform
the US economy to stave off climate catastrophe, and Bernie Sanders has the
only agenda to do so and the only mobilization strategy to get it done. No plan
for a better future is worthwhile if environmental crisis renders our future
unimaginably bleak.
As Naomi Klein notes,
this planetary emergency “entered mainstream consciousness” in the 1980s as the
Right and big business launched an “ideological war … on the very idea of the
collective sphere.” To take the collective action needed to phase out fossil
fuels, our next president must build a foreign policy of radical cooperation
alongside a new domestic politics of inclusion — or else witness a racist,
nationalist, far-right politics expand its divisive power.
Sanders is the only
presidential candidate who has put forward a genuine Green
New Deal, a plan to radically remake the economy to serve ordinary people
rather than just “greening” the economic system that threatens to end human
society as we know it. His Green New Deal would dismantle the fossil fuel
industry and put a renewable energy system under democratic control, working
with governments around the world to achieve what the science demands.
Sanders’s proposals go beyond
piecemeal liberal solutions by targeting the unjust economic system that
fuels climate change and pushing an agenda that simultaneously empowers workers
and saves the planet. This agenda would help millions of workers join unions,
give workers an ownership stake in major corporations, provide universal health
care and tuition-free higher education, build millions of affordable homes, and
protect (rather than target) immigrants.
Though President Sanders could
execute parts of this agenda on his own, much of it would require Congress. How
could it pass, given Republican extremism and likely pushback from even a
Democrat-controlled House and Senate? The question poses a serious problem for
any program that meets our challenge. And it is one Sanders is uniquely
positioned to solve.
Sanders understands that
change at this scale will require mass movements to pressure Congress and every
level of government — and to change their composition. Americans isolated and
atomized by cutthroat capitalism must engage in massive collective action. His
political program isn’t just about policy, then, but about the capacity of
ordinary people to participate in democracy. This disruption includes, critically,
his plans to facilitate direct participation in
decisions from our workplaces to our energy systems, shifting the balance of
power in our society. No one contends that Sanders alone will spark, let alone
be, a mass movement. The Sanders campaign slogan, “Not Me. Us.,” conveys
precisely that. Sanders, as he puts
it, is “gonna be organizer-in-chief.”
Sanders’s Green New Deal plan,
which builds on the resolution introduced
by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), will take
massive organization to make a reality. His plan alone among Democratic
candidates takes seriously the massive public spending ($16.3 trillion, to be
exact, much more than Sen. Elizabeth Warren proposes) needed to
reach 100 percent renewable electricity and transportation by 2030 with full
decarbonization by 2050, a reorientation of public priorities (diverting $1.215
trillion from “military spending on protecting the global oil supply”),
the creation of
20 million jobs, and unprecedented levels of public-sector coordination and
social mobilization. Sanders is the only candidate who identifies the private
ownership of energy as a core problem,
calling out the “greed” in our for-profit system, from investor-owned utilities
like California’s Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to the fossil fuel companies
that collect billions in
federal subsidies while contaminating the planet. Saving the planet
is impossible without heightening class conflict.
Sanders’s critics who say he
would never be able to get much done simply
haven’t been paying attention: Sanders’s record of connecting to
mass mobilizations and dramatically reshaping public
debates sets him apart. Before he ran in 2016, for example, Medicare for All
was deemed a pipe dream; now, it’s a center of
attention. Unlike Warren,
who in her constant equivocation has managed to elicit criticism from all
directions, Sanders pledges to introduce Medicare for All legislation during
his first week in office. And he has responded to the mainstreaming of Medicare
for All by pushing politics in yet more radical directions.
The fight of this generation depends
not only on putting forth good policies but on a powerful revival of collective
politics. With control of the White House, Sanders and the movements rallied
around him could do huge things.
Since the 1970s, American
politics has been stunted by
neoliberal governance, which invokes “free markets” to protect capital from
democratic control and grind down the unions that once checked corporate power.
Many came to believe change is impossible, even as capitalism’s costs shifted
onto ordinary people and exploited their social bonds to keep the broken system
from going off the rails. Young people must borrow for
education against their future and their parents’ assets; women can be trapped
in abusive relationships because of expensive childcare, low wages, and high
rents.
Sanders takes neoliberalism’s
atomizing points of domination and transforms them into a set of demands for
collective freedom, with policies like Medicare for All, free public
higher education, universal childcare
and pre-K, and the abolition of student and medical debt.
These policies would help break the cycle of privatized financial burden and,
in doing so, free people to engage in more radicalized struggle.
Sanders’s homes guarantee and
Green New Deal for Public Housing,
introduced with Ocasio-Cortez, would deliver direct economic benefits while
empowering the working class and cutting carbon emissions. Real estate assets,
as of 2017, were worth an estimated $228 trillion, “a more valuable asset class
than all stocks, shares and securitized debt combined,” according to
Savills World Research. As such, they have been a key driver of inequality and
household indebtedness. Real estate speculation also, of course, helped spark the
global financial crash of 2008.
Building 10 million permanently affordable
homes, investing in shared equity homeownership models like community land
trusts, enacting nationwide rent control, and upgrading and expanding public
housing with local renewable energy would be revolutionary in a country where
more than 500,000 people are
homeless on any given night, tens of millions pay more than a third or even
half their income in
rent, and poor people live under the continual threat of eviction. Making
housing affordable would make people less urgently dependent on their
paychecks. Sanders also pledges to
attack the residential segregation and gentrification that consign poor,
racialized communities to second-class schools, insecure housing and subpar
public services.
Our economic system is
protected by racist repression, which divides ordinary people and scapegoats
people of color, foreigners and, increasingly since the 9/11 attacks, Muslims.
Sanders’s programs break down these barriers and defend immigrant labor rights
against boss abuses. His core universal social programs, Medicare for All and
College for All, are truly universal, available regardless of immigration
status.
“Bernie’s immigration plan is
revolutionary,” Sanders’s Latino Press Secretary Belén Sisa says, because it
identifies undocumented immigrants as us rather than them. Sanders denounces
exploitative corporations as enemies of all workers, foreign and US-born alike,
a rejection of nativist politics long organized around the demonization of
immigrants as a threat to jobs and welfare benefits.
Sanders’s legislative priorities include
expanding immigration visas to reunite families and providing citizenship to
the overwhelming majority of undocumented Americans. Critically, Sanders
rejects the immigration reform model of
the George W. Bush and Obama years, in which establishment politicians
increased deportations and militarized the border in a bid to garner
right-wing support for a path to citizenship that never passed.
In fact, Sanders has said he
would use executive actions to
reverse this trend, no congressional approval necessary — by placing a
moratorium on deportations, offering permanent protection to many undocumented
immigrants, and raising the refugee cap — ending the long-standing bipartisan
war on “illegal immigrants” that mainstreamed nativism. Notably, his
legislative agenda includes a bold new program for climate refugees.
Sanders’s immigration politics
reflects his movement’s maximally expansive definition of the American people.
His pledge to finally protect LGBTQ
people from discrimination in housing, the workplace and public accommodations
does the same. Another example is his pledge to not only support abortion
as a legal right but make it freely available through Medicare for All.
Sanders’s universalism extends
to the fight against the mass social death imposed by mass incarceration.
Policing and prisons have been used to discipline, control, and warehouse poor
people, especially communities of color, pushed to the margins under neoliberalism.
The majority of prisoners are incarcerated at the state level, so what a
president can do is limited. But Sanders can still make change, including by
reforming the federal system. While Sanders should do better and shift his
position to support sex work decriminalization, his plans are
solid: He seeks to end mandatory minimum sentences, withhold money from states
that refuse to end cash bail (which incarcerates people for being poor), grant
voting rights to prisoners, and triple spending on indigent defense.
Importantly, he pledges to end programs like 287(g) and Secure Communities that
have turned local law enforcement into proxy ICE agents. Sanders’s agenda is
comprehensively about our freedom from bosses, debt, landlords, ICE, and
prisons — and from fossil-fueled catastrophe, which is the freedom that
guarantees all others.
Unions remain the unrivaled
vehicle for building worker power, but Democrats have long failed to deliver
for organized labor. Sanders’s commitment would be without precedent: He
pledges to double the
number of union members during his first term.
Sanders backs neglected Democratic
goals like card check — the ability to form unions with a simple majority of
workers’ signatures — as well as measures to make labor actions more powerful,
like banning the permanent replacement of strikers and allowing “secondary
boycotts,” in which workers in a labor dispute pressure other companies to stop
doing business with their employer. What makes Sanders unique is his track
record and our trust he will actually fight for workers.
Sanders’s labor plan also
stands out with measures to bolster worker power broadly.
Ending at-will employment would mean that workers could only be fired for just
cause, universalizing a cornerstone of union contracts. Instituting wage boards
would allow unions to work together to push wages up across an industry, rather
than fighting out contracts with individual companies.
Imposing additional taxes
on corporations corresponding
to their CEO-to-worker pay gap would progressively raise tax revenue while
curbing inequality. Giving workers the right to buy a company if it closes,
moves abroad, or goes up for sale would tame hyper-mobile capital. Ending stock
buybacks would redirect capital from investors and CEOs to workers and
productive investments. Allocating workers at large companies control of 45
percent of board seats and 20 percent of shares would provide labor with new
levers over corporate governance and check one of the key drivers of wealth
inequality.
In addition to these
legislative goals, Sanders pledges to sign an executive order placing a
moratorium on all pension cuts and another ending government contracts to
companies that take a variety of anti-worker actions. As Sanders told a
crowd of union members in Warren, Ohio, near the recently shuttered Lordstown
factory that produced the Chevy Cruze: “If entities like General Motors think
that they can throw workers out on the street while they’re making billions of
profit, and then move to Mexico and pay starvation wages and then line up for
federal contracts, they’ve got another thing coming.”
Transformative change often depends
on disruptive mass movements: Worker strikes in the 1930s
created massive unions and forced the federal government to protect them, the
twentieth-century black freedom struggle broke racist
Southern politicians’ stranglehold, the gay liberation movement eroded
oppressive mores and defended the lives of HIV-positive people, and the
immigrant rights movement successfully curbed Obama’s deportations.
Today, young people are coming
of age at a moment when neoliberalism’s legitimacy is in tatters from the 2008
crisis. The Great Recession revealed the status quo as fragile and intolerable,
and Occupy Wall Street, radical
immigrant rights activists, and Black Lives Matter demanded a new politics in
its place.
One of the most unusual
aspects of Sanders’s rhetoric is his willingness to speak about how broken
America is for so many: the bills that never end, the debt that accumulates,
the corporate intrusion into every facet of life. As Briahna Joy Gray,
Sanders’s national press secretary, said on her podcast Hear
the Bern, Bernie rallies are so passionate because “Bernie articulates more
clearly than any other candidate that the problems facing everyday Americans
are not the result of laziness or failure to work hard; it’s because systems
have been rigged to benefit the rich at our expense.” Speaking that truth is a
prerequisite for transformation.
Generational experience is the
motor of this new class politics: With little chance of upward mobility, many
young people are hell-bent on something new and better, evidenced by the
Democratic Socialists of America becoming the largest and
most consequential socialist organization in over half a century. The Left is
winning electoral victories, from radical district attorneys in Philadelphia and San
Francisco to six socialists on Chicago’s city
council. Teachers strikes have soared,
and health care and hotel workers have walked out in large numbers, too.
“People are always befuddled
in the early stages of a movement,” says Frances Fox-Piven, co-author of
the classic Poor People’s
Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. “They don’t recognize that it’s
there. But it is here … teachers, nurses, service workers generally are in
strike mode. Whenever there’s a major movement, it, in a sense, is contagious.”
Fox-Piven emphasizes how radical movements and politicians need one another:
Disruption doesn’t work unless
there is a kind of electoral resonance. A bloc of elected politicians [can]
inspire the protesters because it’s scary to be disruptive, dangerous. And it
really helps if you have political leaders who are echoing and enlarging the
demands of the protesters. That gives morale to the protest movement. They
think they can win. It’s also true that the existence of an electoral bloc
like that is important in restraining repression. And finally, if the
protesters actually win something as a result of the disruption that they
cause, they have to have people in positions in government to fashion the
concessions. So there’s a constant feedback between the protest movement and
their electoral bloc.
The congressional bloc we need
is emerging in embryonic form with leaders like Ocasio-Cortez and Reps. Ilhan
Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), all of whom have endorsed Sanders.
Ocasio-Cortez exemplifies how movements can win electoral power and, in turn,
strengthen movements: She came to political consciousness because of her experience working
in the service industry, volunteering on the 2016 Sanders campaign, and
supporting indigenous anti-pipeline water protectors at Standing Rock.
“While we have a plan and
while we have an agenda to pass a Green New Deal, to pass Medicare for All, to
make public colleges tuition-free … the thing is that these policies are not
self-enacting,” Ocasio-Cortez told a
Sanders rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa. “The only way that we achieve and become
an advanced society is not through a technocratic policy proposal, but through
a political revolution of working people.”
I asked Fox-Piven if this
wouldn’t be rather hard to achieve. “Very difficult,” she confirmed. “The
movements have to take on the fossil fuel industry and the financial sector.
This should make you gulp because they’re both powerful — and in the case of
fossil fuels, desperate — industries. But that’s our only path out of
extinction, isn’t it?”
It’s clear that a radical
president can shift a party’s center of gravity: Republican public opinion —
on immigration, Russia,
the FBI —
has rapidly moved to align with Trump’s views, and Republican politicians have
largely done the same. A Sanders presidency would polarize the national debate
in a similar way, pressuring Democratic legislators to side with their leader
over the inevitably fanatical Republican opposition.
In fact, Sanders’s movement is
already doing just that: No single figure or force aside from Trump has done
more to reframe the terms of American politics over the past four years.
Sanders’s political rise
emerged from (and accelerated) a crisis of the centrist liberal establishment.
Witness the elite panic and personal arrogance that has sent Deval Patrick and
Michael Bloomberg rushing in to relieve and replace Joe Biden, their tottering
standard-bearer. Still, while the old world is dying, its replacement with
something better is not inevitable. A growing number of college-educated white
voters, for instance, are turning to
Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a former McKinsey consultant whose only consistent belief
is in his own greatness. When Sanders insists that “we need to not only defeat
Donald Trump, but to take back our democracy from the corporate elite,” he is
drawing a line in the sand and indicting the status quo: If Democrats
aren’t with the people, then they’re standing against them.
Effective left populism
requires a vision of the people and their enemy. This movement’s enemies are
the few: a greedy and pathologically destructive billionaire class; the fossil
fuel, pharmaceutical, insurance, and financial industries. By contrast, the
people contains multitudes: a diverse coalition of the working and precarious
middle classes. Though powered at present by mass youth appeal, a Sanders
victory could rapidly energize skeptical Gen X and Boomer voters whose
political horizons have shrunk under the decades-long neoliberal onslaught.
Sanders’s program unifies the
interests of working-class people without erasing their differences. His deep
support in the Latino community and the remarkable enthusiasm he’s generated
among Muslims illuminate the contours of a potential realignment that puts
those most demonized by the xenophobic right at the core of a powerful left.
His October 2019 Queens, NY, rally with
Ocasio-Cortez emphasized the ethical basis of a political coalition rooted in love
and solidarity: “Take a look around you, and find someone you don’t know,”
Bernie told the crowd. “Maybe somebody who doesn’t look kind of like you. Are
you willing to fight for that person as much as you’re willing to fight for
yourself?”
Sanders’s plan to
win the general election in red states like West Virginia likewise holds out
the possibility that a multiracial working-class coalition can subvert the
social divide. When Sanders was asked whether West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin or
Montana Sen. Jon Tester, both centrist Democrats, would vote for his programs,
his response was blunt. “Damn right they will. You know why? We’re going to go
to West Virginia,” Sanders told CNBC.
“Your average politician sits around and he or she thinks: ‘Let’s see. If I do
this, I’m going to have the big money interests putting thirty-second ads
against me. So I’d better not do it.’ But now they’re going to have to think,
‘If I don’t support an agenda that works for working people, I’m going to have
President Sanders coming to my state and rallying working-class people.’”
That’s not fantastical. The working class in West Virginia is restless, with a wildcat teachers
strike shaking the state in 2018 and sparking further walkouts in Arizona and
Oklahoma. A recent poll shows
that a full 69 percent of West Virginia voters continue to support teachers
striking for higher pay. The legislative agenda of any Democratic president
depends on a seismic political shift in enough red and purple states that
Democrats capture both the House and Senate, and remaking the electoral map
requires deepening these movements’ power. Sanders has already used his
campaign database to push supporters
to the picket lines and could lead a far more massive mobilization from the
Oval Office. As sociologist Barry Eidlin notes,
FDR’s signing of a 1933 law protecting unions helped spark mass labor
organizing in the 1930s, even though the law had no practical enforcement
mechanism. Imagine the power of a president using a primetime address to offer
his solidarity to a strike wave. It would be historic — and transformative.
Sanders promises to reshape
the global order by exercising US power in pursuit of negotiated geopolitical
settlements — above all, on the environment. And nowhere does an American
president have more concrete power than in the realm of foreign policy and
national security.
Unlike Elizabeth Warren, who
has no substantive critique of American empire, Sanders has straightforwardly
denounced the military-industrial complex, has long voted no on defense
budgets, and stands alone in his consistent support for making the United
States a partner to Global South struggles. In the 1980s, Sanders stood in
solidarity with Central American revolutionaries against the Reagan
administration’s bloody support of oligarchs. Recently, Sanders cheered the
release from prison of Lula da Silva, Brazil’s former Workers’ Party president,
and quickly denounced the November 2019 coup in
Bolivia for what it was.
The potential a president has
to unilaterally reorder the global power system has been demonstrated by none
other than our current president. His behavior has been so erratic that Saudi
Arabia is reported to have quietly reached out to Iran, hedging against the
possibility that they might one day be unable to rely on US military
protection. Imagine what might be possible if Sanders, a relentless critic of
the Saudi royal family and the war it leads against Yemen, pushed for a
negotiated settlement among rival regional powers.
Sanders could likewise provide
unprecedented hope for tipping the balance in favor of the Palestinian
liberation struggle. Though imperfect on the issue, Sanders has broken with the
pro-Israel bipartisan consensus more than almost
any member of Congress.
US foreign policy has long
been driven by national security concerns that in reality reflect not any
“national interest” but rather the interests of major corporations and the
national security state’s conventional wisdom. In 2015, Obama adviser David
Axelrod called Sanders
“tin-eared” for his repeated assertion that climate change was the greatest
threat to national security. The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan called him
“slightly daffy.” “Some people laughed in 2015 when Bernie said climate change
is the most serious national security challenge we face,” says Matt Duss,
Sanders’s top foreign policy advisor. “No one’s laughing now.”
As Sanders has stated,
“Our endless entanglements in the Middle East have diverted crucial resources
and attention” away from addressing climate change. Instead of more war,
Sanders pledges $200 billion for the Green Climate Fund to help the Global
South adapt to the climate emergency.
US willingness to commit to
deep emissions cuts is a prerequisite for convincing other nations to do the
same, as international climate negotiations are governed by a logic akin to
that of nuclear disarmament: No one wants to go first and be left vulnerable.
China must be convinced that a rapid transition will not undermine its economy.
Poor countries across the Global South must be assured they will not simply be
denied the fruits of fossil-fueled development already enjoyed by the Global
North.
Sanders was clear about
that at the September 2019 climate town hall: “I think we need a
president, hopefully Bernie Sanders, that reaches out to the world — to Russia
and China and India, Pakistan, all the countries of the world — and says,
‘Guess what, whether you like it or not, we are all in this together, and if
you are concerned about the children in your country and future generations,
we’re gonna have to work together. And maybe, just maybe, instead of spending a
trillion and a half dollars every single year on weapons of destruction
designed to kill each other, maybe we pool those resources, and we work
together against our common enemy, which is climate change.”
Neoliberalism has divided us
across borders and atomized our personal lives, leading us to blame ourselves
for problems caused by a rigged system. This moment demands a new politics that
unites us to confront our shared enemies and transform our society. Sanders
consistently argues, “Beating Trump is not good enough.” This is an
understatement. The world quite literally depends upon a political revolution.
And only Sanders has a plan for that.
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