Senator Bernie Sanders is consistently rated one of the most popular politicians in the United States. Ask a left-of-center person who was radicalized in the last two decades or so how they came to their politics, and many will identify a few key inspirations: the Iraq War, the 2008 recession, the false promises of President Barack Obama, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter. Many will also identify a specific person: Bernie Sanders. I supported the Sanders campaign in 2016, got involved in the 2020 campaign as a volunteer canvasser, and was then further radicalized through political education. From 2016 onward, a series of events led me directly to where I am now, professionally and politically. It’s no exaggeration to say that I’m writing these words right now in no small part due to Bernie.

“Bernie Sanders leftists,” such as political commentator Krystal Ball, will also tell you why Sanders has meant so much to so many. On April 8, 2020, the day he suspended his second presidential campaign, Ball said, “Bernie’s greatest legacy is giving millions the permission to ask for and expect more. And once you’ve left that cage, there’s no going back.” She’s right. Bernie's focus on systemic injustice served to remind ordinary people that many of the problems in their lives were not actually their fault. As then-campaign Press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray explained in 2019, 

Bernie articulates more clearly than any other candidate that the problems facing everyday Americans are not the result of laziness or a failure to work hard. It's because systems have been rigged to benefit the rich at our expense. Republicans and moderate Democrats for years have mythologized the undeserving poor [and] cast working people as “takers” as opposed to “makers” and pretended that good outcomes are proof of merit and that poor outcomes were deserved. [...] [This] also helps disguise structural issues that are at the root of so many problems that feel random but aren't really.

Sanders has spent his political career, as Nathan J. Robinson put it, “relentlessly focused” on the bread-and-butter issues that impact ordinary Americans: healthcare, wages, jobs, the cost of living, and the climate crisis, among others. He has constantly reminded us that we live in the richest country in the history of the world and that we can afford to, as the saying goes, have nice things. His presidential policy agenda essentially picked up where FDR’s New Deal left off: enacting a 21st-century Economic Bill of Rights, which would entitle everyone to the basics needed to live a good life. From his tenure as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, when he supported community land trust housing, to his time in the U.S. House, when he mobilized resistance to IBM’s pension-cutting schemes, Sanders has been consistent in working for the good of the 99 percent and against the greed of the 1 percent. Writing about him in 2020 after he dropped out of the race, Robinson explained made Sanders so different from his opponents:

Bernie didn’t like talking about himself, but instead stayed relentlessly focused on ordinary people’s problems and how he would solve them. And he had a record to back it up. While people like Biden and Buttigieg seemed to discover progressive beliefs when those beliefs became electorally convenient for them, Bernie had spent decades as a lonely champion of the causes we cared about. While he could be exasperating or disappointing, we never doubted that he was principled and that he would fight to the death for us.

Sanders recently started a tour to “fight oligarchy,” a response to Donald Trump and Bros’ disturbing breakneck speed assault on government and government programs. He has also released numerous TikTok videos, some of which have gotten millions of views. His January 31 video, which has nearly 18 million views, is one example of a classic Bernie approach to communicating to the public. It’s a case study in how to effectively communicate the dangers of oligarchy while also encouraging multi-racial and class solidarity. He emphasizes that we should not allow ourselves to be divided by race, nation of origin, sexuality, or religion but united in our fight against injustice. This is compelling and a much-needed, direct antidote to the eugenic, racist, and nativist rhetoric coming from the GOP. In the video, he also emphasizes that Musk and other billionaires “don’t give a damn” about the working class (always a point worth making with righteous anger). He emphasizes “fighting back,” which includes calling Congresspeople in order to try to influence the narrow majority that the GOP has in the House and “building a movement.” When I watch his video, I can’t help but see his messaging as just the kind of rhetoric we need right now. In other words, it’s what leadership looks like. What Sanders is doing is incredibly necessary. It’s also an indictment of just how useless (to us, to ordinary people) our so-called leaders are. Most of our elected officials fail to demonstrate even the most basic leadership skills. For instance, the “feckless opposition” of the Democrats was most recently exemplified by Hakeem Jeffries, who said that his party can’t do anything because it’s “their [the GOP’s] government.” Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic talked to people attending the Bernie rally in Iowa and found them disappointed with Jeffries’s “weak” leadership.

The online pro-Bernie left is buzzing again in light of the tour, which probably gives people flashbacks to 2016 and 2020 and the unrealized promise of those campaigns. Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara said that Bernie is “still the most vibrant force on the American left.” Writer Matt Stoller said that “Bernie Sanders launched an anti-oligarchy tour, and it’s the only thing that has popularly resonated within the Democratic Party base. That's fascinating and notable.” Writer Luke Savage said, in reference to the January 31 video, “No politician in my lifetime has been so effortlessly able to communicate a democratic socialist message like this. I think Sanders has played far too nicely with the Democratic leadership, but he’s one of a kind and would have thrashed Trump in an election.” And Faiz Shakir, Bernie’s 2020 campaign director and an advisor to the senator, said that there were “large overflow crowds” at the recent event in Iowa. 

But historian Nate Holdren, on the other hand, raised a very good point which should stop us in our tracks: “I like this but it’s super notable he didn’t do any ‘fighting genocide’ tour.” I don’t read this as a cynical “gotcha” comment. It’s an incisive point that demands further reflection on Bernie’s record. Sanders has been in office at the federal level since 1991. Leftists have rightly pointed out over the years that Sanders has been weak on foreign policy. While Sanders often talks about and sometimes opposes the nation’s bloated military budget—a subject most leaders won’t touch—a principled leftist stance on foreign policy requires an opposition to war and empire, and on that front, Bernie’s record is mixed. As Doug Greene wrote in 2019, Sanders has “voted in favor of almost every single U.S. military intervention in the last two decades.” While he did vote against the Gulf War in 1991, he voted in favor of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, which was at the time defended on supposed humanitarian grounds but ended up killing at least 500 civilians. Sanders also admitted he was “wrong” not to join Rep. Barbara Lee in 2001 in her lone stance against the war in Afghanistan. This is notable given that the war in Afghanistan accomplished nothing apart from the destruction of that country. On Gaza, his record has also been disappointing. He failed to back an early demand for a ceasefire and later made it clear that genocide wasn’t a red line for him and that he was fully on board with lesser evilism. He wrote an op-ed in MSNBC in October 2024 encouraging Americans to vote for Kamala Harris despite her “supporting this terrible war.” He did not use the word genocide once. He then promised to “do everything we can to change U.S. policy toward Netanyahu” after a Harris win. He also uses the “Israel has the right to defend itself” trope, which is a common establishment talking point meant to shut down any and all criticism of Israel’s 75-year-long occupation of Palestine. In April of 2024, Sanders called for “not another nickel for the Netanyahu government if their present policies continue,” and he has at least spoken out about the weaponization of antisemitism and its use against critics of Israel. Since spring of 2024, Sanders has used stronger language about Israel's conduct in Gaza, but it would have been better if he had been as outspoken on Gaza as he has been on issues of healthcare, labor, and so forth.

Beyond policy critiques, when we look at Sanders’s record over the last few years, we see that he has a pattern of staying far too quiet when the Democrats are the party that’s in power. As Savage noted, Bernie has played remarkably nicely with Democratic leadership, including the cognitively impaired “my good friend Joe Biden,” going so far as to endorse the president in April 2023 without mentioning any demands being made in exchange for this support. (AOC also endorsed Biden early on even after it was apparent that Democratic voters wanted Joe Biden out.) Why didn’t he mention making any demands in exchange for his support? Why wasn’t he organizing around an increase in the minimum wage—you know, the thing that Biden supported in his 2020 campaign and then let the Parliamentarian kill? As socialist and podcaster Nick Cruse asks, why wasn’t he organizing around Medicare for All at the moment when Joe Biden said he’d veto it during a pandemic—or when Kamala Harris, once the 2024 nominee, said she no longer supported it? Why wasn’t he organizing an anti-genocide tour or a tour for free speech and academic freedom as pro-Palestinian protesters, students and faculty alike, were being targeted (and now expelled) and losing their jobs in the wake of October 7? Why wasn’t Sanders bringing “organizer in chief” energy regarding any of the issues that Joe Biden campaigned on ($15 minimum wage, student loan cancellation, etc.) and then, as Jordan Bollag explained in 2022, let fail?

As Julia Conley wrote in Common Dreams and as Faiz Shakir has admitted, Sanders kicked off his tour in GOP areas in Nebraska and Iowa specifically to put pressure on GOP electeds there, to “peel off” votes from the majority party and essentially to stop its horrific agenda. What this suggests is that Sanders’s effort is damage control at best. While stopping the right is important, it does not in and of itself constitute a political movement that positively promotes a left agenda.

Meanwhile, economist and modern monetary theory proponent Stephanie Kelton said that Sanders is “Harnessing the energy that’s bubbling up in communities across the country.” It’s true that there appears to be a lot of energy at his rallies. But the more important question is, where is that energy being directed? In other words, what does Bernie mean by building a “movement”? How should that movement express itself politically, especially now that Bernie’s own two presidential runs were foiled by a corrupt Democratic Party that has made clear it is completely antagonistic to substantive progressivism? (Faiz Shakir, who just ran for the DNC chair position, got a mere 2 votes from a total of 428, which is a reminder of how anti-progressive this party is.) This is a question that the left has been asking for years.

The truth is that the U.S. left is in disarray. There’s a huge leadership vacuum in electoral politics. As David Sirota put it, “It’s good to see a crowd for Bernie saying oligarchy is bad. It’s what Dems should be doing. It’s not good that he still seems to be the only one who can generate a crowd for that message. There’s been little success/investment building a larger movement to succeed him.” Even the popular elected officials like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have demonstrated time and again that they are willing to defer to the party establishment and that they will turn adversarial only when the GOP is in power. (With AOC, for instance, the weeping photo-ops at deportation facilities stopped as soon as Biden got into office in 2021, though the policy of family separation at the border did not.) And Bernie and AOC are part of a larger “progressive” movement that has often lacked teeth and has refused to be adversarial on behalf of a working-class agenda. Progressives have not fought hard enough for the things they have campaigned on. As I mentioned before, Jordan Bollag explained how progressives did not fight hard enough during the early pandemic years for the things that their own leader (Biden) campaigned on and which were popular with the public. Briahna Joy Gray has written about the importance of the left having principles and trying to leverage its power in small numbers, such as to force a vote on Medicare for All to gain concessions out of the party, a strategy which was later vindicated by a small group of right-wing “Freedom Caucus” legislators who forced out their House speaker. By contrast, Rhode Island State Senator Sam Bell wrote about how Democrats did not put up a fight when the Biden administration slashed Medicare and food assistance in 2023. 

Drawing on these articles, I’ve written critically of AOC and the Squad and the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) for its lack of adversarialness and discipline. The CPC was started by Sanders, Maxine Waters, and others in 1991 and consists of 100 House members and 1 Senate member, Bernie. The former CPC chair, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, has clearly said that the caucus was not a caucus of “No,” meaning they would not act as a bloc to obstruct things in the legislature. Apparently there has also historically been no strict criteria for membership, as its ranks have at times included people like Hakeem Jeffries and Ritchie Torres, two of the staunchest pro-Israel Congress members; Sylvia Garcia, who doesn’t even support Medicare for All; and Shontel Brown, a GOP- and Israel-lobby-backed candidate who defeated progressive former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner in the 2021 primary. (Brown is still listed as a member even though the others aren’t.) 

The CPC’s website describing the “Progressive Promise” is remarkably vague on policy demands besides Medicare for All, and it doesn’t even list a dollar amount for the minimum wage or a Green New Deal to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If you want a more recent example of just how flaky the Congressional Progressive Caucus has been, check out this January 2024 New Yorker interview with Japayal, in which she makes clear that the CPC would take no stance on Gaza because there are “so many sides and facets to this conversation.” Here’s a portion of that conversation:

David Remnick: We've heard the word genocide used. As we speak, there is a proceeding at The Hague led by South Africa, accusing Israel of genocide. Do you think that's a proper charge?

 

Pramila Jayapal: Well, what I think is important is the process. I have not used that word because I think it's a very technical word in a legal definition. I understand and I have read a lot, not only from pro-Palestinian scholars, but also from Israelis who believe that the proceeding, the due process of the charge is very important. I can make a lot of arguments for that-

 

Remnick: Go ahead.

 

Jayapal: Whatever the result might be, but I do think it's important to understand that there's a lot of different feelings on this, even within the Progressive Caucus. I should be clear—

 

Remnick: Congresswoman, I have to say, as somebody who's followed your career very closely and with admiration, you are 99% of the time very straightforward in the opinions you give. I sense you tiptoeing here.

 

Jayapal: [chuckles] I am tiptoeing because it is probably the most complex issue that I have had to deal with in Congress, and I certainly didn't come to Congress to deal with this issue.

 

Remnick: Politically or morally?

 

Jayapal: Politically. There is no political space.

 

Remnick: Do you feel that you can't be honest?

 

Jayapal: What I would say is there's so many sides and facets to this conversation. As you know, I've called for a ceasefire. I was one of the early people to call for a ceasefire. [...]

 

Remnick: How do you see it? Do you see Israel's existence as a settler colonial [state] as we often hear?

 

Jayapal: I almost don't want to get into that conversation because I think it's a very lengthy conversation. I think what I'd like to say is that I believe, as I've said before, what happened in Hamas' attack was horrific. I also believe that what Israel is doing right now is horrific. The collective punishment of Palestinians is something that does not get in the United States Congress. [...] It does not get the attention. [...]

 

Remnick: What should Israel have done following October 7th? What would've been, in your mind, a proper response to that massacre?

 

Jayapal: I think what would've been very important is—and again, I do have to make very clear that I am speaking only for myself.

 

Remnick: Understood.

 

Jayapal: The Progressive Caucus does not take a position because there's been some confusion about that and some conflict around that, frankly. The best thing would've been to use the tremendous support from around the world that Israel had in that moment to actually talk about what it would look like to, first of all, get the hostages back. Secondly, to have a longer-term strategy around how to take out Hamas, because we have our own experiences that show us that just going in might produce short-term deaths of one leader.

What we have here is just an incredibly spineless stance on the issue. Coming down on the correct side of the question of mass murder should not be hard—and if a political body like the CPC can’t “take a position” when murder is staring it in the face, what possible use is it to anyone? Jayapal also comes off a bit uninformed—the focus on hostages and Hamas instead of the underlying occupation sounds more like it comes from an Israeli press conference than a progressive lawmaker. (Rep. Jayapal needs a subscription to Current Affairs straight away. If she read us she would be more willing to talk to Remnick about the decades-long Israeli occupation of Palestine, the basics of the conflict, what the foremost scholar on Gaza has said about it, the views of anti-war dissidents within Israel itself, and more.) Or why not consult one of your progressive colleagues, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, one of the most outspoken advocates for the Palestinian people, and get a crash course on the issue? This is precisely the kind of leadership that is far too weak for a progressive Chair. 

The new CPC Chair, Rep. Greg Casar, has promised to fight billionaires and focus on economic issues, which is good. But even he has used language like “the Democratic brand has been damaged,” which makes it sound like the party’s problem is one of messaging rather than of substance. His record on Israel-Palestine is also not great. He has also hinted that his main goal for the next two years is, in part, to make sure that CPC members keep their seats. This sounds like playing it safe to me—exactly the kind of thing AOC herself criticized more established members of Congress for as recently as 2020—instead of imposing more structure and discipline on the caucus. What the organization really needs are criteria for membership, a policy litmus test, and a ban on corporate money.

As important as Sanders’s tour is, and as good as it is to see people drawn to a leader who explicitly rejects the GOP’s divisive rhetoric, I fear these rallies are just more of what we already know, which is that Bernie can gather a crowd. If we’re concerned about a larger, longer-lasting leftist movement, we’re missing something here. What we have to understand is that Bernie’s consistency is both part of his appeal—it draws people to him—and his Achilles’ heel. He’s been fighting for the same issues for decades, and that’s good. But he seems unwilling to break with his past strategy of playing just nicely enough with the Democratic establishment to not get totally ostracized from their ranks. His “my good friend Joe Biden” approach has not resulted in affirmative policy wins for the left. As leftists like podcaster Sabrina Salvati and those from Workers Strike Back, an independent worker movement started by former Seattle City Council member and Marxist Kshama Sawant, and the Hampton Institute, a leftist working-class think tank, have pointed out, Sanders’s rallies could be seen as simply “redirect[ing] organic working-class rage” back into the Democratic Party—a party that enabled the right to gain power in the first place. This is why we need a different approach entirely, and I don’t think it’s going to come from Bernie.

I just got a text the other day from Bernie asking for money. He was not asking me, a former canvasser, to volunteer or organize or do anything in real life. He was just asking for money to elect more progressives, using a reference to the Congressional Progressive Caucus as a selling point. Basically, he wants us to do the same thing we’ve been doing for the better part of the last decade, a kind of Justice Democrats approach, which, as I’ve written, started in 2018 with the explicit goal of electing working-class progressives to Congress and unseating “out-of-touch” incumbents.

There’s an idea on the left that if we just elect more people, more working-class candidates in particular, we’ll be able to eventually win our agenda. Now, it’s unfortunate that this has to be said in the year 2025, but diversity is good. It’s a worthy goal to diversify the makeup of Congress, whether that be along class, racial, gender, or other lines. There is no good reason for our governing body to be mostly wealthy, white, and male.¹ But we have had the most racially and ethnically diverse Congress in history, and candidates of color have unseated powerful incumbents in recent years. Yet we still haven’t seen major wins for the electoral left in terms of policy. Demographics, we know, is not destiny—neither among the electorate nor our elected officials. In other words, the “browning of America” does not automatically portend a Democratic majority in Congress, and a diverse Congress does not guarantee progressive policymaking. What this means is that our problems on the electoral left should not be thought of as stemming from a lack of the correct percentage of working-class Congress members or the right amount of racial or ethnic minorities in the legislature. Our main problem with the electoral left has been a refusal to be adversarial in numbers within an institution that is structurally designed not to serve the interests of the working class. To return to what Briahna Joy Gray said recently, 

At a  certain point, fine. I'm convinced Democrats in power can't do anything. We have a lot that we want to do on the left. So then how do you get that done? And it simply doesn't seem to me that it’s possible to do it by electing enough AOCs. Because we’ve seen in really recent history some pretty bad examples of how AOC is willing to bend the knee and completely undermine her own political project.

Now, we could have a debate about whether it’s even possible to be adversarial within the two-party system, or whether AOC should be expected to go up against the likes of “Mama Bear” Pelosi. AOC has spoken about the immense psychological pressure that exists to conform. But that’s where the case for acting in numbers comes in. If it is extremely difficult to act alone, why not in numbers? Even there, progressives have failed to act adversarially. So maybe it’s possible but only in practice carried out by the most aggressive of right-wing representatives. The right understands power, it seems, while the left doesn’t. And while some on the left like to insist that “electoralism won’t save us” and that fretting over electoral politics is a lost cause, the fact is that people are going to get elected, anyway, and if you’re reading this and participating in politics, I submit to you that we should still be fighting to put into office the most adversarial leaders we can and to use elections as opportunities to organize and put our leftist ideas out into the world.

If you listen to Bernie’s videos online, you’ll notice that he uses a lot of class warfare rhetoric and does a great job of explaining the issues in ways ordinary people can understand. He’s doing great work. But—even though he is officially an Independent—this is ultimately for the benefit of the Democrats. What he’s doing is simply an exercise in helping the Democrats with their “messaging” and branding. He’s identifying problems but not offering solutions beyond more of the same electoralism. Not once does he say to stop supporting Democrats who fail to fight back against oligarchy or to primary them with progressives!

A better approach would be for progressives and leftists to do what the CPC has refused to do: impose an explicit litmus test onto all Congressional representatives and candidates. 

The criteria for support should include:

• Pledges not to take corporate money
• Demonstrates a “fighting approach” to politics
  
  And on policy, the minimum platform:
• Medicare for All
• A Green New Deal to rapidly reduce emissions and transition to a clean energy economy
• A $25 minimum wage (the old demand for $15 was outdated years ago, thanks to rising costs)
• Universal free college
• Passing the Pro ACT
• Ending arms shipments to Israel

If these criteria are not met, the candidate should not be supported, either for election or reelection. The goal should be to run and support primary challengers from the left within the Democratic Party (by far my least preferred option) or Independents and third-party challengers, especially in a jungle (open) primary. Draw out the contrast between an actual left-wing agenda and a milquetoast Democratic agenda and use every campaign as an opportunity to talk about the issues.

In October 2020, Bernie issued a premonition: “If the Democrats cannot begin to address the real crises facing this country then the future of this nation will be very dismal indeed… the next Trump… will be even worse than this one.” This has now come to pass. The Democrats have failed not only to offer a meaningful alternative to Trump 2.0, but they have no positive agenda to speak of. The future of the party also looks bleak if we look to those who are poised to lead the party in the coming years—such as Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. Former Obama White House official David Axelrod recently held a panel titled “The Future of the Democratic Party.” When he asked panelist Glusenkamp Perez, whose “politics are pro-business centrism with a working-class rhetorical affect,” what some takeaways were from the recent election defeat, she gave a bizarre, rambling answer that I’m going to put here, lightly edited for clarity, so its awfulness can be fully appreciated:

I think one of the things that's frustrating to me is [that] you get the answer to the question that you ask, and people have been asking the wrong question repeatedly. They ask the question that delivers the kinds of answers they want to hear that doesn't [...] indict them in any way or their responsibility or agency in a system. [...] [P]eople talk about it like, Oh, this was about, you know, people want, you know it's cost of living. It's about cheaper stuff. And I'm like, I don't think, [...] my family, my community, we don't want cheap crap. That's not the point of this. We want what is worth having. We want to be able to work one job. We want to be able to own land. We want a level playing field for small businesses and a lot of the narrative and the discussion about democracy [...] it misses the … it's almost disempowering to people to say our entire world is based on one vote. No, democracy persists in all of these small and personal microscopic things. It is how well you know your neighbors, it is who comes to your house, it's who's teaching shop class, those are all the things that build a strong nation, and a lot of times that feels like the national agenda is so [...] like this industrial complex of consultants that want to sell the same TV ad in Ohio as Washington State….

I’ll stop there because you get the point. Her answer was even worse than the bullshit that Harris’s campaign consultants came up with. As John Ross wrote about the consultants’ campaign postmortem appearance on Pod Save America, “None of these people should ever work in politics again” because they clearly didn’t learn anything from their loss.

It would be best at this point for everyone who is fed up with the Democrats to refrain from giving money to the Democratic Party whatsoever—especially not after the scammy, MLM-like presidential campaign the party just ran, in which they blew $1 billion in just over 100 days. To those of you who have already stopped your donations, good work, let’s keep it up. The Party doesn’t need your money, except to provide you with a psychological sense that they are fighting for you even though they clearly aren’t. The “good billionaires” being courted by new DNC Chair Ken Martin can take it from here. 

Put your money and your time into local mutual aid organizations and independent political parties. Although the deck is stacked firmly against third parties in this country (in the way that the powerful always stack the deck against those who seek to disrupt the status quo in the pursuit of justice), we should remember what AOC said years ago: the Democratic Party is not a left party. If we want an outlet for the political expression of our leftist ideals and for the political advancement of policies to serve the working class, we’re going to have to make one ourselves. Labor unions are also going to have to get more militant, especially to counteract some of their top leaders, who have shown themselves to be compromised by virtue of their friendliness with the anti-worker Trump administration. 

As much as I can appreciate Bernie’s impact on my political evolution and the politics of so many, we shouldn’t have any particular loyalty to a politician beyond their willingness to fight for a leftist agenda and to do so effectively. Politicians aren’t our friends, they work for us. It’s time to get to work building a movement beyond Bernie.

Notes

1.

Age is a factor, too. There’s a real concern about gerontocracy right now, and it is disturbing to see out of touch—and frankly unwell—older politicians continuing to cling to power even as their health visibly declines and their staff deceive the public and pretend that everything is fine. At the same time, age certainly hasn’t been an issue for Sanders or many other members of Congress, and nobody, never mind their class origin, who gets into Congress can rightly be called “working class” anymore, not with a salary of $175,000.