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 the basis for a potential resurgence of class consciousness—and subjective factors, particularly his constancy and apparent authenticity, which made him a natural leader for a country hungry for a break from politics as usual. Sanders was the right guy in the right place at the right time, but he also took advantage of that confluence to make a profound impact on American political culture.
Sanders’s open identification as a democratic socialist gave people a new vocabulary to match their evolving political understanding. Most people who supported Sanders in the 2016 Democratic Party primary and plenty who didn’t but warmed to him over the coming months and years became more amenable to the idea of socialism, loosely defined. It helped that Fox News and the right-wing establishment, resting on their laurels after the twentieth-century collapse of the Soviet Union, began to slander everything as “socialism” that didn’t fit their aggressive conservative agenda, unwittingly inoculating millions of people and vacating the term of the ugly associations it had adopted during the Cold War era.
Luckily for those of us who are younger than Sanders, we don’t have to endure the same isolation that he has throughout his career. There’s a rising socialist movement in this country. And for the first time in decades, working people are no longer resigned to suffering passively. They are searching, listening, and increasingly they are fighting back. What that fight might look like in the decades to come is the subject of the rest of this book.
Class Struggle at the Ballot Box
The potential for socialists to use elections to spread our message and build our movement should be obvious to anyone paying attention. Sanders’s 2016 presidential run showed that socialism actually had mainstream resonance. Two years later Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, inspired by Bernie Sanders, ran for Congress and won, along with Rashida Tlaib and dozens of other democratic socialists at all levels of government. Without these and other successful national, state, and local campaigns around the country, we wouldn’t have the rejuvenated Left that we have today.
Some socialists are uninterested in electoral politics, especially ones that have anything to do with the Democratic Party. The argument is that the party is a “graveyard” for the kinds of self-organized working-class movements we need to build in order to change the world, because the party isn’t actually a workers’ party—it’s a party that has included organized labor, African Americans, feminists, environmentalists, and others with progressive ideas over the years, but those groups are stuck in an uncomfortable electoral alliance with capitalists. The Democratic Party is very adept at absorbing the energy from vibrant, disruptive working-class movements, bringing some of the leaders of those movements into the halls of power and conservatizing them, and completely squashing the transformative potential of organized challenges to the status quo.
These arguments aren’t totally wrong. There are numerous possible pitfalls to using elections to change the world under capitalism, pitfalls that well-meaning socialists around the world have fallen into over the last century. And the Democratic Party is a fundamentally capitalist party, not a workers’ party. In the long term, if we’re going to win the kind of world we want, we’ll need to ditch the Democrats and start a party of our own—one that isn’t predicated on an alliance with the capitalist class.
But we can and should use elections to overcome the very real problems that detractors of electoral politics are identifying. Yes, the capitalist state is arranged against our project. And, yes, it is powerful—so powerful, in fact, that the only way to prevent annihilation at its hands is to give our movement a mass character that can fight the forces that seek to bury it.
Small groups of self-organized socialists and emboldened workers can play a very important role in changing the world. But without millions in our corner, we’re no match for the United States’ entrenched political machinery (not to mention its armies, police, and surveillance apparatuses). The only way we’re going to build a durable movement to change the world is by building a very big movement to change the world. The socialist electoral campaigns that have played out over the last several years show us how we might go about solving this puzzle.
An Uneven Playing Field
We shouldn’t have any illusions that the capitalist state will be easy to transform toward socialist ends. That’s because the state isn’t neutral territory: under capitalism,
