American countries like Nicaragua and El Salvador. After the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua overthrew the country’s brutal Somoza dictatorship, the Reagan administration backed the Contras, a group of right-wing militants responsible for destroying the country’s infrastructure, numerous rapes and sexual assaults against Sandinista supporters and other Nicaraguans, and mass bloodshed across Nicaragua.
In El Salvador, the United States sought to avoid a similar revolution by propping up a brutal, bloodthirsty right-wing dictatorship that could claim almost no backing from the Salvadoran people themselves. The result was some of the worst human rights atrocities ever committed in the Western Hemisphere, including the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero while he gave mass in 1980; numerous massacres of innocent civilians in villages like El Mozote, where nearly a thousand were slaughtered, and the rape and murder of four American churchwomen, both in 1981; the massacre of six Jesuit priests along with a housekeeper and her daughter at the Central American University in 1989; and a constant stream of bullet-riddled, tortured bodies that piled up on streets throughout the country.
The Central America solidarity movement was nowhere near the size of the civil rights movement or the movement against the Vietnam War, but it was an important movement across the United States opposing Reagan’s foreign policy. Typically, few mayors weigh in on foreign policy issues of any kind, but Sanders held numerous Central America solidarity teach-ins and rallies in Burlington. In 1982, he spoke at a rally of hundreds at City Hall against US intrusion in El Salvador, and pushed a ballot initiative against intervention in the country. He also established a sister city program with Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, and even went to Managua, Nicaragua, as mayor and attended a pro-Sandinista rally in 1985.
“I plead guilty to, throughout my adult life, doing everything that I can to prevent war and destruction,” Sanders told the New York Times in 2019 after the paper attacked his mayoral record on Central America. “As a mayor, I did my best to stop American foreign policy, which for years was overthrowing governments in Latin America and installing puppet regimes. I did everything that I could as a mayor of a small city to stop the United States from getting involved in another war in Central America trying to overthrow a government.”
All this history is worth revisiting not just for what it says about Sanders’s approach to governance, but also for what it suggests about how newly elected left officials can approach their time in office. Regardless of whether an official is a small-town mayor, city council member, or a member of the House or Senate, it’s possible to use their elected office to both pursue a robust, pro-working-class agenda for their immediate constituencies and speak out against the reactionary policies that benefit the wealthy few and hurt the many, as well as join movements against imperialist bloodshed around the world. Sanders managed to do all of the above as Burlington’s mayor, at a time when the Right was in power across the country.
During this time and afterward, Sanders was not a member of any party, formally accountable to no one but himself—and still he managed to blaze a trail to political success that would eventually lead to two presidential campaigns. In the annals of astonishing and improbable American political success stories, Sanders’s ranks high.
When Sanders first won Burlington’s mayoral election, neoliberalism had taken hold of US politics. Neoliberalism is the economic philosophy, hatched in the mid-twentieth century—but finding expression beginning in the 1970s and increasing in the 1980s—that held that the majority’s needs could best be served by allowing private capitalist markets to expand into every crevice of society. For neoliberals, state interventions in the affairs of business are only desirable insofar as they buttress this expansion, ensuring maximum profits for business owners. This is justified by the “trickle-down economics” theory advanced under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, which posits that profits for the wealthy are naturally reinvested into society, creating brighter opportunities for all further down the economic ladder.
Neoliberalism imagines workers as entrepreneurs, selling their labor as a commodity the way a business sells commodities, in an environment of supposedly free exchange, not skewed by power imbalances or marred by exploitation. The winners in this exchange are simply the most successful entrepreneurs. Neoliberalism thus promotes the idea of meritocracy: the best players always win the game, and wealth and success are proof of inherent talent and superiority. Collective bargaining rights, the welfare state, and redistribution of wealth represent unfair compensation to the undeserving losers. If you want a better life, work and innovate harder.
The rise of neoliberalism has been disastrous for workers in the United States and helped defeat and dismantle the movements that won so many gains in the New Deal era and the 1960s. It broke the strength of American unions, as employer attacks (combined with conservative strategies by unions themselves) led to concessions like cutbacks in pay, benefits, and working conditions, and eroded workers’ faith and investment in their own unions. Since the dawn of this process in the 1970s, American workers’ wages have remained relatively flat, while productivity has soared—at six times the rate of worker pay. Capitalists’ profits, meanwhile, have likewise skyrocketed. Austerity has been the order of the day, with tax giveaways for the wealthy, massive cuts to already meager welfare benefits, privatization of public goods, and erosion of workers’ rights.
In the latter decades of the twentieth century, Democrats became enamored of neoliberalism. If Sanders had chosen to pursue a political career through the party, he might have been forced to accommodate their worldview—especially without a left-wing working-class movement at his back of the type that is beginning to reemerge today. Luckily for us all, he chose another path.
Outsider in the House
Bernie Sanders graduated from the mayorship to run for Vermont’s sole House of Representatives seat, winning in 1990. The first words out of his mouth, just minutes after he discovered he was going to be a national politician, were:
You all understand that it is not going to be Bernie Sanders or any other member of Congress that’s going to bring about the change that we need. What we need in this country is a mass movement of tens of millions of people who are prepared to stand up and say we want national healthcare. We want the millionaires and the multinational corporations who have not been paying their fair share of taxes to start paying. We want money going into education and environmental protection. And no more Star Wars [Reagan’s boondoggle missile defense program] or stealth bombers.
He became the only political independent in the House at that time, striking a deal with the Democratic leadership to remain outside the party but caucus with them and receive committee assignments according to his seniority as if he were a Democrat (though last in line in his class of representatives). That deal again reflected his special ability to thread the needle of maintaining political independence from both the Democrats and Republicans while avoiding political marginality.
Meanwhile, the Left as a whole was still lost in the wilderness. Neoliberalism was already on the ascent by the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Those events prompted wild celebrations of the free market and led to what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history”—capitalism had won. Critiques of inequality were passé, greed was good, and there was no alternative. Attacks on the American working class intensified. Social welfare programs were being eviscerated nearly as zealously by Democrats like President Bill Clinton as by his Republican predecessors Reagan and George H.W. Bush. The labor movement was under assault, with unionization and strike rates dropping steadily. The progressive causes to which Sanders had dedicated his life were losing ground.
Still, he stayed busy in the House. Sanders opposed the first Gulf War. He fought the brutal “welfare reform” bill—led by the Republicans but supported by many Democrats, as he noted at the time. He spoke out against executives’ bonuses at Lockheed Martin. He decried the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia of the rightward-moving Republican Party under Representative Newt Gingrich’s leadership as Speaker
