for the rest of his career, he fought for a single-payer health care system.
Sanders often brought righteous anger to the House floor. In a speech in 1992, he said:
In case you don’t know, and you haven’t seen the latest polls, the American people hold the president of the United States in contempt, they hold this institution in contempt, they hold the Republican Party in contempt, they hold the Democratic Party in contempt … We are spending $270 billion a year on the military, but we don’t have a major enemy. I know it hurts your feelings. I know you’re upset about it. I know you’re hoping and praying that maybe we’ll have another war. Maybe somebody will rise up. But it ain’t happening. The Soviet Union doesn’t exist! The Warsaw Pact is through! Who you worried about? Iraq? Panama? Who you worried about? I’ll tell ya who I’m worried about. I’m worried about the fact that our workers are seeing a decline in their standard of living. They want to see our industry be rebuilt … The American people want to see our kids educated. They want a Head Start program. They want their kids to be able to go to college. They want to wipe out the fact that 5 million children in this country go to bed hungry. They want childcare for their kids. They want decent education. Let’s have the guts to give some leadership to this country. The Cold War’s over. Let’s reinvest in America.
Sanders’s tenure in the House spanned sixteen years. Those years were bleak ones for the Left, regardless of who held the presidency. The anti-corporate globalization movement started picking up steam in the mid-1990s under President Bill Clinton, and reached its zenith when it shut down the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle through mass protest. The trade deals protesters were criticizing, which gutted democracy in the United States and around the world and hurt workers both at home and abroad, have long been the target of Sanders’s criticism.
But the movement’s momentum evaporated after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The Bush administration beat the drums of war, first mobilizing to invade Afghanistan—which, in a lapse of judgment Sanders did support, along with every member of the House but one, California’s Barbara Lee—then mobilizing in 2002 to invade Iraq. Millions around the country and the world took to the streets to oppose the Iraq invasion; the global protests on February 15, 2003, may have been the largest global protest in human history. Sanders opposed the Iraq invasion—again, unlike many Democrats—along with Bush’s other giveaways to corporations and attacks on civil liberties like the USA PATRIOT Act.
When he ran for Senate and won in 2007, Sanders took up issues similar to the ones he had in the House. He also fought to expand community health centers and defend the US Postal Service and Social Security from privatization and dismantlement. (He cofounded a Senate caucus called, fittingly, Defend Social Security.) He held public hearings on worker abuse and outright slavery in the tomato fields of Immokalee, Florida—hearings organized with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a labor rights organization for Florida farmworkers that first put on the map the issue of labor abuses in the state’s tomato fields.
Sanders has a strong legislative record in Congress, but his fundamental goal has always been to shift the terms of public debate rather than hammering out compromises to pass legislation. “One of the most important roles I can play in Congress is to raise issues that, for a variety of reasons, other people choose not to deal with,” he wrote in Outsider in the White House. “Just shifting the framework of debate can have enormous consequences.”
Perhaps his most famous act as a senator came in opposition to the leader of the Democratic Party. In response to President Barack Obama’s extensions of George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, on December 10, 2010, Sanders engaged in a nine-hour filibuster denouncing the tax cuts and the country’s rampant inequality. “I’m not here to set any great records or to make a spectacle,” he said at the speech’s outset. “I am simply here today to take as long as I can to explain to the American people the fact that we have got to do a lot better than this agreement provides.”
Progressives who were irate at Obama’s willingness to extend such a massive giveaway to the rich were elated. On the evening of Sanders’s filibuster, Politico reporter Shira Toeplitz wrote, “The left’s been looking for a new hero. Tonight they latched onto one: Sen. Bernie Sanders.” (In a sign of the kind of dismissive coverage of Sanders that the paper of record would later give his presidential campaigns, a New York Times reporter managed to write an entire article about the speech that noted Sanders jumped up and down at one point because his legs were cramping, and that he had oatmeal and coffee for breakfast beforehand, but said absolutely nothing about the actual political content of the speech.) The filibuster came less than a year before the Occupy Wall Street protests put economic inequality on the map in the United States. Sanders, as usual, was ahead of the curve.
Aside from the panoply of progressive policy measures Sanders fought for in the House, he also pioneered new ways to talk about major political issues. Sanders’s foreign policy record has been imperfect: not only did he vote in favor of the Afghanistan invasion, but he has also hedged in the past on Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine (though his record is unquestionably one of the strongest on Palestine in Congress). But overall, his anti-imperialist instincts have been strong throughout his career, and they have only grown stronger in the last half-decade. He led the charge on invoking the War Powers Resolution in March 2019 to stop US involvement in the Saudi war on Yemen, and took bolder progressive foreign policy stances than any major presidential candidate in recent history in his 2020 campaign (for example, denouncing military intervention in Iran and Venezuela, denouncing the 2019 right-wing overthrow of democratically elected Bolivian president Evo Morales as a “coup,” and proposing to leverage US aid to Israel in opposition to its occupation of Palestine and abuses of Palestinians).
Sanders has also long fought to support veterans, especially in the Veterans Administration. He became chair of the Senate Veterans Committee in 2013, and has endeavored to stop attempts to privatize the VA. “Some may see it as incongruous for a strong progressive to be a fierce advocate for veterans’ rights. I don’t, and never have,” Sanders wrote in Our Revolution. “I will continue to do everything that I can to make sure the United States does not get entangled in wars that we should not be fighting. But I will never blame the men and women who do the fighting for getting us into those wars.”
The soldiers on the front lines of America’s imperialist wars abroad, the ones who come home missing limbs and with post-traumatic stress disorder, are often poor and people of color. This is thanks in large part to the military’s reliance on economic conscription. In a country where social rights such as health care and education are expensive and elusive, the military attracts personnel with promises of social and economic opportunities that should already be guaranteed. Members of the armed forces report that these benefits are the number-one reason they elected to join up. In his support for rank-and-file soldiers while opposing war, perhaps Sanders takes to heart that Eugene Debs line from the 1918 speech that landed him in jail: “The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.”
Sanders’s strategy is far more likely to draw soldiers and veterans to join the antiwar cause, for which they are uniquely powerful spokespeople, than blanket anti-veteran sentiment on the Left. But it’s also politically shrewd, in that it prevents the Right as well as liberals from scoring cheap points by attacking him as unpatriotic. The rhetoric of such attacks is jingoistic and absurd, used as a bludgeon against antiwar activists, but it can have emotional purchase, particularly in reactionary times when hawks are whipping up pro-war sentiment. Sanders’s record of support for veterans prevents opponents from using that “anti-troop” canard against him when he agitates against war.
Sheer Force of Will
Without a unified mass movement to represent, Sanders marched to the beat of his own drum for decades. He stayed remarkably consistent in his politics during those years, seemingly through sheer force of will. All the incentives in US politics
