Bernie Sanders is a political anachronism. He is at the same time the Gilded-Age Populist, the 1920s Progressive, and the New Deal-era Socialist. His goal, like theirs, is to unite the American masses into an organized political bloc to fight the moneyed elites of Wall Street.
At a time when the mainstream media and political parties dismiss “class warfare” as demagoguery, Sanders calls upon Americans to “wage a moral and political war against the billionaires and corporate leaders … whose policies and greed are destroying the middle class of America.” While other politicians make promises to this or that special interest group, Sanders pledges to fight for laborers, pensioners, and students. Populist progressivism, not pandering, is Sanders’ modus operandi.
Sanders often publicly attributes his “democratic socialist” ideology to the political systems of Scandinavia, celebrating the expansive welfare states of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Yet he draws an important part of his political vision—that of a populist progressive movement pulling political discourse leftward and securing policies more favorable to the working class—from the history of the American Left.
However, today’s American Left should view Sanders’ embrace of the United States’ populist-progressive tradition with a degree of skepticism. Though such a movement has the potential to gain mass support in an era of socioeconomic stratification not seen since the Gilded Age, Sanders’ populist politics should temper his supporters’ excitement regarding the “revolutionary” potential of his attempted crusade. Populism has simply disappointed too often throughout American history, failing to ever fundamentally change the system it has sought to challenge.
There are two reasons to regard Sanders’ presidential campaign skeptically. First, past movements with similar populist orientations found little electoral success on a national level. Second, Sanders’ New Deal-inspired platform is unlikely to be an effective ideological response to the rise of neoliberalism.
The central theme of Bernie Sanders’ presidential platform is a laser-focused concern for the American working class: the amalgamation of laborers, pensioners, students, and others who, in Sanders’ conception, are the victims of contemporary American capitalism. Sanders protests the sharp rise in income and wealth inequality in the United States while decrying the stagnation of real median wages. Promising to combat these trends and improve the socioeconomic conditions of working-class families, he calls for an increase in the minimum wage and various forms of public employment policies. Sanders also rails against the critics of Social Security and Medicare. By scrapping the former’s payroll tax cap and making the latter more cost-efficient, he pledges to strengthen and expand both programs. And while condemning the American higher education system’s failure to offer college students across the country the opportunity to pursue their studies at a reasonable-to-low cost, he vows to make all public universities in the United States free.
It makes sense, then, that Sanders also embraces the political empowerment of marginalized groups. A major plank of his platform is to reform campaign finance law through legislation, constitutional amendment, or appointment of Supreme Court nominees who would overturn Citizens United. Sanders’ commitment to such reform has also affected the way he has structured his own campaign. He is one of the only candidates in this election, and the only major candidate, to forgo campaign funds from Super PACs, opting instead to raise money solely through small donations. His campaign turns the FEC’s campaign finance disclaimer into a mantra: “Paid for by Bernie 2016, not the billionaires.”
Sanders has also adopted a more robust racial justice platform, unveiled after a run-in with Black Lives Matter protesters in Seattle this summer. Specifically, the platform calls for restoring the parts of the Voting Rights Act overturned by the Supreme Court two years ago, as well an increase in ballot access for minority populations most affected by voter identification and post-incarceration voting laws. The Sanders campaign has thus adjusted its class-analytic overtones to the realities of a post-Ferguson United States, offering a policy framework that accounts for racial identity as much as it does socioeconomic status.
In all these ways, Sanders’ platform appeals to today’s American Left, especially to progressively minded college students who have grown up on nothing but the conservative soup of Reagan, tax cuts, and the evils of big government. Unfortunately, given the historical failures of the ideology underlying his policies, Sanders’ campaign seems likely to disappoint.
The United States has a long tradition of populist and progressive movements. In the 1890s, the People’s Party—also known as the Populists—organized presidential, gubernatorial, and congressional campaigns on a platform supporting unions, progressive taxation, and railroad nationalization. Similarly, throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Wisconsin’s La Follette family spearheaded a Progressive movement that also gained influence in other parts of the Midwest. During the Great Depression and the years after, Norman Thomas and his Socialist Party were extremely active in American politics, clamoring for economic policies far more radical than anything President Roosevelt originally intended to pursue when he entered office.
These three movements, along with the small agrarian parties, utopian socialist communes, and radical labor unions that popped up after the Industrial Revolution, shine brightly in the collective memory of today’s American Left. They represent some of the few instances in American history when the working class had a vocal, influential, and resolute voice to call its own.
But despite their contributions to American working-class history, the Populists, Progressives, and Socialists all ultimately failed. None of them successfully revolutionized national politics or grew into a lasting partisan force, peaking as small parties with only regional support. Their populism suffered from a crucial ideological weakness: a dubious worldview which defined working-class struggle as the fight between the 1% and the 99%, wrongly grouping together the many heterogenous groups which make up “the 99%” as though they shared common interests. This mis-framing of national political conflict limited these movements’ broader appeal. As a result, they failed to mobilize enough voters to support their campaigns.
The disappointing history of American populist progressivism is a bad omen for Sanders’ campaign. Like the Populists, Progressives, and Socialists of the past, Sanders asserts the same unpersuasive narrative of a working-class struggle between 99% and 1% that has consistently failed to galvanize the American masses. He condemns the same bankers, millionaires, and elites that countless populist and progressive groups have denounced since at least the late nineteenth century, but whose power and influence such movements have ultimately failed to challenge.
That Sanders resembles the populist and progressive movements of the past makes his success unlikely. Simply put, the United States’ long history of populist failures gives a reason to be skeptical about Sanders’ campaign. Considering populists’ tendency to make overconfident promises about the transformative potential of their movements, Sanders’ pledges to lead a grassroots “movement [to take] on the economic and political establishment” and spur “the political revolution of 2015” sound unconvincing.
The reasons for skepticism don’t stop there. Thinking dialectically about the history of U.S. politics and ideology raises other questions about the potential of a Sanders-led progressive movement.
By thinking dialectically, I mean interpreting changes in political discourse as an ideological tug-of-war between constantly reformulated conceptions of Left and Right. Applying this framework to the U.S. since the Civil War, we can divide American history into three distinct periods: the period until the Great Depression, when classical liberalism and laissez-faire thought were the dominant ideologies; the period from President Roosevelt’s election in 1932 to the end of the 1970s, when progressives exploited the collapse of the free-market system and established government intervention and a strong welfare state; and, finally, the period from Reagan’s election until today, during which conservatives reformulated market principles into new terms and have successfully trumpeted them into ideological dominance.
Carrying out this analysis in greater detail requires a much farther-reaching investigation than this (POL concentrators, take note). Nevertheless, the ascent of neoliberalism in the United States since the 1980s—the predisposition toward market-based solutions to society’s problems, derived from a critique of state interventionism—is an undeniable fact and a phenomenon to which the American Left has failed to adequately respond. Sanders is a part of this failure. His response is not an innovative reformulation of historically progressive and left-wing thought—as the new free-market ideology was to laissez-faire thinking—but the mere restatement of a traditional New-Deal inspired platform.
In their challenge to postwar American progressivism and European social democracy, the conservative intellectuals who brought about the free-market renaissance—Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and their friends in the Mont Pelerin Society—did not simply reassert the usual laissez-faire arguments of classical liberalism. Recognizing the post-Great Depression era obsession with problem-solving in public policy, they reformulated the notion of the market and promulgated it anew.
In this new conception, which prevails today, the free market does not merely represent humankind’s natural state of economic freedom, as it did in classical liberalism; it is also the answer to the majority of society’s problems. The market becomes a simpler, more elegant solution to the issues that the state could only try to resolve through more complicated, less efficient means. Cap-and-trade can now save the environment; and “flexibility” in the labor market can reduce inflation and unemployment without negative consequences for the working class. Combined with the stagflation of the 1970s, the ideological appeal—the novelty and freshness—of this reformulation of free-market thought proved strong enough to turn American public opinion away from the progressive postwar consensus.
It is now up to the American Left to continue its dialectical, ideological struggle with the Right and respond effectively to this reformulation of free-market thought in the United States. Yet Sanders, the Left’s candidate in the coming presidential election, has failed to put forth the recalibrated progressivism necessary to galvanize the American masses into supporting his campaign. Instead, the policies he proposes—increasing the minimum wage and public works programs and expanding social security—are exactly the policies the Right critiqued out of popular support in the 1980s. Sanders’ counterpunch to the return of free-market dominance is no more than the restatement of the New Deal-inspired policies that the Right clubbed out of existence with Reagan’s election.
Any effective political and ideological response from the Left today requires the kind of originality that Sanders’ platform lacks. Simple reassertions of public policy goals from the New Deal-era are not enough to galvanize today’s American masses into turning against the post-Reagan variety of free-market dogma. To truly challenge the dominance of this ideology, as President Roosevelt once challenged classical liberalism during the Great Depression, Sanders and the rest of the American Left must come up with new ideas and proposals that excite the American public and reorient popular opinion leftward. That might mean new socioeconomic policies like universal basic income, or it could be a reorientation away from mere economic progressivism to an entirely new kind of progressive thought—for example, one which attempts to bring the postmodern Left’s insights on race, gender, and sexuality into policy consideration. In any case, what is certain is that the Left needs a neo-progressivism, neo-radicalism, neo-something to effectively challenge neoliberalism.
I still plan to vote for Sanders next year, and I encourage others to do the same. Regardless of my skepticism of his campaign’s potential for success, his platform stands out among those of current candidates due to its truly progressive pitch and tenor. And though I remain pessimistic because of Sanders’ populist orientation and New Deal-inspired policy proposals, I hope that I’m proven wrong.
I hope Sanders’ populism is able to inspire the American masses into political action in a way that William James’ Bryan, Robert La Follette, and Norman Thomas never could. I hope that he can channel FDR in his calls for a more expansive welfare state; and that he successfully recalibrates the American Left as Reagan reformulated and resurrected the American Right.
Until then, all I can do is keep my expectations of Sanders in check while calling on him and other leading American progressives to offer us some ideological novelty, creativity, and freshness—namely, to offer us a coherent vision of a post-neoliberal Left.
I’d like to thank Andrew Hahm ’17 for helping me write this article. The discussions I had with him regarding Sanders’ campaign were crucial to my final thoughts on the matter, and his review of and contributions to my drafts of this article were invaluable.
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