Bernie Sanders has made plenty of history as a democratic socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont, an independent U.S. Representative, and then a U.S. Senator. He was a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and again in 2020, inspiring a new generation of progressive activists and candidates.
But Sanders also has a keen sense of history. He spoke recently with John Nichols, his co-author of the best-selling book It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, about Eugene V. Debs, Robert M. La Follette, and the progressive politics of past and present. Sanders commented on his frustrations with the media, the Democratic Party, and the foreign policy consensus in Washington, D.C., especially regarding the question of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza.
But he also discussed his enthusiasm for grassroots politics and the potential for building movements on behalf of economic, racial, and social justice. Excerpts of the interview, edited for clarity and length, follow.
Q: Raising objections to capitalism is nothing new in the United States. A century ago, political leaders like Eugene V. Debs were outspoken in their criticism, not just of individual robber barons, but also of a system that made the exploitation of workers and resources possible. Debs was a labor leader who ran for President five times on the Socialist Party ticket and earned almost one million votes in 1912 and again in 1920.
Robert M. La Follette was a governor, Senator, and an independent presidential candidate who, when he ran in 1924 as a progressive, won almost five million votes. So when you hear complaints about capitalism today, it’s important to recognize that they extend from a long tradition in this country.
Bernie Sanders: It’s not just La Follette and the progressives in Wisconsin. It’s not just Debs, who was an extraordinary person. It was during that period, a century ago, that you had mayors and members of state legislatures that had large political movements all over this country, fighting for democratic socialism. Of course, they got wiped out in the years during and after the First World War by the government—and by the post-World War I Red Scare that cracked down on free speech and freedom of the press. The idea of democratic socialism is deeply embedded in American history.
Q: You have argued for a long time that we need to remember this history—Debs, La Follette, the progressives, the socialists, and the radicals who campaigned for economic, racial, and social justice and took on the oligarchs and plutocrats. That’s a big theme in our book.
Sanders: When we write about the power of oligarchy, it’s not just the incredible wealth held by the few in the United States and around the world, it’s their power over the media [and] education. It’s their strong intent to make people believe that there is no way you can change the status quo. One of the ways you maintain the status quo is by denying many aspects of our history. They don’t want these discussions about our past or what’s happening now.
We have a chapter in the book on corporate control over the media and how billionaires and corporate interests, to a large degree, determine what we see, hear, and read in the United States. So what this book is about is not only questioning the status quo, but also taking on a media that refuses to allow the voices of working people to be heard and to allow an alternative vision to take hold.
One thing that has always amazed me is that, in poll after poll, virtually all of the issues that we talk about involve things that the vast majority of the American people want. And yet, they’re not part of the media discourse. People are disgusted with income and wealth inequality, with a tax system that enables billionaires and large corporations to pay very little in taxes, and with a health care system that is dysfunctional. Yet we have a hard time getting those ideas into the mainstream discourse. So you’re right, part of oligarchy’s mission is the prevention of serious ideas being debated.
Q: That’s one of the oligarchy’s greatest powers, right? Their ability to use their wealth and power to narrow the range of debate?
Sanders: Yes, absolutely.
Q: If it’s believed that there’s no alternative, then the status quo wins every fight.
Sanders: That’s right. Then there’s the sense of hopelessness. “Yeah, the health care system is absurd. We spend twice as much as any other country, and yet our social outcomes are behind many other countries. But there’s nothing we can do about it.” “Yeah, we have massive income and wealth inequality, but we can’t do anything about that.” “Yeah, kids are going bankrupt paying for college, but we can’t do anything about that.” The constant drum beat, which says that you cannot really bring about change, that the ruling class is just too powerful, is, in fact, their strongest weapon.
Q: One of the challenges in politics—especially since the rise of Donald Trump—is that media coverage is so wrapped up in personalities. We end up in a situation where the whole debate comes down to “vote for me because I’m not him” or “vote for us because we’re not them.” There’s almost no place for ideas.
Sanders: I have personally been criticized, time and time again, for going on and on about the problems we face, about the issues, rather than talking about the outrage of the day.
John Nichols
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in his home office in Vermont, holding a framed copy of "The Progressive" from November 2013.
What I am saying, with regard to so much of the media coverage of politics, is: Look, I am not important, you are not important, what’s important is that we have a health care system that is denying health care to tens and tens of millions of Americans. I am not important, you’re not important, what’s important is that the fossil fuel industry is destroying the planet.
One of the things that the media does is recognize that it’s easy to talk about personalities, to talk about somebody saying something dumb. But they don’t talk about the greed in society. They don’t talk about the alternatives of what kind of world we want to see. You’ve heard me say this a million times: Fifty miles from where I live, if you end up in the hospital for a month in Canada, you don’t have a bill. You come out, and you don’t owe a nickel. How many people in America even know that reality? Not many, because there’s virtually no programming in corporate media about Medicare for All.
One of the major tools the oligarchy has is to prevent us from understanding our history, and to prevent us from understanding an alternative vision about where we can go as a nation.
Q: How do we break the pattern? How do we open up the debate? You ran for President, as La Follette and Debs both did. That gets the message out to some extent, but how do we free things up so that the issues that matter are no longer neglected?
Sanders: If I had that magical answer I would be a lot smarter than I am. That’s the question on everybody’s mind. One of the significant new tools that are out there—that Debs certainly didn’t have—is social media. Even though we’ve got our friend, Mr. [Elon] Musk, owning Twitter [now called X], and other billionaires owning media platforms, social media is an important tool for spreading alternative ideas that the ruling class would prefer not to see discussed. So I think we’ve got to do a better job utilizing social media.
Q: Young people, in particular, get their news from social media. But a lot of older people, including those who are in positions of power, still get their news from traditional legacy media. Hasn’t that been a factor with the debate regarding Israel and Palestine? Young people, who polls show are passionately concerned about Gaza, are getting a lot more information from social media that shows them images of the death and destruction in real time, while many people in positions of authority seem to be almost detached from what’s happening.
Sanders: I think that where The New York Times and The Washington Post are is not exactly where young people are in this country—or what they are seeing and hearing. I think there is a real split in terms of where older and younger people get their news. Television is increasingly an older person’s medium, and social media is where young people get their information. The problem with that is that older people have significant power in Washington, and I think they are quite out of touch in many respects with where young people are and where young people get their information.
Q: We don’t have very good debates in this country about foreign policy. We’re told, “That’s best left to the experts in Washington.” But what we’re seeing now is a situation where millions of Americans are saying bluntly that our foreign policy is wrong. They’re protesting in the streets and organizing against U.S. policy regarding Gaza. You’ve tried to get the Senate to focus on these issues and have real debates about Israel and Palestine, but it’s been hard, hasn’t it?
Sanders: Yes, it’s been hard for a number of reasons. First, it comes down to a corrupt political system in which AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] has enormous political power. Major contributors in the Democratic Party are prepared to spend $100 million against progressive members of the House [who have supported a ceasefire in Gaza], so they are an important factor.
Second, for many, many, many decades—and for good reasons, given what happened during the Holocaust, and given the rampant antisemitism all over the world—the United States saw Israel as an ally to be worked with and supported. I certainly agreed with that. But what I think is not appreciated now is that in Israel, under [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, and people even further to the right of him, you have a government that is going to war right now, not against Hamas, but against the entire Palestinian people.
What they are doing is horrific. It is unspeakable. What we’re talking about [as of mid-February] are 27,000 people killed—two-thirds of whom are women and children. Sixty-seven thousand have been wounded. You’re talking about 1.7 million people displaced from their homes—more than 80 percent of [Gaza’s] population. You’re talking about 70 percent of the housing units in Gaza either destroyed or damaged. And you’re talking about, right now, a horror beyond words: the starvation of hundreds of thousands of children. Right now, as we speak. Who can defend that? It’s indefensible. And, clearly, we cannot, in my view, continue to give financial support for Netanyahu’s war machine, which is causing so much destruction to the Palestinian people.
Q: We started out talking about Debs and La Follette and their criticisms of a capitalist system that showed so little regard for humanity. That was a century ago, but many of the fundamental issues remain unresolved. You serve in the Senate as an independent, but you caucus with the Democrats. Do you think the Democrats need to do a better job of talking about economic injustice and inequality?
Sanders: Do a better job? You’re being very kind by using the word “better.” They’ve got to begin to understand that economic rights are human rights. It’s important to say, “Look, we support democracy. We are opposed to Trump and his friends and their insurrections, their undermining of democracy.” We have to do that.
What’s the sense of voting if you’re earning starvation wages, if you’re spending half your income on housing, if you can’t afford child care, if you can’t afford health care?
But what we also have to understand in a twenty-first century democratic society is that economic rights must be considered as human rights. What’s the sense of voting if you’re earning starvation wages, if you’re spending half your income on housing, if you can’t afford child care, if you can’t afford health care? So the basic centerpiece of progressive politics has got to be that economic rights are human rights.
Every person in this wealthy country has the right to a decent standard of living, health care, education, and decent housing. That is not a radical idea. That’s what’s got to be at the heart of any progressive movement.
Q: Let’s finish by talking about movement building. Debs, La Follette, and the progressives of a century ago spent an immense amount of time traveling. They were on trains all the time, speaking across the country. They preached a gospel of economic and social change in this country. You’ve done a lot of that as well. You’ve spent a lot of your time outside of Washington, going out and talking to people. In this age of so much mass media and social media, does it still matter to go out and preach like that? To do that sort of movement building?
Sanders: It does, absolutely. I’ve done it for years in Vermont. I’ve held more town meetings in Vermont, I think, than any politician in Vermont history. During the presidential campaign, people might have noticed the very large rallies, with 25,000 to 30,000 people. That was really exhilarating. No question. But what many people did not notice was, in places like Iowa and New Hampshire, we would hold meeting after meeting with 100 or 200 people. I loved those meetings. There’s nothing more that I like than those meetings, because you’re hearing people coming forward to speak about their lives. I was deeply moved by their willingness to confide in me. People getting up with tears in their eyes, talking about health care, about struggling to survive in this country. I could relate to story after story from people about how they can’t make it on their income. These were working class people talking about their struggles.
What we did is combine two things: First, we were there doing those meetings, having personal contact with people, and I think that’s enormously effective. That’s why we won Iowa by 5,000 votes [in the 2020 Democratic caucuses]. We did hundreds of those meetings. I love that kind of politics. That’s grassroots politics. That’s the best.
Second, using modern technology, we livestreamed a lot of those meetings and got the message out to hundreds of thousands of people. So it’s the combination of doing grassroots, hands-on politics, and [getting] out to hundreds of thousands of people. That’s how you do it.