Bernie Sanders Can Take A Seat

It's The Movement He Cultivated That Brought Trump Back To Power

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Meet The Press this weekend

The Democrats lost last week’s election, and like clockwork, a bat signal was projected into the skies over Burlington, Vermont.

Fresh off his worst electoral performance as a Senator yet – where he finished with 6,000 votes fewer than Vice President Kamala Harris in Vermont¹ – Sen. Bernie Sanders descended onto the Beltway Circut’s beloved Sunday shows to explain where everyone went wrong.

His diagnosis shouldn’t surprise anyone who has listened to the democratic socialist senator and unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020. Democrats, he said, have “abandoned the working class.”

Presumably identifying the “working class” as anyone making less than $100,000 a year, the criteria often cited to me by Bernie supporters, it is true Democrats have seen their margin with that group slide over the years. It is also true that every left-wing party in the Western World has seen that, too. The only exception has been Labour in Britain, who won a resounding landside in July after 14 years out of power – and after dumping their democratic socialist leader who led them to back-to-back electoral defeats where their margins narrowed with, among other groups, working-class voters.

Sanders’ “working class” agenda is not new. It’s the same packaged “take on the wealthy elites” stuff he peddled in his presidential runs. Democrats, he said, can win massive landslides by telling working-class voters of every race and ethnicity they will fight for them against the “wealthy elite.” They will then unite together and deliver big electoral wins for Democrats. However, it ignores who won this election last week with the support of working-class voters.

The “wealthy elite.”

Americans elected a billionaire real estate mogul, backed by the world’s richest man, whose one signature economy policy from his first term is giving tax cuts to the rich. He defeated the sitting vice president who served in an administration that, to win the support of the vanquished faction headed by Sanders, appointed an aggressive anti-truster as head of the Federal Trade Commission – one of many progressive appointments made in this administration. The Biden Administration also started with a significant economic stimulus supported by progressives but opposed by the “wealthy elite” to pull the country out of the economic doldrums caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic. The stimulus was more extensive than what was implemented after the Great Recession, the kind the “wealthy elites” wanted. The administration appointed staunchly pro-labor National Labor Relations Board members who aggressively supported unionization efforts. Biden even became the first president to ever walk a picket line – in a state his vice president later lost alongside a union whose members voted decisively against her.

It’s true that inflation ultimately dragged down the Harris campaign enough that it led to a working-class exodus to Trump on the promise of lower prices, but nothing in the Sanders agenda would have helped that. Some have argued that Democrats should have gone harder on price gouging, but they did that. Harris spoke about it in her campaign speeches, calling for stricter rules against it, and Democratic senators dragged “wealthy elite” CEOs in front of committees to scold them for it. No one noticed. None of it mattered. People did not believe that or trust them to handle the issue, nor did they think these ideas were anything but passing the buck.

This is where Sanders’ ideas go off the rails. The Democratic Party did many of the things Sanders argues they should do to win back the support and trust of who he deems the “working class.” None of it worked.

One of the most common retorts this past week from Bernie supporters is that the Democratic Party has become more focused on identity and cultural issues than class and economic ones. If the party had let Bernie Sanders lead the way, we’d be solely class-focused and not identity-focused and wouldn’t be losing them due to cultural anxieties. This is expert gaslighting.

Sanders is historically more conservative on cultural issues like guns and immigration, but his supporters and the movement he cultivated were not. His movement ultimately pushed the Democratic Party toward a social justice mindset. It predates Bernie 2016. During Occupy Wall Street, I witnessed firsthand white, often male, demonstrators in Zuccotti Park expressing discomfort and frustration at speakers who uttered phrases like “white supremacy and patriarchy are upholding the corrupt capitalist system.” At least one of those men is a diehard Trump supporter and “anti-woke” scold today and harkens back to his experience in Lower Manhattan over 12 years ago as a reason. In 2013, when workers from New York airports gathered in Jamaica, Queens, for a march in favor of a fairer labor contract, a progressive activist group, New York Communities For Change, marched in solidarity. While there, group members handed out buttons that called for the end to Stop and Frisk, the notorious Bloomberg-era policing policy. Several workers, none of them white, who disagreed with the group on that policy and were offended that their demonstration was being hijacked, walked away from the march. New York Communities For Change later backed Bernie Sanders for president in 2016, the airport workers union backed Hillary Clinton.

In the early days of Bernie Sanders’ 2015 campaign, he embraced cultural issues. In August 2015, just ten weeks after he started his campaign, Bernie held a rally in Los Angeles where the opening act was a Black Lives Matter group. He spoke about institutional racism and bringing undocumented immigrants “out of the shadows.” In New York, Make The Road, an immigrant advocacy group, urged Democratic voters to pick Bernie Sanders in 2016, saying Hillary Clinton would continue Obama’s “inhumane” immigration policies. They called Obama a “deporter-in-chief.” Sanders, they said, would stop the deportations and institute policies that would “welcome immigrants.” This past weekend, Make The Road held a march in Manhattan opposing Trump’s incoming administration, saying “immigrants, working-class people, women, the TGNCIQ+ community², and allies” need to unite to oppose Trump. The next day, one of its chief organizers scolded me for criticizing the march and told me, with no sense of irony, to listen to what Bernie had said about having a “class-focused” approach and “not get bogged down in culture wars the elites ignite to divide us.”

Progressive groups rallying in Manhattan on Saturday.

After Trump won in 2016, Bernie supporters injected much of what we deem “wokeness” into our society. It was a queer Hispanic Bernie delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention who, a year or so later, asked me to start using the term “Latinx” and who suggested I put my pronouns in my Twitter profile. It was my Hillary-supporting Puerto Rican and Colombian friends who told me to stop. I first heard a “land acknowledgment” at a Democratic Socialists of America meeting in Brooklyn in 2018. Former Rep. Joe Crowley didn't want to abolish ICE; his successor, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, did. Former Rep. Lacy Clay didn't want to defund the police; Cori Bush did. The Independent Democratic Caucus in New York didn't want to end cash bail; the Bernie supporters who defeated them did.

It was mainly former Bernie supporters who scolded people about masks during and after the pandemic, calling mask-wearing an essential action for social justice. Many DSA meetings still require mask-wearing today. It was Bernie supporters who accused liberals of wanting to “go back to brunch” after the pandemic and called people ableist for traveling or going to restaurants. It was a Bernie supporter who went viral last summer saying under socialism, we wouldn’t have bananas and no international travel, calling it “a form of colonialism.” Bernie supporters told us forgiving student loans was a “working class” issue even though over 60 percent of “working class” Americans never went to college. A longtime Bernie supporter and organizer in Queens told me that despite that, it’s still a “working class” issue because the working class may not have student loan debt but likely have friends and family who do. It was Bernie supporters in New York City’s chapter of DSA who descended into Assembly districts in the Bronx and Brooklyn in June, declaring to people paying the highest cost of living in the country that it was the war in Gaza that was actually the most critical “working class” issue of our time.

Today, Bernie Sanders’ supporters claim he is a good spokesperson for where to go next because he did well with the groups that swung against Democrats last week: Latinos, the Working Class, and Young People.

Except he didn’t. Hillary Clinton destroyed him with Latino voters in 2016, and while Bernie Sanders did win the Michigan primary, he lost some of the more working-class parts of the state, like Macomb County, Flint, and Saginaw. Hillary crushed Bernie in Detroit and working-class suburbs like Pontiac, but Bernie won the affluent suburbs home to the wealthy elite, like Grosse Point and Livonia. In 2020, Bernie did somewhat better with Latinos, but the evidence his supporters used to say they were his base is not persuading. He won the Nevada caucus – a caucus, not a primary – with only 34 percent of the vote. In the Rio Grande Valley, Bernie struggled to get to 40 percent in most counties, and in the largest, Hildago, he didn’t even get to 30 percent. He “won” those counties because most voters split between Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, and the other more moderate candidates. As for young voters, the Zoomers who showed up the most for Trump last week were first-time voters under 22. They were children when Bernie ran for president.

I didn’t write this to rattle off political statistics. I wrote this because, as I often said, Bernie is wrong. He has always been wrong and is still wrong. The flaw in his theory is what he deems the “wealthy elite” versus what everyday Americans consider them to be. Voters don’t see all billionaires as the elites. They see college-educated liberals on the coasts, some of whom are billionaires, as elites.

Bernie-style populism didn’t land because billionaires figured out long ago they could undermine it by being socially right-wing, and the working class would forgive their wealth and privilege. That’s why this same demographic is willing to make it rain for grifters like Joel Osteen and Pat Robertson. That’s why they worship the wealthiest man on the planet like a God and consider him some real-life Tony Stark. People dismissed Donald Trump as a shameless attention-hungry New York oligarch until he called Mexicans rapists. Then he shot up to the top of the GOP primary polls. The working class didn’t think much of Elon Musk until he said “pronouns suck.” Then he became their hero. A scion of working-class Pennsylvania lost his US Senate seat last week to a hedge fund manager from Connecticut. West Virginia elected their richest man to the Senate after electing him governor – as a Democrat and later a Republican. Ohio tossed out their longtime Democratic senator, known for his strong support of labor rights, for – literally, no joke – a used-car salesman.

You can’t tell me the working class in America thinks being a billionaire alone is what makes one a “wealthy elite.” There are significant factors at play here Bernie is either oblivious to or purposely ignorant of.

In college, a professor once told me that Communism never succeeded in the United States because we are too religious and proud as a country. Religion, traditions, and culture were never widely discredited the way they were in Europe and Asia, where the clergy and nobility kept the bourgeoisie in figurative chains for centuries. The relative ease of social mobility made America unique compared to its Western counterparts. Historically, American progressivism has been focused on expanding social mobility – initially limited to only white men – to identity groups who had been denied it at the start: blacks, women, and immigrants. We have done it, with various amounts of success. While it may seem counterintuitive, Americans pride themselves in being the nation that pioneered the idea that wealth and status can be achieved through ingenuity and hard work and not just based on a lucky roll of the genetic dice, as it was in the Old World. It doesn’t mean we don’t have generational wealth in our country; we do, but since it isn’t the sole way to achieve wealth and power, we don’t care nearly as much about destroying all of it. Further, we will happily endorse it if the oligarchs and the aristocrats vow to promote and protect the social values we care about and the social hierarchy that benefits us.

It’s one of the reasons I believe Bernie could never beat Trump. If you ask working-class people what they want: an anti-immigrant, anti-intellectual billionaire or a Vermont socialist backed by kids from Harvard and UC Berkeley who hate our traditions and customs, the working class will always back the billionaire.

To say it was the Democratic “elite” who pushed identity politics is a shameless lie. The “elite” did, but the “elite” in question is the progressive Left. They are the “elite” the working class wants to fight. Since the Democratic Party made an ill-advised attempt to reconcile the overstated divide in the party brought on by the Bernie Sanders movement, they ended up covered in the stink of this toxic elitist movement. It is disingenuous for the man who cultivated that movement to lecture us on how to get the stink off now.

1. Sanders’ protege, Lieutenant Governor David Zuckerman, lost to a Republican, and the GOP nearly won control of the Vermont Senate, all with Bernie on the ballot.

2. Don’t even ask what TGNCIQ+ means; you don’t even want to know it’s so stupid.