Why This Socialist is Voting for Bernie Sanders

I’m not the most likely of Bernie Sanders voters. I haven’t voted for a Democratic Presidential candidate in a general election since 1992. I voted for Ralph Nader in 1996, 2000, and 2004 and Green Party candidates Cynthia McKinney and Jill Stein in the next two elections. I ran for Congress as a Green Party candidate myself in 2002. The Democratic Party has long been described by some socialists as the “graveyard of social movements,” and I’ve seen evidence consistent with that description in my lifetime. The last progressive Democratic campaign to achieve major success in the primaries, the 1988 Jesse Jackson campaign, had no lasting impact. In 2004 I watched a powerful antiwar movement vanish before my eyes as far too many activists threw their energy behind the Presidential campaign of John Kerry, who supported the very wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that they were struggling against. For me, the Democratic Party has long been, and still is, the Tweedledee to the Republican Party’s Tweedledum, a party with important differences from the Republicans but ultimately subservient to the same corporate masters.

I was quite excited when Bernie, the first self-proclaimed socialist to be elected to Congress in decades—and one who pulled off the rare feat of being elected as an Independent—came to Washington in 1990. Though it was apparent that he was more a social democrat than a socialist, he was one of the rare voices in Congress to challenge the bipartisan consensus to do corporations’ bidding. Not only was Sanders literally standing right behind Hillary Clinton in that now-famous photo of Clinton giving a policy speech about health care, he was out in front of her and most Democrats on health care policy itself, and many other issues, back then and ever since.

My enthusiasm didn’t last. In 1998, he backed a proposal to dump Vermont's nuclear waste on Sierra Blanca, a poor Hispanic community in South Texas. At about the same time, he supported the sanctions against and bombing of Iraq and the bombing of Kosovo. Sanders also backed the Afghanistan war in 2001, military aid to Israel, and one after another bloated military budget. And as an animal rights advocate, I was not exactly overjoyed to learn of Sanders’ strong support for Vermont’s dairy industry and animal agribusiness generally—support reciprocated by Ben and Jerry’s founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who recently personally served a flavor of their ice cream named after Senator Sanders to his supporters. Though he has always held office as an independent, Sanders often acts like a loyal Democrat, voting with the party majority 98% of the time and often supporting Democrats’ electoral campaigns. In 2004, he said of pro-war Presidential nominee John Kerry: “Not only am I going to vote for John Kerry, I am going to run around this country and do everything I can to dissuade people from voting for Ralph Nader… I am going to do everything I can, while I have differences with John Kerry, to make sure that he is elected.” Meanwhile, I was enthusiastically introducing Mr. Nader to an audience at his campaign stop here in Bloomington, and urging them to vote for him.

In light of all this, when Senator Sanders announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination a year ago, I was not brimming with excitement. Having seen one after another progressive run for President within the Democratic party—McGovern in 1972, Jackson in the ‘80s, Kucinich in 2004 and 2008—ultimately accomplish nothing in terms of advancing a left political agenda, I expected much the same from Sanders’ candidacy. I wasted no time informing all my friends who expressed enthusiasm about his candidacy of the aforementioned less-than-progressive policy choices. I pointed out that since he advocated a welfare-state version of capitalism rather than public control of productive assets, he wasn’t a “real socialist.” And I told them I didn’t see how a candidate who announced right from the get-go that he was going to endorse whoever the Democratic nominee was (presumably Clinton) if it wasn’t him, thus keeping progressives stuck in the trap of “lesser evilism,” could meaningfully advance a progressive agenda. Many on the left shared my assessment. Black Agenda Report’s Bruce Dixon said that Sanders was “sheepdogging for Hillary and the Democrats.” Socialist Worker editorialized about “the problem with Bernie Sanders,” opining that because it was taking place within the confines of the corporate-backed Democratic Party, his candidacy was a dead end for progressive politics.

What a difference a year makes. Nobody, not even Sanders himself, imagined that his campaign would take off like a rocket ship, vaulting from single digits in the polls to a statistical dead heat with Hillary Clinton. Nobody imagined that Sanders would achieve virtual rock star status, speaking to overflow crowds often numbering in the tens of thousands, often waiting in line for hours to see him, in cities all across the country. And so I—a socialist for most of my adult life who subscribed fully to the “revered first commandment” of the US radical left that “thou shalt not support, endorse, or even smile at a Democrat” (as William Kaufman of Counterpunch recently put it)—did the unimaginable. I smiled. Finally, messages that I have been shouting into the wind for 30 years—that every wealthy nation on earth has better and cheaper health care than the US, that paying full-time workers less than a living wage is a criminal state of affairs, that everyone should have the opportunity to attend college without being saddled with debt, that our country was ruled by a corrupt and filthy rich elite hell-bent on destroying the middle class to further enrich themselves, and that the corporate media, part of that elite, actively censored such messages—are reaching a mass audience. And just as Ralph Nader did 16 years ago, Sanders has slammed not just the Republicans but many Democrats as well, including his opponent, as beholden to that same elite—but unlike Nader, he has been able to bring that message to the masses to a historically unprecedented extent.

Most importantly—and without precedent among Democratic Presidential candidates—Sanders has hammered home the message that achieving social progress is not a matter of getting the “right” politicians elected. As he puts it, "This is not about Bernie Sanders. You can have the best president in the history of the world but that person will not be able to address the problems that we face unless there is a mass movement, a political revolution in this country. Right now the only pieces of legislation that get to the floor of the House and Senate are sanctioned by big money, Wall Street, the pharmaceutical companies. The only way we win and transform America is when millions of people stand up as you’re doing today and say 'Enough is enough.’” History repeatedly suggests not only that Senator Sanders’ words are true, but that we don’t even need to elect him or someone like him to achieve many of the reforms he advocates. Women’s suffrage was made the law of the land by male politicians elected by male voters. New Deal reforms were enacted by a President who came into office as a political moderate from a wealthy family. The civil rights legislation of the ‘60s was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson, widely known as a racist who liberally used the n-word. Richard Nixon, a conservative Republican, founded the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. None of these changes would have happened without mass movements in the streets pushing for them. Thanks to Senator Sanders, the vitally important idea of the power and importance of mass movements has impacted the political consciousness of millions of Americans. Of course, that level of consciousness is still a ways away from understanding that capitalism needs to be overthrown altogether for social justice to be achieved, but it is a major first step.

Am I “feeling the Bern” yet? Not exactly. Although I am voting for him today in my state’s primary and wish he could somehow overcome the long odds against winning the Democratic nomination and become President, my criticisms of Bernie’s politics and record still stand. I remain a principled opponent of war and big military budgets, of US military aid to Israel, and of the notion that animals can be exploited or killed humanely, and I will not stop speaking out about those or other political disagreements I have with him. For me, socialism is not a welfare state version of capitalism where economic life is governed by a less-wealthy elite, but a society where grassroots democracy extends to all realms of life including the governance of the economy. And much as I am thankful that the success of his campaign--which, it must be acknowledged, would not have been possible had he not run as a Democrat--has allowed him to articulate the ideas that he and I share to an unprecedentedly large audience--and, as a byproduct, to expose the corruption of the Democratic Party's primary process--I still believe that for the changes we seek to happen, social movements must act independently from the Democratic Party and maintain that independence during election season, in part by forming a viable third party. But the political revolution of which he speaks can only start with mass awareness of the issues at stake, and his campaign has made an important contribution to making that happen. The rest is up to us.