At his speech to the Democratic National Convention last night, Bernie Sanders played the usual hits — and also called for a cease-fire in Gaza. But his righteous populist anger felt out of place before a party still dominated by corporate interests.
Last night, Bernie Sanders addressed the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It was his third time speaking at the DNC, eight years after his momentous challenge to Hillary Clinton first brought him to the forefront of national politics. In 2016, Sanders spoke as the leader of a rising insurgent wing in the party; at this year’s convention, by contrast, he spoke as an ally of Joe Biden’s administration.
Sanders’s speech was mostly unsurprising. He hit his usual themes: decrying the greed of the billionaire class, yawning economic inequality, and the desperation faced by too many Americans; reiterating the need to get money out of politics; calling for guaranteeing health care as a human right, passing the PRO Act, fully funding public education, raising the minimum wage, and so on.
That unparalleled message discipline, his laser focus on class issues and raising the living standards of working people, has been key to Sander’s popularity. This consistent focus has also been a political godsend to the United States in an era when politicians too often get mired in the muddy battlefields of the culture war and most studiously avoid the topic of class warfare. When it came time to criticize Donald Trump, he didn’t call him “weird”; he called out Project 2025: “Giving more tax breaks to billionaires. Putting forth budgets to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Letting polluters destroy our planet. That is what is radical, and we won’t let it…
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Auteur: Nick French
