It’s tempting to write off Bernie Sanders’s speeches and interviews as he campaigns for Kamala Harris this year as a “playing the hits” tour: The top 1 percent own lots of wealth. We have to take on Big Pharma. We need to finally guarantee everyone the right to health insurance. Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy. “The American people are sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
But there’s been a noticeable change from Bernie’s 2016 and 2020 hits. Gone are references to Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. What’s there instead is a more limited platform of demands. Call it Bernie’s response to Project 2025. And while many on the Left — myself included — miss the exciting vision of his 2020 campaign, Sanders’s new program has a compelling logic to it. If Trump is beaten, Harris will be president, and the Left and labor will need a set of winnable demands to organize around.
That’s what Bernie seems to be trying to provide. On that score, he’s putting forward an ambitious and appealing program. It’s one that if won even in part might set us up to fight for something closer to the 2020 program in the not-too-distant future. The program is just missing one key ingredient: a strategy to win it that draws the right lessons from the last four years.
The concrete planks in the new Bernie program are focused on redistribution and strengthening the public sector. Medicare expansion to cover dental, hearing, and vision care, and increased Social Security benefits to help struggling seniors. Public financing of…
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Auteur: Neal Meyer
