In February 2020, the insurgent left was on top of the world. Bernie Sanders had just won the Nevada caucuses, solidifying his status as the front-runner in the Democratic presidential primary. A month later, the Democratic Party had consolidated behind Joe Biden, who won South Carolina and dominated Super Tuesday, and the pandemic had set in. Sanders soon demobilized his historic campaign infrastructure and joined a series of committees under Biden in a quixotic attempt to pull Biden left. The Sanders movement dissipated overnight.
Zohran Mamdani’s grassroots campaign and Democratic primary victory feels a lot like February 2020. To avoid the disappointments that followed, we must chart a new path. Luckily, Sanders’s tenure as mayor of Burlington in the 1980s is a master class in just the style of politics we need to be building today.
According to Sanders in his book Outsider In the House, when he was first elected mayor in 1981, the “Democrats’ strategy” was to “tie my hands, make it impossible for me to accomplish anything.” The board of aldermen (Burlington’s city council) fired Sanders’s secretary and denied his proposed appointees. Mayor Bernie’s response was, first, to “do everything a mayor could possibly do without the support of the City Council.” Second was to “expose the local Democrats and Republicans for what they were — obstructionists and political hacks who had very few positive ideas.” Third, and in his view most important, was to “build a third party in the city to defeat them in the next election.”
In that first year, Bernie and his “shadow cabinet” organized grassroots “Mayor’s Councils” to inform his administration and bypass the city council, and established a “parallel…
Auteur: Jeremy Gong
