Bernie Sanders Finds It's OK to Talk Like an Old Lefty

He realizes that real politics has less to do with electing a few leaders than with building a movement, because that's all old lefties like him could ever hope for.

I was planning on reading John Cassidy's Capitalism and Its Critics: A History From the Industrial Revolution to AI next. While I've rarely been impressed by his New Yorker columns, I thought his 2009 book, How Markets Fail: The Rise and Fall of Free Market Economics, was a tour de force, one of the best books to come out of the 2008 financial crisis. Zachary Carter, who wrote the near-definitive history of Keynesianism and a strong brief for its continuing relevance — The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (2020) — has been plugging Cassidy's book. And after having spent many years of trying to accommodate capitalism, it seemed like it might be time to sharpen my critique.

Part of this is that I've come to take a more narrow view of capitalism, freeing its definition from separable things like markets, trade, firms, and other institutions. It's simply about power: who owns the means of production and distribution, and has first claim to profits. In capitalism, those who provide the capital own the firm, direct it, and reap the profits. Unless they face obstacles, capitalists will seek absolute power to profit, and their drive for profit will destroy all else in its way, as we know all too well.

This suggests that there is indeed an alternative to capitalism, which is any system where firms are directed by groups who are not owners of capital — the obvious alternatives are workers, customers, and/or the public — and/or where the lust for profits is stifled or otherwise limited (usually by regulation, although competition also works). We actually have many alternatives to capitalist firms today: non-profits, co-operatives, employee-owned businesses, government. Although much effort is made in the capitalist press and political sphere at disparaging such organizations, there is good reason to expect them to meet public needs better than capitalist firms do, and without the all-pervasive corruption of inequality and its reactionary politics.

So after decades of moderating my initial anti-capitalism, of warming up to schemes which would allow capitalist businesses to dull their worst instincts and function as responsible citizens — decades where I found myself sympathizing with Keynes and Franklin Roosevelt — I now feel the pendulum swinging back. This is mostly due to the fact that since 1980s American capitalism has returned to the rapacious and predatory modes of the Gilded Age and the last gasps of laissez-faire, with its attendant massive inequality and injustice. It was already clear to me that under Reagan America's one great growth industry was fraud. And here we are with Trump, the pure face of fraud, but worse still is his intoxication with absolute power.

So when I was ordering Cassidy's book, I noticed that Bernie Sanders' 2020 campaign debrief — not published until 2023, as he had been busy in the Senate trying to push Biden's key bills through — had finally come out in paperback, with the title, It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism. It's super-rare for any politician to risk a critical word about capitalism, even when it was as plain an obstacle as Michael Bloomberg's half-billion-dollar campaign to stop Bernie in 2020 — compare that to the $30 million or so he spent in 2024 to stop Trump to get an idea of how he evaluates threats to his domain. When the time came, I wound up picking up the Sanders book first, just for a quick skim, but some points below stuck with me.

A brief digression here: I regard Sanders as a politician, not as a political theorist or policy wonk. So when I look at his book, what I'm mostly looking for isn't policy ideas or critical insights. What I'm looking for are examples of how a relatively skillful politician talks about issues. It isn't easy being a politician in America. It's doubly hard being one who wants not just to win elections but to move the country left (i.e., toward a broader and more universal freedom, justice, and equality). So I'm reluctant to nitpick, especially when choices appear to be pragmatic compromises of well-meant principles. (By "pragmatic" I mean something modest that inches you in a desired direction, without precluding further movement. By "well-meant" I mean toward the left, as defined above.)

Republicans are out of bounds here, and many Democrats are open to criticism on either or both of these grounds. "Well-meant" is often hard to determine, except in cases as clear-cut as genocide, so most of our questions come down to effectiveness. Schumer and Jeffries can be presumed to mean well enough to oppose Trump — although for some reason they find genocide to be more perplexing — but how effective are they? That's fair grounds for nit-picking. But even there, how effective can you expect politicians to be when they are shut out of power? Sanders has never had enough power to compromise. All he's managed in many years of politics has been to claim a platform to speak from. He possibly could have used it better, especially to oppose America's and Israel's wars — positions he eventually came to based in principles, but pragmatically chose to avoid initially.

So I don't want to get too deep into the weeds about his policy preferences as shown in this book. (I'll just note that the book lacks anything, positive or negative, on US foreign policy. His omission may be strategic, but suggests he fails to see, or thinks he can escape seeing, how closely US foreign policy is linked to his key domestic policy issues.) But what does interest me is his choice of words, and how they frame his political arguments. Although quite a few Democrats align with him on policy prescriptions, he is almost unique in his use of old left vocabulary: he identifies capitalism as the problem, he embraces the working class, he promises a "political revolution." Granted, he pulls his punches somewhat on capitalism: he reserves his harshest opprobrium for something he calls "uber-capitalism," which is really just what's always been the essence of capitalism, but with the power to dictate its own terms. And it's always clear that his "revolution" aims to win power at the ballot box. The difficulties of actually exercising that power in what would almost certainly remain a system of countervailing power centers isn't a subject worth his speculation. Which makes sense, given that leftists never expect to actually arrive at their destination.

Although John Nichols gets a "with" credit, most of the book — especially the campaign memoir — is written in a conversational first-person style, that clearly reflects his voice. Nichols helped beef up the examples, especially toward the back of the book, although there's no reason to doubt that Sanders' checked them all off. The first section I really took note of was near the end, pp. 261-264, under the section "Real Politics Starts With Organizing." I'm going to reduce these to a list (usually the first lines of paragraphs):

1. Real politics is about recruiting and training working-class candidates at the local level to win election for city council, the school boards, and state legislative seats.
2. Real change never takes place from the top on down. It always comes from the bottom up.
3. Real politics is about knowing our history and recognizing its power as an organizing tool.
4. Real politics is about rejecting the establishment's determination as to what is "possible," "achievable," and "acceptable."
5. Real politics sees through the disempowering lies that are told by the establishment.
6. Real politics is about understanding that the economic elites will never support policies that threaten their wealth and power.
7. Real politics recognizes that the corporate elite are not good guys, no matter how much they contribute to charity or how many awards they receive.
8. In the face of a politically powerful billionaire class and its corporate allies, real politics recognizes that progressives must be smarter and more strategic than ever before. We need to think big, not small, and we need to introduce questions of morality into the political debate by challenging the greed, irresponsibility, and brutality of the ruling class.
9. Real politics is about recognizing the systemic injustices that crush working families.
10. Real politics fights for real choices. Progressives must make it clear that there are two sides in this fight. On one side are the wealthy few who will cede nothing to the many. On the other side are the many who must demand what is rightfully theirs.

These points are stronger than I would have made, which may just mean he's a harder-nosed politician than I am. I'm so wary of confrontation that I always look for positive-sum compromises, not least because I believe that the so-called winners of power games (like capitalism) are also damaged by inequality, so have something to gain, especially where one is able to "level up." But there sure is a lot of history to back Sanders' more cynical view here — enough that he appears to be the realist, and me the utopian.

The other point we should make here is that while Sanders' campaigns offered us the option of making him president, he sure seems skeptical that even as president he could affect the changes he campaigned for without also building a broad-based political movement working for the same goals in every nook and cranny of the nation. This is a far cry from presidential candidates who ask for our trust and then use it mostly to build foundations and museums to themselves. Clinton and Obama didn't dare cross the ruling class. They campaigned to join it. (Conversely, the hysterical reaction of Bloomberg and his ilk suggests a secret fear of popular exposure.)

One more section of the book I want to mention, on pp. 108-112, in a section called "We Need a New Sense of Morality." He starts with a couple examples that are still almost universally condemned (assault, theft), but then notes that the rich and their businesses are treated differently, such that "their behavior is rarely if ever considered to be illegal — let alone punishable." This was written well before the Supreme Court gave Trump his "get out of jail free" card. Still, this makes me wonder whether we need a new sense of morality so much as a return to old one before it got warped by the inequality exploited by lawyers and bribes and politicians like Trump. It's hard to believe that even Trump's fans really support allowing two different standards of justice depending on political alignment. The notion of equal justice for all is so deeply embedded in American political culture that Trump can simply erase it?

That Trump has gotten away with as much as he has is mostly due to the belief that many Americans have that Trump's arbitrary and vindictive prosecutions will finally punish the people they see as their enemies. After all, one thing Trump was not shy about was naming enemies, and promising redemption. History shows that no matter how popular a reign of terror may at first appear, before long it will become overbearing, and possibly turn on itself.

Sanders is a savvy politician, so it shouldn't surprise us that he sees the value of naming enemies: the "new morality" section is part of a larger chapter titled "Billionaires Should Not Exist." Admittedly, he pulls his punches: no guillotines, no show trials, taxation that stays within modest bounds. He advises us to hate the system that made Elon Musk possible, but don't hate Musk personally. (Even though it's hard to imagine a more repugnant person, except perhaps for Trump himself.)

There are many asymmetries in left-right politics. One is that we tend to view evils as systemic rather than personal. As such, we seek to resolve them not by punishing individuals, even ones who are clearly culpable, but by reforming systems to make them work more fairly and equably. This makes it harder for the left both to exploit and to appease the anger people feel when life, society, and economy turn against them. But while many of us would hope to defray anger by moderation, Sanders offers the angry a better target: capitalism, but not just the idea and the system, but personified, rendered in flesh and blood, by billionaires.

As Cassidy's book shows, capitalism has had critics as long as it has existed — Cassidy starts in the 1770s. I started in the late 1960s with what was then called the new left. Sanders started a bit earlier, with what I recognize as the old left. Telltale differences between old and new left include the former's near-exclusive focus on the working class, and a romantic faith in revolution as driver of progress. I won't attempt to argue new vs. old left here, as it matters little to this particular distinction. Sanders picked up some bits from the new left, like respect for women and concern for the environment, but my point is that his key terminology came out of the old left.

This is interesting for several reasons. One is that this way of talking was virtually wiped out in the Cold War/Red Scare, at least as far as the liberal intelligentsia go, and doubly so for Democratic politicians. Sanders, pretty much alone, broke that mold, surviving against an endless torrent of red-baiting attacks, not least from Democrats (who in turn are attacked in the same terms by Republicans, making them extra wary -- which, by the way, comes off as cowardice). The terms themselves don't matter much. I tend to avoid many of them, especially "socialism" — and for somewhat different reasons I dislike "progressive" — but I did grow up with a sense of coming from the working class. And what I recognize there is a solidarity that holds one's personal ambitions in check. This is what people recognize in Sanders as his integrity. It's why we trust him to stay on our side, regardless of whatever personal success he attains. It's something that few other Democratic politicians have, which is why it's so easy to dismiss them as crass elite wannabes.

So there's an advantage in talking like an old lefty. First of all, it shows you have a commitment to other people, especially to those excluded from wealth and power, and that you value the work they do to keep our economy and society functioning. It also shows that you have the courage to break ranks with the prevailing dictates of elite political consultants, and their counterparts in the media who police what can or cannot be said politically. One thing I learned early on is that the the old left, at least in America, always had their hearts and heads in the right place. Maybe their innocence was protected by their lack of power, but even with no real power a very large part of the good that has been done in American history is thanks to the left.