Sanders, Bernard

SANDERS, BERNARD (b. 1941). The most prominent democratic-socialist in the US Congress from 1991 onward and easily the leading American socialist since Eugene V. Debs, Bernie Sanders inspired a dramatic renewal of interest in socialism as a 2016 presidential candidate and as a serious contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Elected to multiple terms as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he served as a member of the US House of Representatives from 1991 to 2007. Since 2007, he served as an independent member of the US Senate, where in 2021 he became the chair of the powerful Budget Committee.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Bernard Sanders came of age in a working-class Jewish immigrant family during World War II and in the turbulent post-war era. His father, Elias Ben Yehuda Sanders (1904-1962) was born in Słopnice, Bezirk Limanowa, Verwaltungsgebiet Krakau, Galicia, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The elder Sanders lived through World War I and its aftermath, before immigrating to the United States in 1921. Bernard’s mother, Dorothy Glassberg Sanders (1912-1960), was born in New York City to a family that had immigrated from Radzyń Podlaski, in what is now Poland. “My dad came to this country from Poland at the age of 17 without a nickel in his pocket. He loved this country,” Sanders recalled in 2015, at an event where he introduced himself as a presidential contender. He said at that same event that that growing up in a family that lost many relatives in the Holocaust taught him “in a very deep way what politics is about.” Sanders explained that, “A guy named Adolf Hitler won an election in 1932. He won an election, and 50 million people died as a result of that election in World War II, including 6 million Jews. So what I learned as a little kid is that politics is, in fact, very important.”

Sanders's older brother, Larry (b: 1935), remembered that, “Our parents were not particularly political. They didn’t belong to any party, but they were idealists. There were just as many idealists in the neighborhood as there were Dodgers fans. We grew up thinking government can do good things. To somebody like my father—growing up impoverished in Poland and then coming to the States without a penny, no language, no education, no security ever—knowing that at a certain point there would be income from Social Security, it was like magic.” Bernie Sanders would recall that his family lived “paycheck to paycheck” on the money Elias Sanders made as a paint salesman. That kept them in a three-room apartment in Brooklyn’s close-knit Midwood neighborhood, but the senator added that his parents frequently argued over money--or the lack of it--and that, "My mother's dream was that someday our family would move out of that rent-controlled apartment to a home of our own. That dream was never fulfilled." A distance runner and the captain of the track team at James Madison High School (the same school from which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg graduated), Bernie Sanders served as class president but lost a bid for the most prestigious position of school president--finishing third on a platform that proposed to raise a scholarship fund for children orphaned during the Korean War. Influenced by his older brother, who served as president of Brooklyn College’s Young Democrats Club, Bernie Sanders took an interest in progressive politics early. But their activism tended toward showing up for demonstrations against urban renewal projects that displaced working-class families, recalled Larry Sanders, as opposed to working on election campaigns.

Bernie Sanders attended Brooklyn College, during a difficult year in which his mother’s health declined. She would eventually die in the spring of 1960. "Losing one's mother at the age of, I believe, 18 ... was very, very difficult," he recalled years later. "I decided to leave Brooklyn because I kind of wanted to get away from the community that I'd grown up in." Enrolling at the University of Chicago as an English major, he quickly shifted to Political Science. Sanders began reading left-wing magazines, including The Nation, and said he “buried myself” in the stacks of the library--reading history, economics, sociology and political texts. He joined the Young People’s Socialist League, a group that at the time was experiencing something of a resurgence as young activists revolted against the “red scare” politics that had narrowed expectations during the 1950s. “What Young People’s Socialist League did for me was that it helped me put two and two together, in my mind,” he said. “In other words, we don’t like poverty, we don’t like racism, we don’t like war, we don’t like exploitation, what do they all have in common?” Sanders also joined the Student Peace Union and became active with the Congress of Racial Equality. He joined sit-ins to protest segregation in off-campus university housing, put up posters opposing police brutality and, on 12 August 1963, was arrested (and eventually fined $25) for resisting arrest while protesting discriminatory practices of the Chicago Public school system.

Later that same month, Sanders joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where he heard the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech. Decades after he graduated, as a presidential contender in 2016, Sanders would return to the University of Chicago and recall, “I learned about the trade union movement here. I learned about the civil rights movement. I learned about foreign policy and the peace movement.”

Sanders traveled to Israel in this period, as a guest of the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement--which in Poland during World War II had contributed leaders to the Jewish Fighting Organization that organized the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and in Israel was for many years aligned with the socialists of the Mapam (United Workers Party). He spent several months near Haifa, living on Kibbutz Shaar Haamakim, which had been founded in 1935 by immigrants from Romania and Yugoslavia. The kibbutz operated as a communal farm on which Sanders worked. “Our values of mutual responsibility are social democratic values, and we choose willingly to create that society,” Yair Merom, the chair of Shaar Haamakim in 2016, told The Times of Israel. “Sanders is talking about the social democratic approach that gives freedom to the individual, but with responsibility for the whole. We do that in a practical way.” In 1964, Sander married a fellow University of Chicago activist who shared his progressive politics, Deborah Shiling. The couple eventually moved to rural Middlesex, Vermont, purchased eighty-five acres of meadow and woodland for $2,500 and lived in an abandoned maple “sugarhouse” with no electricity or running water. They divorced in 1966. After they divorced, Sanders moved back and forth between New York City, where he taught preschoolers in a Head Start program and worked as hospital aide, and Vermont, where he worked with the nonprofit Bread and Law Task Force to register food stamp recipients. He lived for a time in tiny Stannard, Vermont, with Susan Campbell Mott, the mother of his son Levi Noah Sanders, who was born in nearly St. Johnsbury on 17 March 1969. Sanders married his second wife, Jane O'Meara (b: 3 January 1950), a social worker and college administrator, in 1988, and they formed a blended family that included her three children, including Carina Driscoll, who would go on to serve as a Vermont state legislator.

By the early 1970s, Sanders was living in Vermont’s largest city, Burlington, where he worked as a journalist and carpenter and soon hooked up with anti-Vietnam War activists--including former Democratic Congressman William H. Meyer and lawyer Peter Diamondstone--who were forging the state’s Liberty Union Party as a democratic socialist alternative to the Democrats and Republicans. The party needed a candidate to contest a 1971 special election for the US Senate and Sanders jumped in the race, winning 1,571 votes for 2.2 percent of the total vote. He would go on to be the party’s gubernatorial nominee in the fall of 1972, its Senate nominee in 1974 (in a race that was won by his future US Senate colleague Patrick Leahy) and its 1976 gubernatorial nominee--winning his highest percentage of the vote up to that point, 6.1 percent, in the final contest. Sanders stopped running on the Liberty Union line after the 1976 race, but he didn’t stop talking about democratic socialism. He launched a people’s history project that highlighted the work of radicals like Eugene Victor Debs, saying years later that, “It’s very, very important that we maintain that this vision, this solidarity vision, can be accomplished. Debs and others were talking, for instance, about a world without war. Think of that! Today, we’re just taking for granted that we’re spending $700 billion dollars every year on the Pentagon, on war, on weapons. And other countries around the world are also spending huge amounts of money.”

Even as he lost four statewide races in the 1970s, Sanders made a name for himself as progressive who knew the issues. In 1981, he entered the race for mayor of Burlington as an independent outsider leading a dissident coalition of workers, students, small-business owners, and low-income families. This time, he won, beating the Democratic mayor by ten votes.

Sanders kept beating Democrats and Republicans in Burlington during the 1980s, thanks to a conscious strategy of bringing thousands of new voters into the process. “If you ask me now what one of the major accomplishments of my political life is, it is that I helped double the voter turnout in Burlington, Vermont,” Sanders said in 2014. “I did that because people who had given up on the political process understood that I was fighting for working families, that we were paying attention to low- and moderate-income neighborhoods rather than just downtown or the big-money interests. In fact, I went to war with virtually every part of the ruling class in Burlington during my years as mayor. People understood that; they said, ‘You know what? Bernie is standing with us. We’re going to stand with him.’ The result is that large numbers of people who previously had not participated in the political process got involved. And that’s what we have to do for the whole country.”

In the mid- to late-1980s, at a time when Republicans Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were still winning Vermont’s electoral votes, Sanders sought to take the Burlington model of progressive organizing statewide. He waged losing races as an independent candidate for governor in 1986 and the US House in 1988. Yet, with each run, he built out that coalition of working-class voters not just in Burlington but in the state’s traditionally Republican rural areas. Thousands of voters began to split their ballots, voting for Republicans in some contests, but also voting for the man everyone began to call “Bernie.”

The breakthrough came in 1990, when Sanders beat Republican Congressman Peter Plymouth Smith, a well-regarded former lieutenant governor whom many saw as the rising star of the state and national GOP. Even though a Democrat peeled off a portion of the vote, Sanders secured 56 percent to Smith’s 40 percent. That was the first time a Republican incumbent had been beaten in a general election for a Vermont US House seat since the founding of the Republican Party—and only the second time that a non-Republican had won the seat since 1854.

Though his was a breakthrough win, Sanders did not serve cautiously. He went to Congress as an ardent progressive, and earned top ratings from labor, environmental, and civil-rights groups. The representative from Vermont played a vital role in forming the Congressional Progressive Caucus; and voted against Democratic and Republican free trade deals, the Patriot Act and the authorization of George W. Bush’s use of military force in Iraq. Every two years from 1992 to 2004, he won reelection as an independent democratic socialist--surviving the “Republican wave” year of 1994 and pushing his percentages into the high sixties, even as Republicans were still winning many statewide posts.

When Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords, a Republican who turned independent in his last term, announced that he was stepping down in 2006, Sanders jumped into a race in which a number of Democrats would have liked to run. He won the Democratic primary and then declined the nomination, mounting an audacious independent bid that was not supposed to be easy. Sanders faced a wealthy Republican who poured more than $7 million into the race, much of it spent on a crude negative advertising campaign. Though he was outspent and attacked, Sanders secured 65 percent of the vote in November 2006. He did so at the same time that the state was re-electing a Republican governor. Sanders was re-elected six years later, in 2012, with 71 percent of the vote and again in 2018 with 67 percent.

In the Senate, Sanders caucused with the Democrats but frequently broke with both parties to push an economic, social and racial justice agenda that drew increasing national attention. At the same time, he proved to be a master at forging unlikely coalitions and getting amendments attached to major pieces of legislation--adding a plan for significant public health clinic funding to the Affordable Care Act and securing an audit of the Federal Reserve as part of financial reform legislation. A frequent guest on the MSNBC cable news program of Ed Schultz and on Thom Hartmann’s syndicated radio show, he also traveled extensively to speak at rallies, marches and events organized by labor and progressive groups. In February 2014, asked if he was thinking about running for president, he replied: “I don’t wake up every morning, as some people here in Washington do, and say, “You know, I really have to be president of the United States. I was born to be president of the United States.” What I do wake up every morning feeling is that this country faces more serious problems than at any time since the Great Depression, and there is a horrendous lack of serious political discourse or ideas out there that can address these crises, and that somebody has got to represent the working class and the middle class in standing up to the big-money interests who have so much power over the economic and political life of this country. So I am prepared to run for president of the United States. I don’t believe that I am the only person out there who can fight this fight, but I am certainly prepared to look seriously at that race.”

Following many months of consultations with activists about whether to run as an independent or a Democrat, Sanders formally announced on 30 April 2015, that, “After a year of travel, discussion and dialogue, I have decided to be a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president.” Polling in the single digits and dismissed by pundits as having little chance in a contest with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sanders began traveling to key Democratic caucus and primary states, drawing tens of thousands of people--many of them young, first-time voters--to mass rallies where he proposed a radical shift in political direction for the party and the country. He spoke of replacing a for-profit health care system with a “Medicare For All” plan, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, making college education free and strengthening unions to take on corporate power. Key labor organizations, including National Nurses United and the American Postal Workers Unions, endorsed the insurgent, as did Move On, Democracy for America, Friends of the Earth and, of course, Democratic Socialists of America, Still dismissed by much of the media and the Democratic establishment, Sanders began to climb in the polls. He stunned the pundits by essentially tying Clinton in the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, and then winning 60 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary. Sanders would eventually win twenty-three contests, more than thirteen million votes and 1,865 delegates to the party convention. That was not enough to secure the nomination, but his bid had a transformational impact on party politics. Democratic Socialists of America experienced a surge in membership, as did other activist groups. Sanders backers, such as eventual US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, got into politics as democratic socialists, running for and winning Democratic nominations and general elections.

After Clinton lost to Donald Trump in November 2016, Sanders emerged as one of the leading critics of Trump and a likely contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Pressured by activists who were concerned that his 2016 message had been too narrowly focused on economic issues, he was increasingly outspoken on issues of racial justice and women’s rights and emerged as one of the sharpest critics of US military interventions abroad. Sanders entered the crowded 2020 race for the Democratic nomination in February 2019, decrying Trump as a “pathological liar” and a “racist.” He argued that the way to beat Trump was by organizing a mass-movement campaign that built on the energy of his 2016 bid. "Three years ago, when we talked about these and other ideas, we were told that they were 'radical' and 'extreme,’” Sanders explained to supporters. "Together, you and I and our 2016 campaign began the political revolution. Now, it is time to complete that revolution and implement the vision that we fought for." For a time in 2019 and early 2020, Sanders was considered the frontrunner for the Democratic nod--even after he suffered a minor heart attack and underwent surgery in October 2016. He tied again in Iowa and then won a pair of key contests, the New Hampshire primary and the Nevada caucuses, before losing to former Vice President Joe Biden in the critical South Carolina primary. As the super Tuesday contests of 3 March 2020 approached, more moderate Democrats dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden, who ran better than expected--despite the fact that Sanders won the biggest primary of the day in California, where he secured substantial Latinx support. As the coronavirus pandemic surged and campaigning was curtained, the Sanders campaign was no longer able to hold mass rallies or implement the grassroots strategies it had been counting on. Biden won a series of key contests and, on 8 April 2020, Sanders suspended his campaign. He quickly endorsed Biden and became a key campaigner for the Democratic ticket of Biden and another 2020 contender, Kamala Harris, who was the party’s choice for vice president.

At the 2020 Democratic National Convention, where Sanders received 1,073 delegate votes, the senator addressed his supporters, saying, “Together we have moved this country in a bold new direction showing that all of us--Black and white, Latino, Native American, Asian American, gay and straight, native born and immigrant--yearn for a nation based on the principles of justice, love and compassion. Our campaign ended several months ago, but our movement continues and is getting stronger every day. Many of the ideas we fought for, that just a few years ago were considered "radical," now seem mainstream. But let us be clear. If Donald Trump is reelected, all the progress we have made will be in jeopardy.”

After Biden defeated Trump in November, Sanders was briefly considered as a candidate to serve in the new administration’s Cabinet, as Secretary of Labor. But, when Democrats took control of the Senate following wins in a pair of Georgia runoff elections, Sanders seized on the opportunity to serve as Budget Committee chair. The senator quickly emerged as a key player in negotiations to enact Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. He also introduced legislation and held hearings focused on a longtime goal of his: taxing the rich. Showing no signs of slowing down, Sanders told me in an interview that he was focused on building out a consciousness of working-class solidarity as an alternative to American oligarchy.

Sounding themes he had spoken to over six decades of political activism, Bernie Sanders spoke of the need to “break through this current worldview that suggests that everybody has got to try to become a billionaire and you can lie, cheat, and steal if your goal is to make billions and not pay attention to the suffering of others. That is a bogus vision, and our job is to say that if we stand together, everybody in America can have a decent-paying job. That is not utopian. We can have government policy that guarantees a good job to all. We can have educational opportunities for all, regardless of income. We can have health care as a human right, not a privilege. We can lead the world here in the United States in combating climate change. We can combat this outrageous and racist criminal justice system and a very, very broken immigration system and more. We can build the houses that people need. We can secure decent retirement for our people. But we have got to really fight for a new vision for America, rather than this every-person-for-himself-or-herself view that now permeates our society. And to win that fight, yes, we need an understanding of the power of working-class solidarity.”

Day, Meagan and Micah Uetricht. Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism. New York: the New Press, 2020.

Rosenfeld, Steven. Making History in Vermont: The Election of a Socialist to Congress. Wakefield, NH: Hollowbrook Publishing, 1992.

Sanders, Bernie with Huck Gutman. Outsider in the White House. New York: Verso, 2015 edition.

Soofer, Steven. The Socialist Mayor: Bernard Sanders in Burlington, Vermont. Westport,CT: Praeger, 1991.