Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on Wednesday gave what was billed as a major speech outlining his sweeping vision for “democratic socialism” that he said would require nothing short of “political revolution.”
In the speech, he warned of the need to rise up against the “forces of oligarchy and authoritarianism.” The concentration of wealth among billionaires, he said, was depriving the masses of the ability to share the benefits of economic growth, and this economic frustration was being exploited by nationalists throughout the world, including President Trump.
“This authoritarian playbook is not new,” Sanders said. “The challenge we confront today as a nation, and as a world, is in many ways not different from the one we faced a little less than a century ago, during and after the Great Depression in the 1930s. Then, as now, deeply-rooted and seemingly intractable economic and social disparities led to the rise of right-wing nationalist forces all over the world.”
Sanders goes on to mention the massive 1939 Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden as evidence that “dark forces” also tried to organize in the United States, but in his telling, they were thwarted because of FDR’s bold economic policies.
What’s interesting, and quite telling, in the Sanders analysis of totalitarian movements in the 20th century is that he ignores the totalitarian threat of communism. He mentions Mussolini and Hitler, but does not mention Stalin.
Under communism, angry rhetoric about the concentration of wealth and promises of a more economically equal society evolved into a bloody system of global oppression that was responsible for an estimated 100 million deaths, making it, as author David Satter put it, the “greatest catastrophe in human history.”
It also got much closer to becoming a reality in the U.S. than Nazism, with high-ranking government officials serving as communist agents.
In the case of Sanders, his failure to bring up any of this when talking about authoritarian threats is a major omission, especially given his long history of active support for communist regimes. In the 1980s, Sanders visited and warmly praised the authoritarian Cuba and the Soviet Union. As the New York Times reported, he also visited Nicaragua and praised the communist government, attending a Sandinista rally where the crowd chanted, “Here, there, everywhere, the Yankee will die.” Liberal Jonathan Chait has argued that Sanders has not properly responded to questions about his support for the Sandinistas.
This is especially scary given that his prescription for America closely parallels his past praise for communist governments.
In his speech, Sanders calls for a new Bill of Rights. Whereas the original Bill of Rights protected individual liberties by describing actions that the federal government could not take against states and individuals, the Sanders revision would manufacture new rights that require the violation of individual liberty.
To Sanders, the nation cannot achieve “true freedom,” without free healthcare, affordable housing, free higher education, and a guaranteed job of at least $15 per hour. But this agenda would require mass confiscation of earnings not only of the very rich, but of middle and lower income Americans. It would also mean restrictions on individuals and not just corporations. For instance, individuals would no longer be able to purchase private insurance that duplicates any of the benefits offered by his new government run plan.
Sanders also declared that, “the only way we achieve these goals is through a political revolution.”
In 1989, as reported by my colleague Joseph Simonson, Sanders wrote, “For better or for worse, the Cuban revolution is a very profound and very deep revolution. Much deeper than I had understood. More interesting than their providing their people with free health care, free education, free housing … is that they are in fact creating a very different value system than the one we are familiar with.”
Sure, Sanders claims he’s talking about a revolution in which the people take on corporate interests through the democratic process.
But if Sanders is going to draw a connection, as he does in this speech, between Trump and fascist movements of the 1930s, he needs to seriously grapple with the fact that his own ideology, in practice, has often turned into authoritarianism. This is especially true given his long history of having praised brutal authoritarian regimes.
