With his early victories in the Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders is well-positioned to capture the Democratic nomination. It’s too soon to say whether he will ultimately triumph, but it would be a remarkable turn of events in the Democratic Party. Indeed, those comparing Sanders to the party’s ill-fated 1972 nominee, George McGovern, should think bigger: Sanders’s radicalism is reminiscent of the candidacy of William Jennings Bryan in 1908.
Bryan shot to fame virtually overnight in 1896, when he delivered his famous “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic National Convention. The big issue that year was whether the United States would remain on the gold standard. Indebted farmers, especially in the South and West, were staunchly opposed to the status quo. Desperate for inflation, they sought a bimetallic standard for the currency — both silver and gold. Bryan was a 36-year-old congressman from Nebraska. Yet he had such a gift for oration that he transformed this seemingly dry policy dispute into a moral crusade.
“You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns,” he told the delegates. “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!” His speech created such a sensation that the convention soon nominated him for the presidency.
Though Bryan had diehard followers on the Great Plains and in the Mountain West, the larger public was not buying what he was selling. Ohio Gov. William McKinley easily bested him that year, and again in a rematch four years later, when the main issue turned from the gold standard to the Spanish-American War. By 1908, the Democratic political bench had been severely depleted, the party reduced mainly to its Southern base. Without a plausible alternative, it once more nominated Bryan, who by that point had reinvented himself as a progressive. After returning from a world tour in 1906, he declared in a speech at Madison Square Garden that he favored the nationalization of the railroads. They are “so much of the nature of a monopoly,” he said, “that they must ultimately become public property and be managed by public officials in the whole community.”
Ultimately, this was a bridge too far for the Democrats; though they nominated Bryan for president once again, they did not include such a plank in their platform.
Today, it looks like the Democrats might nominate somebody with similar views. In response to the raging wildfires in California, Sanders took to Twitter last fall to blame the “existential crisis” of “climate change” and suggested, “It is time to begin thinking about public ownership of major utilities.”
Talking about nationalizing major sectors of the economy did not do Bryan much good back in 1908. He managed just 43% of the vote against William Howard Taft that year. Whether it propels Sanders to the White House remains to be seen. The general election, after all, is nearly nine months away, a lifetime in politics. Nevertheless, a Sanders nomination would put the party further to the left than it has been in a generation — not just on specific issues, but how it relates to the private sector, and American society in general.
Granted, there is a great deal of continuity between Bryan/Sanders and other Democratic candidates. Both have generally favored stronger regulation of business, higher taxes on the wealthy, protection for labor unions, and a more generous social safety net. But a noteworthy difference between Bryan and Sanders, on the one hand, and Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, or even Barack Obama, on the other, is their orientation toward American business. The latter endeavored in many respects to work with the private sector to expand social welfare; the former were much more confrontational in their rhetoric. This is not to say that mainstream liberals were laissez-faire, or even free marketers. But looking at the War Industries Board of World War I, the National Recovery Agency during the Great Depression, Medicare, and Obamacare, one sees liberal Democratic leaders working with the private sector. It was a kind of progressive corporatism, rather than socialism.
Mainstream liberals have also been careful not to endorse sweeping changes that affect the middle class. Their general resolve was to redirect just a portion of national wealth to those who were in need of it, without totally upending the private economy or threatening the sense of economic security enjoyed by the broad middle of the nation.
This policy agenda was often reinforced by the socioeconomic backgrounds of Democratic candidates for the White House. Wilson was president of Princeton University; FDR was a Hudson River brahman; Johnson was the Senate majority leader; Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review. They had all “made it” under the current rules of the country and were not so much interested in upending those rules altogether but (by their own account) adjusting them for those who had not.
Like Bryan, Sanders embodies little of this. He advocates sweeping changes to all sorts of facets of American life — from energy consumption, to healthcare, to education, and more. Many of his suggestions would significantly alter life for middle-class America and would drastically affect the private sector. Also like Bryan, Sanders is an outsider’s outsider. He is not a member of the Democratic Party and has not been known to work closely in leadership roles within Congress. He comes from a sparsely populated rural state. He has consistently had more sympathy for radicals than other members of his party. His personal style only reinforces the radicalism of his campaign message.
Democrats have historically had a great deal of success with the Wilson-Roosevelt-Obama model, and there is no obvious political reason for them to abandon it. Their defeat against Donald Trump in 2016 was no doubt hard for them to bear, but turnover in the presidential office is common and hardly a reason for a party to panic. Instead, it looks like Democrats have simply lost control of their nomination process; underestimating the Sanders threat, they have been too slow to counteract it.
It would be good for the country for the mainstream Left to secure control of its party once again.
While there are many deficiencies to liberal Democrats’ policies, they have done the country a service for a century by typically preventing Jacobinism from ever going mainstream: Despite their desperation, Americans during the Great Depression did not vote for communists; instead, they voted for an upper-crust New Yorker calling for a “New Deal.” So, it has usually been ever since, as radical strains of left-wing politics have basically been a political dead end. But if the liberals lose control of their own party, we might see the radical Left well and truly go mainstream. That would be bad for America. Let’s hope the Democrats get their political house in order this cycle.
Jay Cost is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
