Bernie Sanders and 250 of his closest surrogates, from Bill McKibben to John Cusack, have convened in Burlington this week for a three-day discussion of practically the same socialist platform he has been spouting since he moved there in the 1960s.
It’s a family affair: The Sanders Institute, which his wife Jane now leads, is hosting the show. And, besides seeming an awful lot like a curtain-raiser for his anticipated second shot at the presidency, it’s a perfect venue for Sanders to bask in the credit he’s due. That’s credit for making nearly every Democrat, Barack Obama included, pledge fealty to policy proposals that once were Sanders specials, like Medicare-For-All and free college. And credit for the current fixation on small donations that, in 2018, let Democrats finally overtake Republicans in grassroots fundraising.
When Sanders said, in a recent interview with New York magazine, “If it turns out that I am the best candidate to beat Donald Trump, then I will probably run,” it was tantamount to an official announcement. Or so believes veteran Sanders-whisperer Greg Guma, who covered the perennial far-left candidate even in the hardscrabble days before he was, finally, elected mayor of Burlington.
“I doubt he’s going to find somebody who would deliver as clear an economic message,” Guma weighs in. “He’s not going to stop for Elizabeth Warren.”
Sanders’ political instincts are easy to predict, Guma tells me, because he’s never changed: An “autocratic urge” animates an unflagging conviction that he alone—his unfiltered ideas, that is—can save the country of its capitalist torment. Guma hopes Sanders will be satisfied that he had an impact on history and “pass the torch”—but that’s not his style, to let someone else carry the platform he made popular to victory.
“I wish that he would get to a place in life where he was ready to do that.”
People and institutions either stand in his way—the Democratic donor class, and the mass media—or they stand behind him in the movement he’s built. Claiming credit for the successes of the Democratic left’s new heirs and heiresses isn’t especially magnanimous, but it’s typical Sanders: For him, the crowds that flock to his rallies and the candidates who run on his ideas—just 40 percent of them won—only prove one thing. They confirm what Sanders has been trying to tell us his whole political life.
Toward that end, getting out the message, unfiltered, has been a lifelong pursuit. For Sanders, the media’s stubborn appetite for new stories has proven a consistent problem. He writes as much in a section of his otherwise predictably predictable 2020 tee-up Where We Go From Here: Two Years in the Resistance. “It turns out that not only were progressive ideas catching on all across the country, but our candidates were also pulling off major upsets and winning elections,” he recounts of the 2018 Democratic primaries. “No doubt the New York Times was disappointed.” It’s unpleasant and peevish—and could rub #Resistance-minded readers the wrong way.
It’s also pure Sanders.
In the chapter “A New Way to Communicate,” he critiques the media for covering his platform and campaign with reportorial skepticism and outsize attention to fresher stories, like his PAC’s low election win rate and the federal investigation into Jane Sanders’ mismanagement of the late Burlington College. These familiar critiques of a commercially-driven press echo exactly a column he wrote, and Guma published, in 1979: “The potential of television, democratically owned and controlled by the people, is literally beyond comprehension.” Two years later, after several failed statewide runs, Sanders was elected mayor.
His pitches—then and now—for a non-commercial state-run media recall a move the already very corporate-media-averse Mayor Sanders made. (The premise also recalls another recent proposal for media reform.) The perceived failure on the part of the local press to portray his socialist platform to his liking led him, back then, to launch a public access TV show all his own. He used it to talk directly to Burlingtonians about the policy points too boring for the daily papers and nightly news. A recurring slot on national call-in talk radio followed. And, more recently, the success of his live-streamed response to President Trump’s first State of the Union—which drew millions of viewers—inspired him to launch a weekly online talk show.
Non-Sanders-centric media outlets, like the New York Times, underestimated him, he believes. Because they’d underestimated the popularity of socialism, they failed to see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s path to victory. Sanders didn’t know who Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was until late last June, either—but, as a former volunteer on his 2016 campaign, she knew him. As Sanders likes to tell teeming crowds, he was her path.
These fresh socialist faces may be “the future of the Democratic party,” as DNC chairman Tom Perez put it. But the presumptive frontrunner, who’d turn 80 in his first year as president, won’t let you forget there would be no future without him
“He’s going to say, I was there first,” Guma knows. “I just hope he has a sense of humor about it.”
