The Death of the Old Bernie Sanders Left

The 2024 presidential race is increasingly becoming a story not just about two campaigns, but two political movements.

Eight years ago, Americans witnessed not one, but two popular movements against the political establishment that had dominated government for decades.

On the conservative side, Donald Trump defeated Jeb Bush and John Kasich, banishing the Republican establishment. On the liberal side, meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed “democratic-socialist” senator from Vermont, attempted to lead a revolution against Hillary Clinton, the closest the Democratic Party had to royalty, but ultimately failed.

Though it has suffered trials, eight years later Trump and his America First movement not only still exist, but are the dominant force within the Republican Party, something all Americans must reckon with. By contrast, Bernie Sanders’ supporters have been reduced to marching in support of Hamas under trans rights flags. In the Michigan Democrat primary on February 27, the remnants of the Sanders coalition barely mustered 100,000 votes for the “Uncommitted” campaign of opposition to Biden, compared to the nearly 600,000 votes Sanders himself won in 2016.

For the last eight years, American political life has been defined by these two 2016 political revolutions – one which succeeded, and one which failed. In 2024, American politics is not about left versus right so much as it is about outsiders versus insiders, which is why figures like Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, and Tulsi Gabbard find themselves lumped in with the “right” by their former liberal allies.

That dynamic is a consequence not of the America First movement’s success in toppling the Republican establishment, but of the utter failure of the Sanders revolt to shake the Democratic establishment, leaving the Democratic Party as a base from which establishment politicians and entrenched interests could rally their forces against Donald Trump.

American politics would not necessarily be further to the left or right if Sanders had succeeded in toppling the Democrat establishment, but it would be about competing visions of what America should be and what policies should be adopted. Instead, the contest we have now is more fundamental.  It is about who should rule, and who should obey. Who should have the right to speak, and who should be silenced.

It may seem odd at a time when supporters of Hamas are openly marching on campuses and members of the Democratic Socialists of America count scores of elected officials among their ranks, including representatives and the mayor of Chicago among their members, to say the left has collapsed. But today’s left is a pressure group, not just contained within the Democratic Party as a lobby, but also confined geographically to urban cores and college towns.

The modern left is also limited culturally to a Westernized conception of identity politics as practiced by affluent white liberals. As a result, as evidenced by the last New York mayoral election where Eric Adams beat out more left-wing Democrats in largely minority neighborhoods, the left struggles to win working-class and non-white areas of major cities. It may occasionally forge alliances with other groups, as it has with Arab Americans over opposition to Israel, but this is an instance of the Democratic Socialists of America prioritizing Arab nationalism over socialism or its nominal agenda, rather than of expanding its appeal to a new audience.

The Arab Americans of Dearborn will accept the solidarity, and then resume their drift to the GOP when school returns in the fall and their children are subjected to courses on non-binary identity. Democratic-socialists have abandoned coalition-building in favor of socialism, and socialism in favor of identity politics, and then failed to secure the loyalty of the identity groups whose causes they purport to champion.

In fact, the stunning legacy of the left’s embrace of Black Lives Matter, extreme LGBTQ+ advocacy, and open borders has been to drive African Americans, gays/lesbians, and Hispanics toward the Republican Party.

The culmination of this came in the recent Michigan primaries. The Sanders-wing of the Democratic Party had everything going for it when it came to a credible showing. They had a president who was viewed as too old to serve by a majority of Democrats. In Arab-Americans they had the support of a major demographic group, of national figures such as Beto O’Rourke, and elements of the Michigan Democratic Party. They managed 13.2% or 100,000 votes, in a state Sanders won with 599k in 2016 and still managed to win 578K in 2020. In short, they lost over 80% of those who had supported Sanders even four years before.

It did not have to be this way. Bernie Sanders without a doubt benefited from running against Hillary Clinton in 2016, but like Joe Biden, she retained popularity within the party and the support of the establishment. What Sanders managed to do was to unite voters who agreed with him on policy with two other groups. First, of course, were those who disliked Clinton, but on a wider level, he also brought in those who had problems with the Democratic establishment.

Sanders won 43 percent of the national vote in the Democratic primaries in 2016, 13.2 million votes, and 23 out of 57 contests, including states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana. That coalition included some college students and urbanites, but the professional class largely backed Hillary.

The heart of Sanders’ coalition were rural voters, union voters, and those in small towns. Sanders’s appeal was inclusive. He combined Donald Trump’s criticism of trade deals with criticism of how banks, bankruptcy laws, and pharmaceutical companies exploited Americans. He also supported gun ownership relative to other Democrats, was neutral on immigration, and avoided direct attacks on American history.

In short, Sanders’ 2016 campaign was positive in a way the modern left is negative. Whereas the modern left treats medical care as an entitlement, Sanders attacked the high costs and consequent medical debt as the result of a regulatory and legal system where politicians colluded with pharmaceutical companies, and banks and then exploited the system. Similarly, whereas now those with student debt treat debt forgiveness as a right, Sanders framed it as a form of financial exploitation. The problem was that universities and banks had colluded with the government. As for identity politics, Sanders in 2016, suggested class was more important, a line that he hurt himself by dropping in 2020.

In short, Sanders ran against his own party’s establishment in 2016. The modern left, by contrast, defines itself by how closely it defers to that establishment.

A quick examination of almost any Democratic Socialists of America or other left-wing event or protest will reveal masks on the faces of the overwhelming majority of participants. Deference to pharmaceutical companies, “experts,” and institutions became an identifying line for the left, and the suggestion that there might be any ulterior profit motive, whether in pushing certain COVID-19 treatments or promoting expensive gender transition care, is foreign.

In fact, the American left are arguably the first socialists in history who cannot even conceive of the idea that capitalists might have an ulterior motive when it comes to anything with cultural significance.

“There is no political agenda behind ESG and DEI,” leftists say, “companies are just following the market.” Meanwhile, Disney is seen as a victim of persecution in Florida, while we’re told the same pharmaceutical companies that helped create an opioid epidemic would never promote medical treatments for gender dysphoria which would create lifetime customers. Social media companies only look out for the public interest when censoring accounts.

It is this embrace of the institutions of the establishment that drove more principled leftists such as Glenn Greenwald, Bill Maher, and Matt Taibbi out of a movement they had dedicated decades of their lives to. Ironically, it is now members of the Democratic establishment class who occasionally express dissent – on crime, the border, and excessive identity politics. The suggestion that class is at the center of politics, which used to be the heart of socialism, will get you banned from every socialist group in America, especially if a white male utters it.

On economics and foreign policy, the left has become the domain of the urban over-educated and under-employed bourgeoisie, as Marx would term them, the millions who find themselves making just above or below six figures after exorbitantly expensive humanities degrees.

When it comes to housing, the left fully embraces class warfare – against landlords. They are a party for rent control, against eviction, against cars, but for high property taxes to pay for public transport. It is hard to imagine why anyone who lives outside a city or college campus would vote for them, which is why almost none do, and their support for housing only extends to cities anyway. If someone tries to build a house in a suburb or rural area, they will oppose it on environmental grounds.

As for foreign policy, it is hard to understate how much mileage Sanders received from Hillary Clinton’s vote for the 2003 Iraq War. That vote also helped cost her the 2008 contest against Barack Obama, and by 2016 she had added Benghazi and Syria to the list of failures, along with a promise of launching a global campaign of intervention to prove she was a new Iron Lady.

Looking back, it is almost impossible to imagine a greater failure to “read the room,” if not for the copious competition for the title provided by Clinton’s campaign. Sanders was attacked by the usual suspects as an isolationist and an appeaser, but the irony is, at the very moment when some of Sanders’ foreign policy instincts have been vindicated, if not by history then by the sentiments of the American electorate, the left has dropped all of them.

When it comes to Ukraine, the modern activist left is, with a few exceptions, all in on a jihad to rescue Ukraine and deliver Vladimir Putin to the Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity. They are all for an interventionist, some might say, imperialist, policy in Latin America and Europe against “mini-Trumps” and have backed blatant interference in elections in Brazil, Hungary, and Poland, as well as efforts to topple Netanyahu in Israel.

If there is one place the left has actually moved leftward it is on Israel, but as opposed to their conservative counterparts and Sanders 2016, they do not want to scale back U.S. support but rather switch which side it is behind.

If it is hard to figure out who this assortment of grievances and entitlement masquerading as policies are intended to appeal to, the answer is almost no one except elite institutions themselves and those who wish to work in them. In 2016, Sanders represented a movement of voters. In 2024, the left represents a movement of politicians.

The campaign against Israel has made little progress among the electorate in Michigan or New Hampshire, but it has conquered the group chats of junior staff at the White House and State Department. Advocacy groups have either succumbed, been subjugated or thrown into chaos. Corporations have been infiltrated – just witness Google’s Gemini AI.

The result is a polarization of American politics not between different groups of voters, but between different power centers. On one side, are the concerns of ordinary voters, sometimes in conflict with each other, but generally concerned with real-world issues such as inflation, crime, education, and health. On the other hand, an activist movement has abandoned appealing to voters in favor of appealing to institutions, and then using those institutions to impose its will.

Between them are a few Democrats trying to balance the concerns of voters in the real world with the institutional power of a left that has become the Marxist vanguard, not of the masses, but of a social elite.

To say this is an unhealthy situation would belabor the obvious. The current left is driven to resort to anti-democratic means of institutional control because it has driven away the masses and then blamed the consequences on a conspiracy by powerful institutions it controls. The right is accused of prioritizing the politics of grievance over issues, but the reality is that it has justified grievances about the institutional war being waged against it, and no one to discuss policy with.

This did not need to happen. There was a valid critique of 2016 America from the left just as there was one from the right. A case to be made about the dangerous concentration of media and cultural power in unaccountable hands, the close collaboration between private industry and government, and whether those in positions of power had our best interests at heart.

With a few exceptions, this critique is no longer being made from the left. Instead, we have a shrinking cult that repels those for whom it purports to speak and has made common cause with the very institutions it was dedicated to challenging.

Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.