Union candidates raised during that campaign helped play an important part in the election results and eventually resulted in changes in public policy,” he wrote in his first book, referring to issues, such as property tax reform and better provision of dental care for poor children, which were eventually taken up by the Democratic winner of the governor’s race. “Despite our [winning] a paltry one percent [of the vote], the Liberty Union made an impact on major legislation.”
This was a repeat of a scenario that had played out in high school, when Sanders ran for student body president and lost, only to watch the victor adopt his proposal for the school to raise funds for Korean War orphans. And it also foreshadowed what happened in 2016, when Sanders’s first presidential campaign came up short but nonetheless caused a massive political sea change. Sanders has won plenty of campaigns— but crucially, the ones he’s lost have also moved the needle.
His tenure with the Liberty Union Party gives us another glimpse at how deeply the demands and vision of socialism informed his politics. The Liberty Union Party called for mass decommodification and nationalization. “I favor the public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries,” he said in one interview in 1973. On another occasion, Sanders wrote an open letter to one of his state’s senators, published in a Vermont newspaper:
I would also urge you to give serious thought about the eventual nationalization of these gigantic companies. It is extremely clear that these companies, owned by a handful of billionaires, have far too much power over the lives of Americans to be left in private hands. The oil industry, and the entire energy industry, should be owned by the public and used for the public good—not for additional profits for billionaires.
“We have got to begin to deal with the fact that corporations do not have the god-given right to disrupt the lives of their workers or the economic foundation of their towns simply because they wish to move elsewhere to earn a higher rate of profit,” he said in a press release in 1976. In that press statement, he floated the idea of capital controls, where the state blocks the free movement of capital, prohibiting businesses from moving elsewhere and taking jobs and the economic life of a region with them. Capital controls, decommodification, nationalization—these are radical ideas, and they testify to Sanders’s roots in the socialist movement.
Sanders left the Liberty Union Party in 1977, frustrated that it was too narrowly focused on elections. “The function of a radical political party is very simple,” he said in his resignation letter. “It is to create a situation in which the ordinary working people take what rightfully belongs to them. Nobody can predict the future of the workers’ movement in this country or the state of Vermont. It is my opinion, however, that if workers do not take power in a reasonably short time this country will not have a future.”
Perhaps if Sanders had lived in a country with an electoral system that didn’t maintain a two-party stranglehold, he would have found electoral success earlier. Jeremy Corbyn, the former British Labour Party leader to whom Sanders is often compared, holds similar politics to Sanders and has a similar history of involvement in important leftist movements throughout his life, from solidarity campaigns against apartheid in South Africa to opposing wars. He got involved in electoral politics just after Sanders, but Corbyn had a labor party to join; when Sanders was on the margins of Vermont politics with the Liberty Party, Corbyn won his first elections for Labour.
Radicals in the United States have long wrestled with the question of what to do about the Democrats, a party that has never come anywhere close to being a true workers’ party, and has always made compromises with capitalists that prevent it from embracing a full-on fight for the working class (a question we will take up at length in Chapter 4). Neither of the two basic choices has been good: stifle your criticisms of the party and join them, viewing the Democrats as the only game in town and the only party through which you can get anything done; or stick to your principles and work through third parties that never win. The former has been a recipe for conservatizing progressives and socialists; the latter, a recipe for political marginalization and demoralization.
Sanders, however, managed to largely avoid the pitfalls of both and blaze his own independent political path.
Leaving the Liberty Union Party did not spell the end of Sanders’s involvement in politics. He ran for mayor of Burlington as an independent in 1980 and won—the same year Ronald Reagan captured the presidency and the Right saw a national upsurge. Sanders’s eight years as Burlington mayor are a fascinating study in local left governance. He won office by a mere ten votes, and immediately set to work using his position to improve living standards for average Burlingtonians.
His list of accomplishments as mayor is long. At a time when so much of the country was moving rightward, Burlington under Sanders’s mayorship raised taxes on wealthy developers, expanded affordable housing (which included the establishment of a pioneering community land trust), fought for rent control, supported municipal workers’ unions, expanded public funding for youth programming and the arts, fought utility companies, instituted feminist measures in local government, outlawed discrimination in housing, became one of the first cities to hold an official Gay Pride parade, and stopped a massive condominium development from taking away a large plot of public land on Lake Champlain.
But his tenure didn’t just focus on local issues. Nationally, Sanders spoke out consistently against Reagan’s savage budget cuts. He also used the small city’s mayoral office to speak out against the president’s blood-soaked interventions in Central American countries like Nicaragua and El Salvador. After the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua overthrew the country’s brutal Somoza dictatorship, the Reagan administration backed the Contras, a group of right-wing militants responsible for destroying the country’s infrastructure, numerous rapes and sexual assaults against Sandinista supporters and other Nicaraguans, and mass bloodshed across Nicaragua.
In El Salvador, the United States sought to avoid a similar revolution by propping up a brutal, bloodthirsty right-wing dictatorship that could claim almost no backing from the Salvadoran people themselves. The result was some of the worst human rights atrocities ever committed in the Western Hemisphere, including the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero while he gave mass in 1980; numerous massacres of innocent civilians in villages like El Mozote, where nearly a thousand were slaughtered, and the rape and murder of four American churchwomen, both in 1981; the massacre of six Jesuit priests along with a housekeeper and her daughter at the Central American University in 1989; and a constant stream of bullet-riddled, tortured bodies that piled up on streets throughout the country.
The Central America solidarity movement was nowhere near the size of the civil rights movement or the movement against the Vietnam War, but it was an important movement across the United States opposing Reagan’s foreign policy. Typically, few mayors weigh in on foreign policy issues of any kind, but Sanders held numerous Central America solidarity teach-ins and rallies in Burlington. In 1982, he spoke at a rally of hundreds at City Hall against US intrusion in El Salvador, and pushed a ballot initiative against intervention in the country. He also established a sister city program with Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, and even went to Managua, Nicaragua, as mayor and attended a pro-Sandinista rally in 1985.
“I plead guilty to, throughout my adult life, doing everything that I can to prevent war and destruction,” Sanders told the New York Times in 2019 after the paper attacked his mayoral record on Central America. “As a mayor, I did my best to stop American foreign policy, which for years was overthrowing governments in Latin America and installing puppet regimes. I did everything that I could as a mayor of a small city to stop the United States from getting involved in another war in Central America trying to overthrow a government.”
All this history is worth revisiting not just for what it says about Sanders’s approach to governance, but also for what it suggests about how newly elected left officials can approach their time in office. Regardless of whether an official is a small-town mayor, city council member, or a member of the House or Senate, it’s possible to use their elected office to both pursue a robust, pro-working-class agenda for their immediate constituencies and speak out against the reactionary policies that benefit the wealthy few and hurt the many, as well as join movements against imperialist bloodshed around the world. Sanders managed to do all of the above as Burlington’s mayor, at