this time and afterward, Sanders was not a member of any party, formally accountable to no one but himself—and still he managed to blaze a trail to political success that would eventually lead to two presidential campaigns. In the annals of astonishing and improbable American political success stories, Sanders’s ranks high.
When Sanders first won Burlington’s mayoral election, neoliberalism had taken hold of US politics. Neoliberalism is the economic philosophy, hatched in the mid-twentieth century—but finding expression beginning in the 1970s and increasing in the 1980s—that held that the majority’s needs could best be served by allowing private capitalist markets to expand into every crevice of society. For neoliberals, state interventions in the affairs of business are only desirable insofar as they buttress this expansion, ensuring maximum profits for business owners. This is justified by the “trickle-down economics” theory advanced under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, which posits that profits for the wealthy are naturally reinvested into society, creating brighter opportunities for all further down the economic ladder.
Neoliberalism imagines workers as entrepreneurs, selling their labor as a commodity the way a business sells commodities, in an environment of supposedly free exchange, not skewed by power imbalances or marred by exploitation. The winners in this exchange are simply the most successful entrepreneurs. Neoliberalism thus promotes the idea of meritocracy: the best players always win the game, and wealth and success are proof of inherent talent and superiority. Collective bargaining rights, the welfare state, and redistribution of wealth represent unfair compensation to the undeserving losers. If you want a better life, work and innovate harder.
The rise of neoliberalism has been disastrous for workers in the United States and helped defeat and dismantle the movements that won so many gains in the New Deal era and the 1960s. It broke the strength of American unions, as employer attacks (combined with conservative strategies by unions themselves) led to concessions like cutbacks in pay, benefits, and working conditions, and eroded workers’ faith and investment in their own unions. Since the dawn of this process in the 1970s, American workers’ wages have remained relatively flat, while productivity has soared—at six times the rate of worker pay. Capitalists’ profits, meanwhile, have likewise skyrocketed. Austerity has been the order of the day, with tax giveaways for the wealthy, massive cuts to already meager welfare benefits, privatization of public goods, and erosion of workers’ rights.
In the latter decades of the twentieth century, Democrats became enamored of neoliberalism. If Sanders had chosen to pursue a political career through the party, he might have been forced to accommodate their worldview—especially without a left-wing working-class movement at his back of the type that is beginning to reemerge today. Luckily for us all, he chose another path.
Outsider in the House
Bernie Sanders graduated from the mayorship to run for Vermont’s sole House of Representatives seat, winning in 1990. The first words out of his mouth, just minutes after he discovered he was going to be a national politician, were:
You all understand that it is not going to be Bernie Sanders or any other member of Congress that’s going to bring about the change that we need. What we need in this country is a mass movement of tens of millions of people who are prepared to stand up and say we want national healthcare. We want the millionaires and the multinational corporations who have not been paying their fair share of taxes to start paying. We want money going into education and environmental protection. And no more Star Wars [Reagan’s boondoggle missile defense program] or stealth bombers.
He became the only political independent in the House at that time, striking a deal with the Democratic leadership to remain outside the party but caucus with them and receive committee assignments according to his seniority as if he were a Democrat (though last in line in his class of representatives). That deal again reflected his special ability to thread the needle of maintaining political independence from both the Democrats and Republicans while avoiding political marginality.
Meanwhile, the Left as a whole was still lost in the wilderness. Neoliberalism was already on the ascent by the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Those events prompted wild celebrations of the free market and led to what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history”—capitalism had won. Critiques of inequality were passé, greed was good, and there was no alternative. Attacks on the American working class intensified. Social welfare programs were being eviscerated nearly as zealously by Democrats like President Bill Clinton as by his Republican predecessors Reagan and George H.W. Bush. The labor movement was under assault, with unionization and strike rates dropping steadily. The progressive causes to which Sanders had dedicated his life were losing ground.
Still, he stayed busy in the House. Sanders opposed the first Gulf War. He fought the brutal “welfare reform” bill—led by the Republicans but supported by many Democrats, as he noted at the time. He spoke out against executives’ bonuses at Lockheed Martin. He decried the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia of the rightward-moving Republican Party under Representative Newt Gingrich’s leadership as Speaker of the House in the last half of the 1990s. He was one of the cofounders of the House Progressive Caucus in 1991. And as he would for the rest of his career, he fought for a single-payer health care system.
Sanders often brought righteous anger to the House floor. In a speech in 1992, he said:
In case you don’t know, and you haven’t seen the latest polls, the American people hold the president of the United States in contempt, they hold this institution in contempt, they hold the Republican Party in contempt, they hold the Democratic Party in contempt … We are spending $270 billion a year on the military, but we don’t have a major enemy. I know it hurts your feelings. I know you’re upset about it. I know you’re hoping and praying that maybe we’ll have another war. Maybe somebody will rise up. But it ain’t happening. The Soviet Union doesn’t exist! The Warsaw Pact is through! Who you worried about? Iraq? Panama? Who you worried about? I’ll tell ya who I’m worried about. I’m worried about the fact that our workers are seeing a decline in their standard of living. They want to see our industry be rebuilt … The American people want to see our kids educated. They want a Head Start program. They want their kids to be able to go to college. They want to wipe out the fact that 5 million children in this country go to bed hungry. They want childcare for their kids. They want decent education. Let’s have the guts to give some leadership to this country. The Cold War’s over. Let’s reinvest in America.
Sanders’s tenure in the House spanned sixteen years. Those years were bleak ones for the Left, regardless of who held the presidency. The anti-corporate globalization movement started picking up steam in the mid-1990s under President Bill Clinton, and reached its zenith when it shut down the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle through mass protest. The trade deals protesters were criticizing, which gutted democracy in the United States and around the world and hurt workers both at home and abroad, have long been the target of Sanders’s criticism.
But the movement’s momentum evaporated after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The Bush administration beat the drums of war, first mobilizing to invade Afghanistan—which, in a lapse of judgment Sanders did support, along with every member of the House but one, California’s Barbara Lee—then mobilizing in 2002 to invade Iraq. Millions around the country and the world took to the streets to oppose the Iraq invasion; the global protests on February 15, 2003, may have been the largest global protest in human history. Sanders opposed the Iraq invasion—again, unlike many Democrats—along with Bush’s other giveaways to corporations and attacks on civil liberties like the USA PATRIOT Act.
When he ran for Senate and won in 2007, Sanders took up issues similar to the ones he had in the House. He also fought to expand community health centers and defend the US Postal Service and Social Security from privatization and dismantlement. (He cofounded a Senate caucus called, fittingly, Defend Social Security.) He held public hearings on worker abuse and outright slavery in the tomato fields of Immokalee, Florida—hearings organized with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a labor rights organization for Florida farmworkers that first put on the map the issue of labor abuses in the state’s tomato fields.
Sanders has a strong legislative record in Congress, but