The Bernie Sanders campaign “crashed” the Democratic Party in 2016 by exposing the class interests that its leadership represented and expanding the horizon of political possibility in America. Against the neoliberal ideology that has shaped the Democratic Party for decades, Bernie’s 2020 campaign is continuing the fight for a coherent and principled agenda — guided by the needs of working-class people of all races, genders, nationalities, sexualities, and creeds — which Bernie has described as “democratic socialism.”

“Democratic socialism,” in Sanders’s telling, is made up of a series of policy proposals to eradicate poverty, rebuild the working class, reinvest in public institutions, and achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth. Specific aspects of this framework include curbing corporate power through financial, labor, and environmental regulation; opposition to job-killing free trade agreements; and tax policy that favors working-class people, not corporations and the rich.

It includes policies aimed at addressing income and wealth inequality, like gender and racial pay equity, raising the minimum wage, and empowering labor unions — and expanding the social wage with universal health care and childcare, free public college, land trusts, full employment, and paid family leave. In addition to his longtime fight against climate change and for sustainable energy, Bernie has offered a comprehensive plan for reforming US immigration policy (correctly positioning criminal justice as both a class and civil rights issue) and called for an end to permanent war.