Bernie’s Democratic Socialism Is Firmly Within the American Tradition
The Bernie Sanders campaign is nothing less than the promise to fulfill a thwarted but long-cherished American dream: a society where the wealthy and powerful no longer dominate our lives.
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders holds a campaign rally at the Los Angeles Convention Center on March 1, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. David McNew / Getty
As long as Bernie Sanders is a candidate for president, the issue of democratic socialism will be front and center. To conventional wisdom and the punditocracy, this is a terrible weakness. Why on earth, they argue, does he have to use the S-word for an otherwise popular agenda?
And yet, not only is Sanders’s democratic socialism a strength — ultimately, with his recent victories and massive popular support, it has the potential to inaugurate a new era in American politics.
Over the past four decades, Bernie Sanders has won fifteen elections, the last eleven of which were statewide. In many of them, his opponents have tried to take his avowed democratic socialism and use it as a battering ram to drive him into political oblivion.
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