Bernie Wants Democrats to Fight for the Working Class. They Won’t.
Bernie Sanders is sounding the alarm: working-class people are fed up with Democrats’ failed strategy of behind-the-scenes negotiations. But the party won’t listen. So Sanders and the Squad should take a more aggressive approach against the Democrats.
Senator Bernie Sanders holds a news conference about state and local tax deductions as part of the Build Back Better reconciliation legislation at the US Capitol on November 3, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
It’s been almost twelve months since Joe Biden was inaugurated as the forty-sixth president of the United States, and Democrats have very little to show for it.
They promised to beat the pandemic and to replace the Age of Inequality with an economy that works for all. But all we got was a new COVID culture war, a temporary and poorly implemented child tax credit, and an infrastructure package that was more a slush fund for private corporations than a substantive investment in the future.
Bernie Sanders knows the score. In an interview with the Guardian published this week, Sanders told labor reporter Steven Greenhouse that the Democrats need a “major course correction.” He attacked the current strategy for passing Build Back Better, the infrastructure and social services plan: “We have tried a strategy over the last several months, which has been mostly backdoor negotiations with a handful of senators. It hasn’t succeeded on Build Back Better or on voting rights. It has demoralized millions of Americans.”
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