Bernie’s 2025 Program

The concrete planks in the new Bernie program are focused on redistribution and strengthening the public sector. Medicare expansion to cover dental, hearing, and vision care, and increased Social Security benefits to help struggling seniors. Public financing of elections and the overturning of Citizens United. Raising teachers’ salaries to fortify public education. Passing the PRO Act to make it easier for workers to unionize. Raising the minimum wage. Cutting prescription drug prices by expanding the current price cap on insulin to a much wider range of pharmaceutical drugs. Taxing the rich to pay for social programs (as a first step: not renewing the Trump tax cuts, which expire in 2025). And an end to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, starting with an immediate cease-fire. (To that end, Sanders is trying to block further arms transfers to Israel.)

As Bernie has emphasized time and time again, this is hardly a radical program. Taken together, it’s still to the left of anything Kamala Harris and mainstream Democrats are ready to enthusiastically support this year. But most of the ideas are in the Democrats’ 2024 platform (though an end to the war on Gaza is notably missing).

Party platforms notoriously have only the faintest effect on how US parties govern. The inclusion of these items, however, signals that these demands might not be dead on arrival in a new Kamala Harris administration in the way that Medicare for All surely would. And most are extensions of policies already mooted or partially pursued by Joe Biden’s team.

For Want of a Strategy

The challenge for Sanders and his allies in the labor movement and on the Left lies in moving such a limited vision forward.

The Left has a long history of drawing up well-crafted programs, after all; the bigger challenge has always been finding a strategy to win them. As much as Sanders cites broad public support for his program — “We’re going to win this struggle because this is precisely what the American people want from their government,” as he told the Democratic National Convention — in a system that is more plutocratic than democratic, broad but passive popular support counts for little.

Moreover, when Sanders cites the Biden administration’s significant response to the pandemic crisis, he often fails to mention a key point: those measures were temporary and a panicked response to avert an economic crisis. For about two years, starting during the pandemic’s height and extending into 2022, the United States briefly had a robust welfare state. But the key programs, from subsidies for parents to generous unemployment benefits and paid leave, were never renewed. There’s no reason to think Democratic leaders will bring those programs and more back on their own.

Sanders owes it to his supporters to start sketching out not just a realistic program of demands for 2025 but a real plan to win them. That plan needs to be clear-eyed about the apathy and even hostility of the Democratic leadership to serious reform.

Learning the Right Lessons From 2021–24

Joe Biden’s term was far from a ringing success for Bernie and his allies. Despite the real but brief victories for working people during the pandemic, the remainder of the Biden term was ambiguous at best for Sanders-style politics. And it hardly strengthened Bernie’s hand in DC. After stinging defeats in primary fights earlier this year, the Sanders-aligned Squad will be smaller coming out of Biden’s presidency than it was going in. It’s hard to see how a repeat of the strategy of the last four years, in which both Sanders and left-leaning social movements played the inside track and avoided breaking ranks with leading Democrats, could realize Sanders’s pared-down program.

Instead, there’s much Sanders and his allies can learn from unlikely sources: corporate America, the Israel lobby, and a section of the working-class base that is willing to vote for Trump. Each force has been willing to flex its muscles, lean into disruption, and impose costs on Democrats who might otherwise balk at their demands.

When Democrats briefly entertained Biden’s ambitious “Build Back Better” plan, which included generous redistributive policies and corporate tax increases, for example, large segments of corporate America mobilized. A full-court press in the media and behind the scenes, including threats of cutbacks to investments and plunging markets that would sink the COVID-19 recovery, hobbled the original plan.

The alternative, the Inflation Reduction Act, has won the qualified support of the Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute. The parts many in the corporate world are less keen on — including subsidies to homeowners to install solar panels and improve the energy efficiency of their homes — are mostly benefiting the rich. And Biden is finishing his term having helped to oversee big corporate tax cuts. Business mobilized, disrupted the administration’s plans, and largely got its way.

Much the same can be said about the administration’s Israel policy and its attitude toward working-class Trump voters. While Biden himself has been a committed Zionist for decades, many in the Democratic Party’s political class are at least privately uncomfortable with Israel’s genocidal war. But the Israel lobby’s aggressive and uncompromising primary campaign attacks on pro-Palestine Democrats, and even those who dare to show sympathy to Palestinians, has scared many in the party into toeing the prowar line.

Likewise, many workers who once were more reliably Democratic but are now consistently swing voters in elections have had their effect. Harris and leading Democrats are tacking right on immigration, backing a host of antimigrant policies in the hope that sounding more like the GOP on the issue will win back disgruntled working-class voters.

Far from alienating Democratic leaders, when social forces go on the offensive, party leaders offer them a seat at the table. Even Sanders’s seat at the table in 2020 was arguably earned because of the threat he posed to the Democrats, as someone who made a serious run at the party’s presidential nomination twice and the leader of a rising insurgency within the party. He lost influence as his support became more reliable.

Unless Sanders and his labor and left allies truly believe that Harris and leading Democrats enthusiastically support his reform program for 2025, it’s time to start taking notes from how others are advancing their ideas. Disruptive social forces that are unafraid of imposing costs on Democratic leaders win. Loyal supporters lose.

That might not be comforting, but it’s the reality of how the Democrats operate. In an undemocratic, top-down political party, power politics decides policy, not having the best or most popular ideas. Acting as though it were any other way is as unrealistic as thinking that Medicare for All is on the agenda in 2025. Sanders’s team seems to get the latter point. They need to acknowledge the former, too.

New Disruptive Directions for Bernie, Labor, and the Left?

A disruptive strategy for 2025 and beyond could take many forms. Here are just a few ideas, mostly focused on what Sanders himself could do.

Assuming Democrats retake Congress, party leaders should not be allowed to take left-wing progressives’ support for granted in congressional leadership elections at the start of next year. Sanders and his allies need to play hardball. The filibuster has been a convenient excuse for Democrats unwilling to fight for serious reforms. Why not make support for Democratic congressional leaders conditional on its repeal?

Conservative Democrats have been the most vocal opponents of many past reform efforts. Could Sanders raise cash to open up offices, hire organizers, and build membership-based campaigns in the districts and home states of these conservative Democrats? That would put the kind of real pressure on these politicians that they will actually listen to — this could involve bird-dogging, showing up en masse at town halls, mobilizing demonstrations in cities and towns across the country. With a list numbering in the millions, a proven fundraising record, and widespread goodwill from the party’s progressive base, Sanders is possibly the only figure in national politics who could make that idea a reality. (For those of us on the Left who dream of one day having a democratic membership party of our own, that’s one of the roles we hope to play. For now, regardless of how we feel about it, one man fills that role: Sanders.)

Hopefully this would be done in conjunction with democratic membership organizations, like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and left-leaning unions. And if such a disruptive movement for economic justice could unite — as it should — with the millions of Americans who are outraged by the genocidal war on Gaza, both movements would be much stronger.

Assuming his agenda stalls in 2025, Sanders and his allies, especially in the labor movement, need to look ahead to the 2026 midterm elections. Could they rebuild the kind of project Justice Democrats started, but on a much larger scale? Corporate Democrats across the country deserve left-wing challengers, in primaries and general elections. Justice Democrats never received sufficient funding, but with Sanders and labor’s backing, a renewed effort that brings in groups like DSA, grassroots Uncommitted activists, and local community organizing efforts to take on corporate Democrats could have real legs.

Could Sanders and labor even come together to run independent labor candidates for Senate in red states, where the Democrats’ party brand is toxic? That’s what the union steamfitter Dan Osborn is trying in Nebraska this year. It’s a long-shot bid because he’s running on a shoestring budget, yet Osborn is still within striking distance of his Republican opponent in many polls. Imagine what would be possible with sustained organizing and substantial resources. US politics would look very different if Sanders were joined in the Senate by even a small handful of labor-backed independents from red states.

The fight for a real program for change goes beyond electoral politics, of course. A lot will depend on organized labor taking advantage of levels of support not seen since the post–New Deal era and launching a massive new organizing drive. Loaded with eye-popping financial resources, the labor movement is a sleeping giant. But despite many proclamations that labor is “organizing like never before,” unions are sitting on billions of dollars in untapped assets. Those are funds that could be used to hire thousands of worker organizers to make trouble for employers and corporate Democrats alike.

Most of these moves would displease and even draw the anger of Democratic leaders, though the party’s base would love them. Sanders would have to shed his role as a loyal partner in the party and return to his more oppositional role as an “outsider in the House.” It’s a role he knows how to play — and well — but it’s not clear he’s ready to reprise it.

Breaking Out of the Downward Spiral

US politics is stuck in a repetitive cycle. The plotline is so familiar that it almost feels like a natural law that American politics must work this way. (Never mind that from 1932–1994 Democrats won almost every congressional election.)

The cycle goes like this: Democrats win a national election, promising hope and change and chanting, “We’re not going back.” They take the White House and Congress. Aspects of their program are enacted. Curiously, the items that pass always happen to be the ones that give major businesses big subsidies to meet some social need while making a handsome profit.

Then Democrats’ reform program — especially the part about strengthening organized labor, every single time with no exception since 1976 — stalls, brought down by a combination of conservative Democrats and half-hearted (at best) efforts from the top to move it forward. Disappointment sets in. Republicans retake the House in the midterms. The Democratic president is isolated and reduced to signing weak executive orders, which will promptly be repealed in a few years’ time. (Quietly, it’s also in these years that bipartisanship covertly returns and many bills of interest to corporate America glide through DC. This is how a bill truly becomes a law in the United States, when most regular people aren’t looking because they think gridlock is the order of the day.)

Anger grows as the “party of the people” fails to meaningfully carry out its mandate for change. Republicans channel the anger, move further right in the process, and retake the White House. They pass a major tax cut, rewarding and increasing the power of their donor class and reducing the revenues available for future reform efforts. In short order, the GOP too loses support. Democrats raise the alarm about threats to democracy and make a comeback on an agenda of hope and change. Rinse and repeat. All the while, inequality mounts, and the climate catastrophe grows more severe.

Bernie Sanders’s modest but realistic reform program for a Harris administration could break us out of that cycle. If won, it could finally show that the public sector can deliver for regular people, and it could at last help juice a new wave of unionization. That would raise working- and middle-class people’s expectations and help the Left regain momentum.

These are the kind of moves that could create the next wave that pushes forward union and movement organizing and elects a new generation of left-wing progressives and democratic socialists. And together this could move us closer to putting on the agenda the kind of bold program Bernie and many on the Left really believe in: Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, a progressive foreign policy, mass unionization, democratic reforms, an end to mass incarceration, and a program for social housing and rent control, all paid for by a much more progressive tax system and a dramatically reduced military budget.

For anything like this to be possible, Sanders will insist, Harris and the Democrats must hold on to the White House and the Senate and retake the House in two months. Democratic victory is far from certain, which is why Sanders has been unrelenting in his efforts to persuade working people and the Left that they need to join the fight to beat Trump. It’s an argument based on a very reasonable assessment that Sanders and others have drawn from how bad the 2017–2020 years were for the climate, migrant rights, inequality, and more. (Though it’s an argument that’s harder to make now than it was in 2020, as Democrats continue to support Israel’s genocidal attacks and take an increasingly harsh stance on immigration.)

But lessons for strategy also should be drawn from the last four years, and much more thought is needed on how to win even modest reforms. The last four years were not a good run for pro-worker politics. Winning a good program takes much more than campaign speeches, good vibes, and a working relationship with those in power. If Sanders, labor, and the Left want more than lip service under a hypothetical Harris administration, they need a real plan that looks beyond November.