How Bernie’s Campaigns Reorganized the Organized Left
A decade after Bernie Sanders’s first presidential run, intraleft debates about whether to engage with the Democrats are largely settled. That campaign taught US socialists much about how — and how not — to build a powerful socialist movement.
If it wasn’t for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, many on the Left would still be spinning their wheels rehashing the same debates about whether it is possible to engage with the Democratic Party as socialists. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)
Ten years ago, while socialist Bernie Sanders was making his historic run for the Democratic presidential nomination that drew millions of supporters and promised a “political revolution” to live long past his campaign, I was part of a small revolutionary organization that pooh-poohed him as a faux renegade.
The socialist left at the time had been largely marginal to the American political landscape. This was not only because so few socialists sat in political offices. Organized socialists were unable to insert our ideas, strategies, or demands beyond small meetings and study groups, only occasionally influencing national discourse by being part of movements that showed themselves on the street in mass numbers. But movements naturally ebb and flow, and in their absence, much of the Left would retreat back into itself time and again.
In 2016, Bernie Sanders showed that socialists could be relevant to mainstream discourse, could move the needle on major policy issues, and could do so on the basis of a class politics that resonates widely and deeply around the country. Though he didn’t win that primary nor the following one in 2020, Bernie’s runs transformed the mainstream political landscape and, along with it, the organized left.
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