Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Campaign Lit a Spark Beyond Elections
Electoral campaigns can feed workplace struggle by politicizing people, raising their expectations, bringing activists together, and giving them experience organizing others. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns did all four.
Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign didn’t just launch the current wave of socialist electoral challenges. It also inspired and cohered a new generation of labor activists. (Bill Pugliano / Getty Images)
Bernie Sanders’s impact on the American left is not typically measured in social movement terms. The story normally goes that democratic socialism returned to national politics after 2015, tens of thousands of people joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a new generation of socialist candidates ran for office, and a much larger left media ecosystem emerged.
That’s all true. But another part of the story has received relatively less attention: the role Bernie’s campaigns played in inspiring and cohering a new generation of labor activists.
I first started making this argument while writing about the red-state teachers’ revolt of 2018. Obviously, Bernie did not cause these massive statewide strikes; years of austerity and attacks on public education created the conditions. But while reporting on those strikes on the ground in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona, I kept finding that many of the rank-and-file leaders who took the initiative to get them started had been politicized by Bernie’s 2016 campaign.
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