Can Bernie Sanders’s Politics Defeat Trumpism?: Bernie Sanders is drawing massive crowds, not in the so-called “Commie Corridor” of Brooklyn and Queens, but in battleground states like Maine, Florida, and Michigan. This is unusual, as Atlantic writer Russell Berman noted earlier this week: “Democratic candidates typically embrace him during primaries and then stick him on the sidelines for the stretch run, when they’re rediscovering their love of capitalism and bipartisanship.” But this year, many of these candidates are still embracing him—and his policies—in the general election, despite competing in tight races against Republicans. By doing so, they’re testing a long-running question on the left: Can Democrats beat Republicans with a social-democratic platform centered on the working class? Tuesday’s elections will provide a clearer answer than any U.S. election has this century.
When Sanders ran for president in 2016 and 2020, many of his supporters insisted that had he won the Democratic primary, he would have gone on to win the general election. In this dreamy hypothetical scenario, we could have been spared Trump in 2016 (perhaps also averting Biden, the genocide in Gaza, and Trump 2.0). “Bernie would have won!” has been a wistful core belief of the Vermont senator’s supporters; some poll data indeed suggests he could have, but given all the oligarchic cash that would have been deployed to oppose him, the unpredictability of polling, and the conservativism of many Americans, who knows? We never will, of course. Sanders is (presumably!) too old to run for president again, so these midterms are the best test yet of whether his politics can beat Trumpism on the ballot.
The core of Sanders’s politics is an opposition to oligarchy and support for a better life for America’s working class. In policy terms, that has meant support for Medicare for All, lowering the price of prescription drugs, taxing the rich and large corporations, limiting corporate power, the right to organize unions, and free college. It has also meant universal childcare, the right to… https://newrepublic.com/article/217453/bernie-sanders-democratic-socialism-politics-defeat-trumpism