The senator may be remembered as a bridge between the promise of America and the fulfillment of that promise.
The founders knew that one revolution would never be enough to fix all of their new nation’s problems. In 1787, even as the Constitution was still being hammered out, Thomas Jefferson reflected on the justice of rebellion, not just in the past but in the future. In a letter to William Stephens Smith, the son-in-law of John Adams, Jefferson wrote, “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion…. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” These harsh words, seemingly so nonchalant about violence, remain controversial. Yet however abrasive, they are also true.
The American Revolution was from the start an incomplete project. It won national sovereignty but left the problem of democratic equality unresolved. The grand claim in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” was, as Martin Luther King Jr. immortally put it in 1963, merely a promissory note or, even worse, a bounced check. Many of the founders, including Jefferson, were avid (if occasionally shamefaced) slavers, and the Constitution they crafted had protections for slavery embedded in its heart.
It would take a second revolution, in the form of the Civil War and Reconstruction, to resolve this most blatant hypocrisy of 1776. And that was far from the only revolution the United States has seen. In ways that even Jefferson couldn’t have predicted, American history has been a series of roiling rebellions, always in the face of violent reprisal, to force the nation to live up to its dream of equality: abolition, Indigenous rights, women’s suffrage, civil rights, and LGBTQ rights, among many others.
No current politician better exemplifies this honorable lineage of political rebellion than Bernie Sanders. Back in 2016, three campaign books appeared that by their very titles distilled the conflicting visions of modern America: Stronger Together, by Hillary Clinton, Crippled America, by Donald Trump, and Our Revolution, by Sanders.
Stronger Together summed up Clinton’s politics of elite comity, her desire to unite moderate Democrats and establishment Republicans behind a neoliberal system that she believed was fundamentally just. Trump’s Crippled America was equally backward-looking, though in a more snarling way. Trump was animated by right-wing grievances that saw America as possessing a past greatness that had been stolen by a corrupt elite, undocumented immigrants, and conniving foreign regimes.
As we know all too well, it was Trump’s bleak vision that captured the anti-system anger that politicians like Clinton, and then Joe Biden, foolishly ignored. But he hasn’t built a durable political coalition, and he remains not just polarizing but historically unpopular.
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In contrast to those of Clinton and Trump, Sanders’s politics aren’t about recovering or protecting past glory. Our Revolution is as anti-system as Crippled America, but it points toward the future. Sanders doesn’t want to “make America great again,” and he doesn’t think, as Clinton did, that “America already is great.” He wants the country to live up to its potential for greatness.
Sanders doesn’t really go for Fourth of July–style patriotic boasting. Tellingly, when he invokes the Declaration of Independence in Our Revolution, Sanders emphasizes all the ways that contemporary US democracy falls short of its ideal, placing the blame squarely on economic inequality. Democracy, he writes, “should mean that the wealthy don’t have undue influence over the political process.”
Politics is about the naming of enemies. Sanders’s great virtue is that he has always named the ultra-wealthy as the foe of democracy while offering democratic socialism as the alternative. After serving as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders became a national figure by winning a congressional seat in 1990. He ran as an independent and a self-proclaimed socialist at a time when leading Democrats, including the 1988 presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis, avoided even calling themselves “liberals.”
As Sanders told The New York Times in 1989, “Everybody in the state of Vermont knows that I am a socialist. That is important, because when you acknowledge being a socialist, you can begin attacking some of the real problems in our society which Democrats and Republicans will never talk about in a million years.”
Sanders never became president. But the failures of centrist Democrats to defeat Trumpism, combined with Sanders’s own indefatigable fighting spirit, have made him more relevant than ever.
The journalist and former Sanders adviser David Sirota has compared him to Barry Goldwater, who lost his 1964 presidential bid in a landslide but decisively pulled the Republican Party to the right. Just as the dreams of the Goldwater campaign were eventually fulfilled with Ronald Reagan’s election, Sanders’s influence might come to fruition in a future presidency.
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At 84, Sanders is the polestar of leftist politics and an inspiration to a cohort of younger politicians who are carrying on his fight. In April, The Wall Street Journal reported that he continues to shape the Democratic Party as a “kingmaker,” noting: “As Democrats trip over themselves to come up with a cohesive strategy to win back congressional majorities and effectively take on President Trump, Sanders has built a formidable political machine to spread progressive policies and support like-minded candidates, many of whom are young and new to politics.”
Although his place in history is still uncertain, Sanders may well be remembered as an essential bridge between the promise of the American Revolution and its fulfillment in social democracy.
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