Micah Uetricht - Bigger Than Bernie - How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism

Praise for Bigger than Bernie

An indispensable guide to twenty-first-century socialism from the viewpoint of clear-eyed, sharp-witted, smart, funny authors who lay bare the past failures of angry, narrow sectarianism, and offer a bold, dynamic vision for using the Sanders moment to build a stronger left. These authors, like the magazine they write for, give me hope!

Jane McAlevey, author of A Collective Bargain

Part history lesson, part guidebook; this is a love letter to the everyday people and movements who transformed this country, and who continue to declare that our lives have meaning and our future is worth fighting for. Bigger than Bernie isnt just about the man whos spent the majority of his political career on the fringes. Its about fighters. Its about thinkers. Its about love. Its about us.

Phillip Agnew, cofounder of the Dream Defenders

Hannah Arendt said we should think what we are doing. And that is what Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht have done here. Their book not only examines all that democratic socialists have achieved in the past few years but also gives an exhilarating account of what well be doing in the coming years. Anyone who thinks, with dread or relief, that the work comes to an end after Election Day in 2020 will think again. Im going to keep coming back to them and their book in order to understand where and how it goes in the future.

Corey Robin, author of The Enigma of Clarence Thomas

Bigger than Bernie is a comprehensive and necessary read for those longing for a more humane country, and as someone who has been up-close in many of our current fights for justice, I can attest to the power of its analysis. The authors champion non-reformist reforms that arise from and propel social movements, and provide an essential roadmap for achieving permanent change. An energizing and instructive account that brings socialism into the present tense.

RoseAnn DeMoro, former executive director of National Nurses United

An urgent and essential text that forces us to think bigger than any one specific candidate about how to create a real and lasting politics of the multiracial working class. As chroniclers of both the Sanders campaign and the long history of class struggle, no one could better capture the promise and perils of this once-in-a-generation moment. I try never to miss a word that they write and you shouldnt either.

Krystal Ball, cohost of Rising on HillTV

Day and Uetricht are two of the most brilliant and courageous intellectuals organically grounded in the marvelous militancy of the Sanders Movement. This indispensable book is a powerful, pioneering analysis of these new radical times, and a compelling vision of where it all might be going.

Cornel West, author of Race Matters

BIGGER THAN BERNIE

How We Go from the Sanders Campaign
to Democratic Socialism

Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht

First published by Verso 2020

Meagan Day, Micah Uetricht 2020

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-838-5

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-840-8 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-841-5 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Garamond by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

Contents

Bernie Sanders has redefined whats possible in American politics.

The United States has long been thought to be a fundamentally conservative country, one where large numbers of people would never go for that scary, supposedly foreign socialism. Pundits and historians have proposed many reasons why. Americans have had it too good, bought off by the overflowing abundance of this country. Socialist utopias have run aground on the shoals of roast beef and apple pie, as Werner Sombart famously wrote in 1906. Or, when the point is raised that many Americans have always been poor and overworked and exploited and oppressed, observers have speculated that theres just something unique and undefinable about the American soul that makes us allergic to socialism. Were too competitive, too individualistic; cooperation just isnt in our nature. Not content with these explanations, leftists often focus on the singularly ferocious repression of labor and leftist organizing throughout US history and the successful division of the American working class through racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other forms of bigotry and oppression.

Whatever the reason, its true that no socialist party has played a notable role in US politics for the better part of a century. Even after the 2008 financial crash, so clearly the result of a financialized capitalist system that drove the entire economy into the ground in reckless pursuit of profit, it was not the Left but the Right, in the form of the anti-taxation Tea Party, that saw an immediate resurgence. Eventually there was Occupy Wall Street, yet even at those left-wing protests, the concept of socialism remained on the margins. In the dominant culture, the principal use of the word socialist was as an absurd but powerful epithet thrown at decidedly non-socialist liberals like President Barack Obama. A mass socialist movement remained out of reach.

Bernie Sanders helped change that. He showed that there was actually a hunger in American life for a critique of capitalism when it was attached to a bold and credible policy agenda for wealth redistribution and working-class empowerment. He called his politics democratic socialism. Americans were supposed to be repelled by politicians like him who railed against millionaires and billionaires, and immune to exhortations to unite and fight along class lines. Yet here was a presidential candidate vying for the nomination of a major US political party, giving the party elite a run for their money, and putting class politics back on the map in the United States.

We owe Sanders a great deal for insisting and then proving that a different kind of politics in the United States was possible. That contribution alone will likely reshape the US political landscape for decades to come, putting long-dormant left-wing ideas back into play. But as important as Bernies politics and policy proposals are, they wont change the country and the world on their own. And they may not even be the most significant part of his legacy as a political figure.

What matters even more than Sanderss vision of socialism is the movement Sanders has helped set in motion. Sanders doesnt only argue for free public health care and college or a Green New Deal. He says we need a political revolution in this country to achieve those policies. The Sanders presidential campaigns have never been just about getting one man elected to the White House. Theyre about building a movement of millions that can long outlive and outperform any single electoral campaign.

So those of us who support Sanders and are inspired by his call for political revolutionand by the rise of other democratic socialist politicians like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the recent teachers strike wave, the surge in the organized socialist movement, and everything else that has taken us all by surprise over the last few yearshave to ask: What lessons should we draw from the Bernie Sanders moment? And how can we take all the energy that his candidacies have generated to build a movement that is bigger than a presidential candidate, bigger than a few dozen newly elected socialist representatives, and bigger than anything the US Left has seen in decades?