Senator Bernie Sanders is the right choice for the Democratic nomination because he’ll challenge the misdirection that leads liberalism astray. 

If the Democrats are to defeat Donald Trump and usher in the progressive policies that most Americans want, the party needs to reexamine how it understands itself and its core constituency.

Whatever happened to the party of the people? The journalist and author Thomas Frank posed this question in his 2016 book Listen, Liberal. With acerbic precision, Frank delves deep into the history behind a shifting Democratic Party. Bringing historical context to bear, Frank makes his case for why the modern Democratic Party has been unsuccessful in dealing with economic inequality. 

Why is it, Frank asks, that the party of organized labor, of FDR, of Truman, has demurred from the task of fighting tooth and nail for economic justice? 

After all, in 2012, corporate profits (measured as a share of GDP) hit their highest levels on record. And in 2014, the total of all the bonuses doled out on Wall Street was more than twice as much as the total earned by every person in the country who worked full-time for minimum wage.  

When people rightly call out the Trump Administration for looking like a retreat for Wall Street executives, they should remember that the retreat didn’t begin in 2016.  

So why, during a period when the excesses of Wall Street roiled the body politic, did the Democratic Party and its leaders cower from the prospect of holding the malefactors accountable? Furthermore, why is it that during this same period of time, the party finally took a courageous stand for marriage equality yet couldn’t summon the will to say, put the banks into receivership?  

There is no simple answer, but it is a simple consensus opinion that economic growth is good and recessions are bad. Fair enough. And of course the party was right to push for marriage equality. It was a righteous fight and, lest we forget, politically feasible for the first time.  

But to those of us who aren’t consummate political insiders, it does seem a bit strange that the previous Democratic administration couldn’t walk and chew gum in this regard.

Doing two or more things at once seems important right now for the following reasons and many more you’ve probably heard about: 

Three people own more wealth than the bottom half of the county. The racial wealth gap persists. In some areas of the world, climate disruption on a life-threatening scale is not a future threat, but a lived reality. 

And since ballooning the deficit is now a bipartisan endeavor, with some economists gingerly admitting that it doesn’t really matter as much as certain folks insisted during the prior administration, it again becomes difficult for nonexperts to understand why more expansive welfare spending should be anathema to a party that purports to stand for the downtrodden. 

So, when an administration decides what political battles it will wage, it’s a question of priorities. 

When it comes to the Democratic Party’s sheer unwillingness to challenge market supremacy and invest in social programs at scale, it’s probably true that they think it’s bad politics.

Older, moderate Democrats remember the electoral carnage of the Reagan era. More recently, any Democrat who was alive and politically conscious a decade ago remembers the ACA backlash. 

It seems reasonable to assume that many Democratic party officials just want to win elections and — contrary to the recriminations of some extremely online corners of the left — they aren’t all bought and paid for neoliberal shills.

But here’s the very simple problem: if the Democrats won’t fight for progressive priorities, nobody else is well.

Well, there’s a registered Independent from Vermont who might. 

Bernie Sanders has never chosen political expediency over progressive priorities. The reason he’s been so consistent throughout his career, such a dogged champion of progressive positions even when they were unpopular: working class people have his ear, not professionals.  

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To understand why the Democratic Party is disconnected from segments of the population that used to be loyally in their corner, analysts like Frank would cite its deprioritization of working class causes in favor of the predilections of upper-class, well-educated professionals. 

To diagnose their particular malady we must understand that there are different hierarchies of power in America, and while oligarchy theory exposes one of them — the hierarchy of money — many of the Democrats’ failings arise from another hierarchy: one of merit, learning, and status.”

For most people who attend the best universities, work at the best firms, and make the best contacts, politics is not a matter of life and death. We live in a Democracy and professionals deserve to have their voices heard, but their interests should not shape the prioritization of a party that claims to stand for workers.

Bernie Sanders is the most pro-labor candidate for the Democratic nomination in decades, and it’s not even close.

He’s the only candidate who has displayed a willingness to break from the entrenched norms that prop up American exceptionalism and the military-industrial complex.

One can bet that a Sanders Administration would be staffed with true believers, not investment bankers.

Finally, he’s much more pragmatic than people give him credit for. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that Bernie Sanders might be able to reframe compromise as president. If his most ardent supporters see him making the compromises he’ll almost certainly have to make as president, maybe hard-line progressives will take a more realistic view of how legislation moves from ideation to implementation. 

So, whatever happened to the party of the people? Could it be that the leaders of the Democratic Party understand their form of liberalism cannot be divorced from the interests of their growing professional class constituency? Is it true that most of these professionals like their lives and don’t want them to fundamentally change? If so, is this at least one of the reasons why Senator Elizabeth Warren, who called herself “a capitalist to my bones,” felt like a safe choice for progressive professionals (her core constituency)? 

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then the chasms pitting left-leaning people against each other today might very well outlast today’s primary. 

Nobody knows for certain whether or not a Bernie Sanders presidency would result in Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. What can be said with a relative degree of certainty, however, is that a President Sanders would not rattle off empty platitudes in a West Wing-esque cadence as the social ills of working people wear on.

Bernie Sanders will prioritize the right fights.

In the context of this race, the Sanders campaign is facing an uphill battle. Whether or not Bernie Sanders becomes president, he’s offered the party a roadmap for the future and a chance at reconciliation with the past. 

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