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EDITED BY Andrew Prokop
2015-07-28 11:43:41 -0400
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Bernie Sanders believes the power of billionaires and corporations is the defining issue of our politics today — and he wants to stop what he sees as America's drift toward oligarchy by mobilizing a "political revolution" among the public. That's the driving force behind his presidential campaign and, indeed, the Vermont senator's four-decade political career.
A longtime independent and "democratic socialist" who's now running to be the Democratic Party's presidential nominee, Sanders wants the party to move to the left on economic and domestic policy issues. He's argued that because recent Democratic leaders have been too centrist and too reliant on fundraising from business interests, the American public has lost faith that the party will fight for them. "Corporate influence makes the party more conservative, which raises doubts among people," he told me in September 2014.
In addition to supporting a complete overhaul of our current campaign finance system — which Sanders says has been completely broken by Citizens United v. FEC and other court rulings — his proposed agenda includes a single-payer health-care system, a carbon tax, and an increase in government spending on infrastructure, Social Security benefits, and college tuition. Meanwhile, he's highly skeptical of new trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and has called "unfettered free trade" a "disaster for the American people."
It's mostly on economic issues that Sanders really wants to push the Democratic Party. On foreign policy and social issues, he's a mainstream liberal — which has sometimes disappointed some further-left activists. And he's long preferred to focus on issues of economics rather than race, seeing the former as a better way to unite a broad coalition around his views. "The roots of many of these problems," he once said, are in "an economic system in which the rich controls, to a large degree, the political and economic life of the country."
Sanders himself admits that passing his sweeping reform agenda is vanishingly unlikely — unless he mobilizes the public to his side in a truly historic way. "If somebody like me, or me, became president, there is no chance in the world that anything significant could be accomplished without the active, unprecedented support of millions of people," he said last September.
So he wants to reach out to white voters, rural voters, and seniors, rather than focusing mainly on the usual Democratic constituencies. "I do not know how you can concede the white working class to the Republican Party, which is working overtime to destroy the working class in America," Sanders told me. "The idea that Democrats are losing among seniors when you have a major Republican effort to destroy Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid is literally beyond my comprehension."
Elites believe that Sanders has practically no chance of winning, and he's far behind frontrunner Hillary Clinton in polling, fundraising, and endorsements. But already he has emerged as the main alternative to Clinton in the small Democratic field, regularly drawing impressive crowds, improving his poll position in New Hampshire and Iowa, and energizing activists on the left. Now he hopes he can defy the odds and pull off a historic upset.
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