Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
Bernie Sanders on the Democratic Party’s Future, on “The Daily”
“There was no appreciation — no appreciation — of the struggling and the suffering of millions and millions of working-class people,” the senator said.
by https://www.nytimes.com/by/the-daily-team · NY TimesAs the Democratic Party grapples with its sweeping electoral loss and a new political reality, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has been resolute about his diagnosis of where the party went wrong.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he said in a statement after the 2024 presidential election.
This week — when Republicans cemented their control of the House, giving President-elect Donald J. Trump a unified Congress to enact his agenda — Senator Sanders spoke to Michael Barbaro, host of the New York Times podcast “The Daily,” about his take. The two discussed the fallout of the election and where Mr. Sanders sees the Democratic Party going from here.
Below are takeaways from their conversation, with excerpts edited for length and clarity. You can listen to their full conversation on “The Daily.”
Sanders is in a fighting mood, but he may be willing to work with Trump.
When asked how he felt about being in the minority with Trump poised to bring an aggressive agenda to Congress, Mr. Sanders said, “Our job is to rally the American people to make it clear, especially to working people, that we need an economy and a government that works for all and to expose as best we can what Trump and his administration are doing.”
“So you’re in a fighting mood?” Michael asked him.
“Oh, absolutely,” Mr. Sanders replied. “I think right now this is a pivotal moment in American history. And the next year or two will determine what happens in this country for decades, in my view.”
But the senator is prepared to work with the president-elect, too, on issues important to the working class. “If Trump wants to impose a credit card limit on interest rates, I’ll be there,” he said. “If he comes up with reasonable ideas, yes, I would be interested in working with him.”
The Democratic Party failed to appreciate the “struggling and the suffering of millions and millions of working-class people,” Sanders says.
When Michael asked the senator about his comments that the Democratic Party had abandoned the working class, Mr. Sanders argued that there was a clear difference in messaging between the Republican and Democratic campaigns:
“What happened in this campaign is Donald Trump said to the American people: You’re angry. You’re really pissed off. And I know that. And you’re right. And then he gave his explanation. And his explanation — which was obviously nonsense and false and racist, et cetera — was that millions and millions of undocumented people were coming across the border, they were invading America, we’re an occupied country. They were taking your jobs, taking your benefits, eating your cats and your dogs. That is why you are hurting. Now, that is a crazy explanation. But it is an explanation.”
With regard to Democrats’ messaging, Mr. Sanders said: “There was no appreciation — no appreciation — of the struggling and the suffering of millions and millions of working-class people. And unless you recognize that reality, and have a vision of how you get out of that, I think you’re not going to be going very far as a political party.”
Sanders criticized the party for not involving “ordinary people.”
Michael asked the senator why he thinks the Democratic Party was unable to communicate an understanding of working-class people’s pain, and whether this was related to an overreliance on college-educated voters.
“It is not beholden to college-educated people,” Mr. Sanders said. “That’s the wrong word. It is beholden to the donors who put hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into it and to the bloody consultants out there who will end up this campaign making zillions of dollars, doing their 30-second TV ads, rather than figuring out how we talk reality to ordinary people and get them involved in the political process.”
It was a mistake not to go on Joe Rogan’s show, Sanders says.
The senator suggested that Vice President Kamala Harris should not have declined the invitation to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast. “What every communications director knows is that there is a new world of media out there,” he said.
He continued: “And it’s not just NBC, CBS or The New York Times. It is podcasts. It is Joe Rogan. It is Fox News. It is young people who nobody in the Democratic leadership has ever heard of who have YouTube programs that attract millions of people. That is the reality. Can you ignore that? That is insane. Anyone who thinks you can ignore that reality is crazy.
“In my experience, not that I’ve been on millions of these shows, the people that I talk to treat me with respect, and I think you cannot be, ‘Oh, Joe Rogan said this or he says that.’ Yeah. So what? You know, my wife disagrees with me on this or that issue. So what? You can’t run away from somebody because they may have said something stupid or something that you disagree with. That’s life.”
Sanders offered ideas for rebuilding voters’ trust in government.
Michael asked the senator how voters can overcome the “huge loss of faith in government.” Mr. Sanders’s response involved improving governmental processes and bringing younger people into the work.
Mr. Sanders said: “Elon Musk is a very, very aggressive and capable business person — very impressive what he’s accomplished. And he says, I could do more in a week than the government can do in, you know, five years. In some ways, he is right. The problem is, at the end of his efforts, he ends up making zillions of dollars and working-class people are not any better off. The alternative is to say: Let the government do it right now. But you’ve got a government that is inefficient and bureaucratic.”
The answer to that problem, he said, is “to bring young people into government who believe in a mission to improve the lives of people.”
He continued: “Whether you work in the post office, whether you work in the veterans administration, whether you work at Social Security, pay these people well, give them good management. Let them be proud of the important work that they are doing. No more important work in this country than being a public-school teacher. Yet we underpay those teachers. We put them under terrible working conditions. Choice has got to be to modernize government, make government work for ordinary people, health care for all is a human right. If other countries around the world can have national health care programs, so can the United States of America. We are not dumber than other people.”