Early in his new book “Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders describes the 2014 midterm election as a “disaster” for establishment Democrats who failed to generate grass-roots enthusiasm. “The election of 2014 was a wake-up call for the Democratic Party,” he writes. “I wondered if they heard it.”
The sound of last week’s Krakatoan explosion is still reverberating. Sanders finished his account of his 2016 presidential campaign weeks before Donald Trump’s stunning upset of Hillary Clinton on Nov. 8, but given what’s just occurred the book is inevitably, satisfyingly prescient. It’s hard to escape the idea that the reason Sanders decided to enter the race against Clinton — “The Clinton approach was to try to merge the interests of Wall Street and corporate America with the needs of the American middle class — an impossible task,” he writes — was perhaps her biggest vulnerability against Trump.
Over nearly 450 pages, Sanders argues that the strength of his campaign against Clinton’s brand of centrist Democratic politics shows that there is a hunger for the kind of ambitious policy proposals and grass-roots advocacy that fueled his run. “The great crisis that we face as a nation is not just the objective problems that we face,” Sanders writes. “The more serious crisis is the limitation of our imaginations.”
It’s not just Clinton. Sanders argues that “establishment Democratic politicians often have very few roots in their communities,” pointing to poor turnout at events for New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s 2014 midterm campaign. Weeks early, he saw Iowa Senate candidate Bruce Braley speak in Iowa, and writes that his “remarks, which consisted of tepid Democratic centrist rhetoric, were just not resonating with people in the room.” Braley lost to Joni Ernst.
Sanders’ own rhetoric, in contrast, was precisely keyed to the mood of the swaths of the electorate that decided the general election. Trump’s closing argument — the rigged system, the corruption and self-dealing of the coastal corporate elites — sounds as if were borrowed directly from the senator.
In a section on Wall Street reform, Sanders creates his own capacious basket of deplorables: Democrats and Republicans who he says pushed policies that helped to create the Great Recession; Robert Rubin, President Bill Clinton’s former treasury secretary and “the poster child for the revolving door that exists between Wall Street and Washington” who “spearheaded financial deregulation”; Hank Paulson, treasury secretary under President George W. Bush, who defended the deregulation of Wall Street; Tim Geithner, President Barack Obama’s treasury secretary; and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who, Sanders writes, “future textbooks will refer to Greenspan as an example of how not to run a central bank.”
Had Clinton won, the chapter would have served as a reminder that liberals planned to pressure Clinton not to name a treasury secretary with a Wall Street background. Instead, President-elect Trump’s transition team has recommended former Goldman Sachs partner Steven Mnuchin for the job.
The other enormous — and closely intertwined — factor in Clinton’s loss was the enthusiasm gap. Sanders emphasizes his own reliance on small donors over super-PACs, the enthusiasm his campaign generated in the form of large crowds, and his willingness to engage in bold ideas. Sanders describes a few moments when he was surprised to find that long lines of people near his rally sites were there to see him. Those crowds were full of people who “were tired of status quo politics and status quo economics,” he writes. The most memorable compliment he received during the campaign, he writes, came from a man who said: “Thank you, Bernie. You treat us as if we were intelligent human beings.”
In post-election interviews, Sanders has challenged Trump to do what, he argues, the Democratic Party has been unable to do. “Trump ran his campaign talking about he was going to be a champion of the working class,” Sanders told NPR on Monday. “He was going to stand up to the establishment. Well, let me tell you, we are gonna hold him accountable to that.”
“Our Revolution” describes one the possible paths forward for the Democratic — but it’s vastly longer than it appeared to be on Nov. 8.
