Sanders to Dems: Do your job

Sanders gave this advice to Democratic Socialists over the weekend: 

1. Echoing Bill Belichick slogan that won the Patriots six Superbowls: Do your job Sanders told a story from his time as Mayor of Burlington VT:

There was an article in the local newspaper, and the reporter asked some guy, “But what does it mean? What do you think about having a socialist as your mayor?” And the guy said, “Well, I don’t know much about socialism, but I do know they’re getting the snow off of the streets a lot faster than they used to.”

You gotta do your job.

2. Knock on every door—and talk to Trump voters. “You’ll have some unpleasantness. But by and large, what you’ll find is that there is a lot more commonality of interest than you might have appreciated.” We all want the streets plowed in winter.

3. The affordability crisis goes deeper than the price of eggs today or gas tomorrow: “Wages are basically the same as they were fifty years ago, despite a huge increase in worker productivity as a result of all of the expansion of technology. And almost all of the gains of that new technology have gone to the 1 percent.” My 9th grade drop-out father made more money (he could buy a house) in in the 1950s than my college grad son is making in an auto parts factory today tending robots (he spends 50% of his income on rent). 

 

 4. Democrats think they can win by being the not-Trump party. Sanders said it’s not enough. “The system is failing. Our job is not to run away from that reality but to offer a real alternative.”

What’s missing from this prescription: how to respond to the culture war issues that Trump rode into the presidency.

The best Democratic analysis on this point comes from the Substack blog Liberal Patriot: “It’s magical thinking that simply changing the subject to economics will evaporate the Democrats’ many cultural liabilities. Culture matters—a lot—and the issues to which they are connected matter. They are a hugely important part of how voters assess who is on their side and who is not; whose philosophy they can identify with and whose they can’t.”

The biggest such issue in 2024: immigration and Biden’s weak border policy.

When an interviewer had asked Sanders before the 2016 election if he supported open borders, he called the idea a Koch brothers scheme to lower wages.

And in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, Sanders blamed Democrats’ defeat on their having become “a party of identity politics.”

The Democratic Party came to associate immigration restriction with bigotry. But the precipitous decline of working class wages since 1970s had quite a lot do to with employment of immigrant labor—and why my son’s wages are so much lower than my father’s were. I’m say more about this in a later post.