America's Next Story: Senator Bernie Sanders

0:01This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:14I'm David Leonhardt, an editorial director in New York Times Opinion. And this is America's Next Story, a series about the ideas that once held our country together and those that might do so again. We the people, in order to form a more perfect union. Ask not what your country can do for you. ask what you can do for your country. America is too great for small dreams. Change is what's happening in America. And we will make America great again. God bless you and good night. I love you.

0:54Today, my guest is Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders has been talking about income inequality since the 1980s, back when he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont. In our nation today, we have an extreme disparity between the rich and the poor. He's been railing against oligarchs since the 1990s, before Elon Musk made his first million. To a very great extent, the United States of America today is increasingly becoming an oligarchy. Sanders started out as a political oddity, but his focus on inequality has turned him into one of the most influential politicians in America. You're about to hear a feisty conversation in which Sanders criticizes Democrats for not standing up for the working class.

1:41And I push him on what an authentic version of working class politics might look like. He also offers his take on the abundance movement. And he sketches out a progressive patriotism that can take back the country from Donald Trump.

2:00Senator Bernie Sanders, thank you for being here. My pleasure. I have to start by going back to your days as mayor of Burlington and thanking you for bringing minor league baseball to the city because I had family there and I would visit every summer and we would pick a week when the Vermont Reds were home and we would go every night. That was a lot of fun. We worked hard on it. And they turned out to be a great team. A lot of the guys who played there ended up in the majors. So it was very good for the community. We had a lot of fun. My family were supporters of yours, and they got a big kick out of the fact that even though they were called the Reds because of the Cincinnati Reds, the one socialist mayor in America had a baseball team called the Reds.

2:35Yes, we thought that was kind of fun. Yes. Okay, let's get into it. I want to go back to the pre-Trump era and think about the fact that a lot of Democrats in that era, I'm thinking about the Clintons, Obama, felt more positively toward the market economy than you did. They were positive toward trade. They didn't worry that much about corporate power. They didn't pay that much attention to labor unions. And if I'm being totally honest, a lot of people outside of the Democratic Party, like New York Times columnists, had many. Yeah, I recall that. The same attitudes. Some of them didn't actually, weren't supportive of my candidacy for president.

3:12That is fair. That is fair. I assume you would agree that the consensus has shifted in your direction over the last decade or so. I think that's fair to say. And I'm curious, why do you think those other Democrats and progressives missed what you saw?

3:32In the 70s, the early 70s, some of the leaders in the Democratic Party had this brilliant idea. They said, hey, Republicans are getting all of this money from the wealthy and the corporations. Why don't we hitch a ride as well? And they started doing that. Throughout the history of this country, certainly the modern history of this country, from FDR to Truman to Kennedy even, the Democratic Party was the party of the working class, period. That's all here, working class. Most people were Democrats. But from the 70s on, for a variety of reasons, I think the attraction of big money, the party began to pay more attention to the needs of the corporate world and the wealthy rather than working class people.

4:15And I think, in my view, that has been a total disaster. not only politically, but for our country as a whole. I agree certainly that corporate money played a role within the party, but I also think a lot of people genuinely believed things like trade would help workers. When I think about... No. You think it's all about money? No. What I think is, if you talk to working class people during that period, as I did, if you talk to the union movement during that period, as I did, you said, Guys, do you think it's a great idea that we have a free trade agreement with China? No worker in America thought that was a good idea.

4:52The corporate world thought it was a good idea. Washington Post thought it was a great idea. I don't know what the New York Times thought. But every one of us who talked to unions, talked to workers, understood that the result of that would be the collapse of manufacturing in America, the loss of millions of good paying jobs. Because corporations understood if I can pay people 30 cents an hour in China, why the hell am I going to pay a worker in America a living wage? We understood that. I think that's fair. I guess I'm interested in why you think that members of the Democratic Party, not workers, why you think members of the Democratic Party and other progressives ignored workers back then, but have come more closely to listen to workers.

5:32I mean, if you look at the Biden administration's policy, if you look at the way Senator Schumer talks about his own views shifting, I do think there's been this meaningful shift in the Democratic Party toward your views, not all the way. Well, what we will have to see is to what degree people are just seeing where the wind is blowing as to whether or not they mean it. In my view, working class Americans did not vote for Donald Trump because they wanted to see the top 1 % get a trillion dollars in tax breaks. They did not want to see 15 million people, including many of them, being thrown off the health care they had or health care premiums double, etc., etc.

6:13They voted for Trump because he said, I am going to do something. System is broken. I'm going to do something. And what did the Democrats say? Well, in 13 years, if you're making$48 ,000, we may be able to help your kid get to college. But if you're making a penny more, we can't quite do that. The system is OK. We're going to nibble around the edges. Trump smashed the system. Of course, everything he's doing is disastrous. Democrats, the system is OK. Let's nibble around the edges. Democrats lost the election. All right. They abdicated. They came up with no alternative because you know what? They even today don't acknowledge the economic crises facing the working class of this country.

6:55Now you tell me, all right, how many Democrats are going around saying, you know what? We have a healthcare system, which is broken completely. We are the only major country on earth on the guarantee of healthcare to all people. I've introduced Medicare for All. You know how many Democrats in the Senate I have on board? How many? 15 out of a caucus of 47. And you think Medicare for All is both good policy and good politics? Of course, it's good policy. Health care is a human right. And I feel very strongly about that. I think that at a time when we have more income and wealth inequality, you know what the American people think?

7:29Maybe we really levy some heavy duty taxes on the billionaire class. I believe that. I think most Americans, including a number of Republicans, believe that. Not quite so sure what the Democrats are. I believe that you don't keep funding a war criminal like Netanyahu to starve the children of Gaza. That's what I believe. That's what most Americans believe. Overwhelming majority in the democratic world believe it. Democratic leadership, maybe not quite so much. So the point is that right now with 60 % of our people living paycheck to paycheck, I don't know that the Democratic leadership understands that there are good, decent people out there working as hard as they can, having a hard time paying their rent because the cost of housing is off the charts.

8:14Healthcare is off the charts. Childcare is off the charts. Campaign finance system is completely broken. You know, when you must can spend$270 million to elect Trump, you got a broken system. Our job is to create an economy and a political system that works for working people, not just billionaires. So the key to you is the Democratic Party needs to tell a story and implement policy. I don't know. You talk about the Democratic Party. David, who are you talking about? I'm talking about the leadership of the party in Congress. Who are the leadership? The leadership of the party right now. This is the struggle that I had when I ran in 2016, right?

8:49What I said is open the bloody doors. Meaning? Meaning let working class people in. With all of their flaws, They may have said something 28 years ago. They regret saying, open the door. Open the door to young people. Open the door to people of color. As candidates, you mean? As candidates, as participants. Do you know that I was in West Virginia? I don't know if you know this. I went to West Virginia, I don't know, two months ago. Yeah. I went to a county in West Virginia, which voted for Trump. Okay. We had hundreds of people coming out. Unbelievable what I heard. Decent, hardworking, good people.

9:22Did you know there is no Democratic Party, basically, in West Virginia? The party's given up. Yeah. It's not only West Virginia. It's state after state after state. Democratic Party has abdicated. You give it up. They're not fighting for the working class. And what the Democratic Party has been is billionaire funded, consultant driven party. Way out of touch with where the working class of this country is. Let's talk about what a true working class politics might look like. So I think clearly a part of that is a much bolder economic policy, right? And you've made that much of your life work. I do think there's another part of it.

10:01And when I look at your career, I see that. So your old colleague, Pat Leahy, once said that you appealed to an anti-establishment strain in Vermont that is not necessarily liberal. And when I think about what a true working class politics might look like, I think about the fact that in your history, you spoke positively about hunting and you got support from gun owners. And you really did better in rural Vermont than a lot of other Democrats. And so to me, I mean, just to think about Vermont for a minute, you sent the signal that you were not from one of the fancy Vermont towns like Charlotte, but that you actually understood the interests of people in less affluent rural Vermont.

10:39I am one of those people. I grew up in a three and a half room rent controlled party. It is not those people. Those are my people. And part of that, I think, is being willing to defy the Democratic Party orthodoxy, not only on economic issues, but also on some social issues. And you did that. You did that on guns, for example. And I'm curious whether you think that a true working class politics needs to incorporate the views of working class people, not only on economics, but also on issues where many working class people just have different views than the faculty lounge at a fancy university.

11:18I mean, I think there are certain basic, I think, you know, I have spent my whole life believing, not a radical idea, that women have a right to control their own body. We've got to end sexism. We've got to end racism. We've got to end homophobia. Very, very important. You know, I'll tell you a funny story. Way back when, I can't remember the year, in Vermont, there was an amendment, there was the Constitutional Amendment for Women's Rights. Do you remember that? Mm-hmm. Okay. And it turns out that a lot of, a number of people voted against that who voted for me. In other words, you gotta have a tolerance.

11:53I believe, again, women have a right to control their own body. There are people who disagree with you. What am I supposed to do? Throw them out? Discard them completely because they disagree with you? In this country today, in one sense, there is a lot of disunity, clearly, and a lot of people divided. But on the basic issues, is health care a human right? We're pretty much most people think, yes. Should the rich stop paying their fair share of taxes? Yeah. Should we build low-income and affordable housing? Yeah. Is the campaign finance system currently corrupt? Yeah. in the richest nation on earth, should elderly people be able to retire with security and dignity?

12:35Yeah. So got to be tolerant. I mean, so what? You don't agree with me on every issue. What am I going to do? All right. We're going to work together and come up with the best plan that we can. We want to play a clip of an interview you did with Ezra Klein, who's now my colleague, but at the time he was at Vox. And it's about immigration. But I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the U.S. are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders, about sharply increasing the American foreign aid.

13:07Open borders. That's a Koch brothers proposal. Really? Of course. I mean, that's a right-wing proposal which says essentially there is no United States. Can you say more about your views on immigration? Look, when there are people who want cheap labor coming into this country to lower wages, There's no question about it. Where we are right now is we have, we think, about 10 million undocumented people in this country. The overwhelming majority of those people came to this country for the same exact reason as my father came from Poland without a nickel in his pocket to create a better life for themselves.

13:44And many of them actually brought their little kids here. They fled violence. They fled poverty. The overwhelming, overwhelming majority of these people are working on. during COVID, those were the people in the meatpacking plants. Those were the people who were coming down with COVID and dying. They were keeping the economy going. The failure of both the Democratic and the Republican Party in the last number of decades is we have not developed a comprehensive immigration reform and, in my view, a path towards citizenship for those people. And I think what Trump is doing right now is disgusting.

14:19It is what demagogues always do. You take a powerless minority, maybe it's the Jews in Europe during the 30s, maybe it's gypsies, maybe it's gay people, maybe it's black people. You name the minority and you blame all the problems of the world on those people. That's what Trump is doing with the undocumented. My view is very, very different. I think we've got to move toward comprehensive immigration reform and a path toward citizenship for people who are by and large working very hard and a very important part of our economy. So Trump is clearly doing outrageous things that deny people their civil rights and that violate their basic humanity right now.

14:57There's no question about that. I also think it's fair to say that the Biden administration's immigration policy did essentially reject the views of a lot of working class Americans. And they looked at it and they said, that's just too open an immigration policy. And I think their discomfort with it was consistent with your longtime view of immigration. Well, what I do think in terms of the Biden administration, so long as we have nation states like the United States of America and Canada and Mexico, you have borders. And if you don't have any borders, in a sense, you don't have a nation state.

15:35And Biden tried to make some progress at the end of his tenure. You know, you saw the pictures in Texas of just all kinds of undocumented people. And that does not resonate. And it's not right. We need to have an immigration policy, but you also need to have strong borders to read. The reason I'm pushing you on this is I do think there is greater demand for a true working class politics in this country than many democratic elites have often acknowledged. It's a kind of working class politics that really could involve moving economic policy in the direction that you want. But I think for people to win, and when you look at people like Ruben Gallego in Arizona, who's won, or Marcy Kaptur in Ohio, or you in Vermont when you first got elected there, it wasn't a solidly blue state.

16:18It is not enough to be populist on economics. Democrats also have to show some basic respect for working class views and be authentic rather than just saying that they're tolerating views on things like immigration or on guns. They genuinely have to have views that are different than really affluent Democrats tend to have on social issues. You think that's fair? Yeah. Okay. I think it's really uncomfortable for the Democratic Party because I think it— You see, when you keep, David, talking about the Democratic Party, when I ran for president, you know, one of the things that I learned is there ain't much of a Democratic Party.

16:57There are people on the top. When I think about a party, I think about the involvement of large numbers of people at the grassroots level. You understand what I'm saying? Yep. That's why when I think about a party, people disagree. They yell and shout at each other. People have said democracy is kind of messy. But I think sometimes when people think about the Democratic Party, thinking about these cocktail parties in New York City or L.A. where wealthy people mingle with consultants, mingle with the leadership, that's not much of a party. That's really kind of an elitist institution. So one of the things that I have, that I believe, if the Democratic Party is to survive, maybe it will, maybe it won't, the transformation has to be to open the doors, to bring in millions of people, to hear what they have to say, to have them start running for office, etc.

17:46Let's talk about Trump. You are turning out tens of thousands of people across the country for your fighting oligarchy tour. Well, over 300 ,000, but who's counting? I was thinking of individual events, but that's fair. Total audience. Fighting Oligarchy is also the name of your book. I'm curious why you chose fighting oligarchy as opposed to something that was more Trump specific, like, say, fighting authoritarianism. Why do you think oligarchy is the root cause of how we got to Trumpism? That's a good question. And obviously I work day and night trying to defeat this guy's effort toward moving us to an authoritarian society.

18:33I think the two go hand in glove, by the way. But I think what I wanted to do, what we did in the rallies and what I wanted to do in the book, is ask the American people to start looking at some very uncomfortable realities. You know, it's very easy when I can say, oh, in Russia, now Putin and his friends, that's an oligarchy. And I got a handful of zillionaires running that country. Oh, in Saudi Arabia, you got a billion dollar family, I think. All over the world, you got these really wealthy and powerful oligarch types. Not in the United States. Not true. In America today, we have more income and wealth inequality we've ever had in the history of this country.

19:11Over the last 50 years, you have seen a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom 90 % to the top 1%. You have a political system which is dominated by the billionaire class, right? That's what Citizens United was all about. That's what Super PAC's about. So you got Mr. Musk able to contribute$270 million, right, to elect Donald Trump. And Democratic billionaires playing a role. You know, obviously, I'm strongly supporting Zeran Mamdani. And it was just amazing to me how upfront the oligarchs were in New York City. One guy says, well, we're going to spend whatever it takes. You know, we're landlords, we're the oligarchy.

19:50How dare this guy come in and upset the apple cart? Quite open. That's what really stuck me. So you got an economy dominated by the very wealthy, a rigged economy. You have a political system dominated by billionaires. You have the media, corporate media having a huge impact. You add it all up. What do you call that country? You tell me. Is it fair to call it an oligarchy? I think I absolutely think there are oligarchistic aspects to our country. Oh, you're sounding like a New York Times reporter here. I'm not willing to say that we are already an oligarchy, but I'm worried that we're very much moving toward that.

20:23And so I think there's a huge amount of your diagnosis that I agree with. To some extent, I'm not pushing you on the oligarchy notion. I'm accepting it. I'm asking in this moment, should we be paying more attention to the authoritarian threat? Okay. They go together. All right. I agree they do. All right. The point is what is very rarely discussed. You know, I've been on 48 million television shows and nobody has ever asked me, not one person has ever said, Bernie, are you worried that so few people in America have so much wealth and so much power while working class people are struggling? No one ever asked me that question.

20:59I bet you make the point anyway. I do. I say thank you for your silly question. Now I'll give you the answer to the question you didn't ask. All right. But what do the oligarchs want? When you hear people like Peter Thiel talking about, I don't know if you follow this, when Peter Thiel, who is a billionaire actively involved in AI and robotics, you know, he refers to his opponents, not as people he disagrees with, the antichrist. Did you see that? Literally, the word was antichrist. A religious critique because these guys have the divine right to rule. And when Trump gets elected in his inauguration and he has all of these multi-billionaires behind him, A, these guys are doing phenomenally well.

21:48They love Donald Trump, no doubt. But B, what do they want? Do they want to pay taxes? No. Do they like unions? No, they want to break unions. do they want any form of regulation in AI and robotics? No way. You're an antichrist. You're an immoral. You're a devil, literally, if you try to interfere with us. They like oligarchy. They like authoritarianism. They like authoritarianism because people like Putin gives the oligarchs in Russia, right? Opportunity to do anything they want. That's what Trump is doing right here in this country. I would say Russia's made it to full oligarchy, by the way.

22:30Yes. But let me tell you, there's some people on the right now who are beginning to refer to the United States Congress as the Duma. People blabbing all day long, powerless. Trump has all the power. You mentioned Zoran Mamdani. Yeah. New York is obviously different from the rest of the United States in a whole bunch of ways. What lessons do you want Democrats who are from swing states or red states to take from Zoran Mamdani? God, you keep sounding like a New York Times reporter. Well, I am. Oh! Okay. All right. Get over something. Okay. Okay. I grew up in Brooklyn. It's very different than West Virginia.

23:07Yes. Different than Maine. Different than other states. But at the end of the day, and I say this not, you know, to be sweepingly rhetorical, the overwhelming majority of Americans are working class people. And what Mamdani is talking about in New York is people cannot afford the outrageous cost of housing. You know what? It's true in Vermont. It's true in West Virginia. It's true in virtually every state in this country. He's talking about affordability, talking about child care. You know what? Child care crisis in almost every state in this country. Don't use the word red state or blue state.

23:45when I hear red states, to me, it's an abdication of the Democratic Party in fighting for the working class people have no alternative and they vote for the Trumps of the world. If we are bold and we got to be really bold and demanding that in the wealthiest country in the history of, you tell me, you tell me why in the richest country, all of our people cannot have a decent standard of living. There is no excuse for that other than the greed of the billionaire class who have so much power and the acquiescence of the political class in allowing that to happen. I mean, this ties together our conversation nicely because I agree that Mamdani's message on affordability can resonate in the entire country.

24:28But when you look at the Democrats who've won in places that's harder for Democrats to win than New York, they sound very different from him on something like policing. Very different, right? They appear in their ads with police officers. They talk about the border. There's basically no counterexample of a Democrat who's won a tough race without doing things like that. Well, I think the world is changing, by the way. And I think you're going to see more of that. And I think you're seeing candidates right now running. And by the way, in terms of the police, one of the reasons, you know, I was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, a few years ago, 1981.