Read Carefully

“It ain’t Bernie, it’s you. It’s not me, it is us” the Vermont Senator shouted to adoring fans chanting his name at a recent rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Many of us, largely due to our primary and secondary school education, implicitly accept what is known as the Great Man theory of history. Such a view says that history is propelled by highly influential individuals who bend the world to their will. Think about any historical topic and do a name association. When you think of Rome you think of Julius Caesar, not the plebeians. Britain conjures images of Winston Churchill smoking a cigar, not the soldiers in the trenches saving the island from eventual German invasion. Even recalling the history of the United States, whose events you are probably most familiar with, probably makes you think of Washington or Lincoln or FDR rather than the continental army, slaves, and labor strikers.

The Great Man theory has been robustly challenged in recent years, but remains extremely relevant, and I believe for good reason. There are some moments of men singularly changing the world, especially in early human history. Kings and Queens and perceived Gods have often come from bloodlines and radically change the world without having the population play any serious role.

That said, all the great leaders of modern history headed mass movements and greatly relied on the population to achieve their agenda. Napoleon was a product of French revolutionaries overthrowing the monarchy. Mahatma Gandhi’s movement worked because millions of fellow Indians marched and fasted with him. Nelson Mandela was the figurehead of a robust social democratic movement that had been organizing and building while Mandela sat in a jail cell. Franklin Roosevelt was successful because the population kept equipping him with massive Democratic majorities in the House and Senate to accomplish his New Deal agenda. Martin Luther King was an organizer of millions of blacks agitating for equal protections under the law.

I have long argued that Elizabeth Warren would be an excellent president. Her knowledge of the financial industry and political savvy are exceptional. Her creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and its built-in self-protection mechanisms such that it can’t be done away with by a Republican President (though it has been weakened), is an incredibly impressive accomplishment. Her ability to regulate Wall Street and its influence on Washington would likely be unparalleled by any president, including Bernie Sanders, and that could very well be the first step towards moving the country in a social democratic direction.

The problem with Elizabeth Warren is that she’s limited to what can be done in the Oval Office and the halls of Congress. Regulating the financial industry is a good thing, but it’s hardly revolutionary change. Her wealth tax on stock market speculation could be used to modestly redistribute wealth, but that won’t be consummate with the scale of the problem. We’re talking about the difference between the 1 percent owning more wealth than the bottom 82 percent of the population versus more wealth than the bottom 90 percent of the population. A welcome improvement, of course, but inadequate when viewed as what it is – a response to an absolute crisis.

This is where Bernie Sanders steps in. Unlike Warren, and certain unlike any of the other Democratic candidates running, Sanders has built a mass movement that seems to be growing. In the week following his announcement for a 2020 bid for the presidency, Sanders raised $10 million from 360,000 donors. The number of donors was more than 20 percent of his total donors in his year and a half long 2016 campaign. Perhaps most shockingly, 39 percent of Sanders’ donors came from an email address that had never donated to the Vermont Senator before. While a small portion of these are almost certainly individuals, like former students, who have simply changed their email address, that numbers nonetheless suggest that the most popular Senator in the country continues to gain followers.

From an electoral standpoint, this bodes well for the Sanders’ campaign. In a field that continues to balloon, it’s clear Sanders has a dedicated and loyal base. If multiple candidate stay in past the first round of states, its rather easy to envision a Trumpian outcome where Sanders gets the plurality of his devoted supporters in each primary while the rest of the votes are split between Biden, Harris, and O’Rourke.

From a successful presidency standpoint, which for Bernie is nothing less than a complete political revolution, it bodes even better. Sanders understand the constraints of electoral politics well. If everything goes perfectly for Democrats in 2020, their ceiling is 53 Senate seats. That’s not enough for a filibuster but also likely not enough to get 51 Democrats to vote to get rid of the filibuster. I think there’s an underrated chance that a lot of Democrats will be looking at the obstructionism of the McConnell regime as Senate Minority Leader combined with a frustration to pass their agenda, and many will decide its worth getting rid of the filibuster as it is the biggest impediment to progressive legislation. To get that, however, you’re going to need a buffer. There are a couple ultra-moderates in Congress like Joe Manchin and obsessive institutionalists like Mark Warner who will never support a filibuster repeal. The buffer needed may never materialize.

The Senate is a deeply undemocratic institution that greatly subsidizes rural states. As geographic polarization continues to increase and Democrats continue to cluster, the map only gets harder. There’s a lot more Indiana’s than there are California’s. If the huge defeats of incumbent Democrats Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly are any example, Democrats are doomed in the Senate as it currently exists.

Sanders understands this reality and is prepared to fight it in two ways. First, he’s talked about pushing statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. Not only is it morally right for places that pay taxes and abide by the U.S. constitution to have representation in its Congress, it would almost certainly create four new Democratic Senators. It would be the first time in my lifetime that Democrats actually did something to achieve and maintain political power, something Republicans have been actively doing since the Gingrich revolution.

The second, and most important, way in which Bernie Sanders would advocate for his revolutionary agenda in the face of a fundamentalist Republican Party hellbent on blocking his every move and aided by the broken institutions of Washington, is to mobilize you and me. Bernie surely never envisioned it this way, but the Donald Trump presidency helps this project immensely. Since the civil rights movement, America has been a post political country. By this I mean we feel that our politics has been decided. We’re a capitalist hegemon who abides by the elite consensus in Washington. We have no sustained movement politics of the kind we see in France, Germany, and even the UK. No one takes to the streets. Or at least they didn’t until Donald Trump was elected. We’re still lacking in movement politics, but at the very least people are engaged with politics and beginning to finally think about how the world can be different. We’ve come to a realization as a polity for the first time since the 1970’s that things can be different.

This is why Sanders base of support is so important. I don’t know if he’s going to win the Democratic nomination. He is undoubtedly the front runner, but electoral politics are strange. This reality is reflected in the fact that Joe Biden is polling well, even as the Democratic base moves far away from Biden’s centrism and outdated belief in the Third Way. The Democratic base is rapidly moving towards Sanders policy agenda while Biden’s agenda is closer to Joe Manchin. Another example of the strangeness of primaries is the fact that Beto O’Rourke was polling extremely well after his Senate run, consistently around 15 percent in a crowded field. Today, after his actual announcement, he’s polling at about 1/3rd of that number. Primaries are weird. Some candidates catch fire (Bernie in 2016), some candidates dramatically underperform (Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio), and some candidates fall off because of a seemingly unimpactful gaffe (Howard Dean).

What I do know about Sanders is that he’s the only member of either party with an activated base of supporters who are willing to act outside of electoral politics.

Sanders presence in the White House would mean the return of movement politics from a growing group of left-wing activist. Many of these people have already flirted with activism in the form of the Women’s March on the eve of Donald Trump’s election and, earlier, Occupy Wall Street. New people who haven’t yet dipped their feet in street activism but are voraciously making calls and knocking on doors for the Senator.

If the conditions of any other country, and indeed America’s past, hold true, all people need is a spark. We’ve already seen this movement budding in the teacher’s strikes spreading around the country from Oklahoma to Kentucky to Los Angeles. As the government shutdown dragged on, organizers were ready to launch large scale strikes in defiance of federal law. There has simultaneously been a growing movement of protests around environmental causes, such as the blockage of oil pipelines and marches to bring awareness to the poisonous drinking water in Flint, Michigan. Bernie Sander has supported every single one of these protests. He joined the picket line with striking Verizon workers in 2016 and will speak at a union rally at UCLA on March 20th. Sanders is all in on the grassroots labor and environmental movement, aiming to create change from the bottom up. Congress is slow, revolutionary people’s movements are not.

Which brings us to the critical distinction of the Bernie presidential run. Sanders is the only candidate with a long history of activism outside the institutions of government. He led desegregation efforts at the University of Chicago and attended King’s March on Washington. He was active in the antiwar movement and organized for the Packinghouse Workers of America. This is an important perspective that is missing from every other candidate. The only way to create revolutionary change that is commensurate with the time constraints need to save the planet and reverse runaway inequality is through a series of grassroots movements that promote solidarity across lines of class, race, sex, and creed. Combining that with the things that Sanders could get done in the Oval Office, like putting in place environmental regulations through executive order and rolling back American military intervention to pay for domestic spending, is a combination that begins to actually achieve serious reformation.

Listen to the rhetoric of the campaigns vying for your support. They all subscribe to the Great Man theory of history and it just so happens that they are the Great Man. Donald Trump was explicit in saying he was the only one that can fix it, but most candidates imply the same thing in a more subtle way. As part of his Vanity Fair announcement for his run, Beto O’Rourke’s cover included the words “I want to be in it. Man, I’m just born to be in it.”

Bernie has made clear in his run for the presidency and indeed throughout his entire political career from the dorms of Chicago University to the United States Senate that it’s not about him. It’s about us.