Many writ­ers on the rad­i­cal Left have been deeply pes­simistic and alien­at­ing in con­sid­er­ing Bernie Sanders’ cam­paign for pres­i­dent. Black Agen­da Report edi­tor Bruce Dixon dis­missed the Sanders cam­paign as ​“sheep­dog­ging for Hillary.” Some­thing tells me that call­ing peo­ple ​“sheep” isn’t the best way to engage any­one in a pos­i­tive polit­i­cal conversation.

The tens of thousands of Sanders supporters that have come out to rallies across the country want a different politics in this country. What are we saying to them about building a bigger, more relevant socialist left today?

Equal­ly patron­iz­ing has been William Kauf­man, who dis­missed the his­toric oppo­si­tion of many on the rad­i­cal Left to sup­port­ing a Demo­c­rat as ​“a mind­less ide­o­log­i­cal reflex.” Call­ing some­one ​“mind­less” isn’t a good way to start a con­ver­sa­tion, either.

Per­son­al­ly, I’m not a Bernie pes­simist or ​“Sandernista” who’s all-in for the Ver­mont Sen­a­tor. I think that the Sanders cam­paign is refresh­ing and he has made social­ism pos­i­tive for a younger gen­er­a­tion. I whole­heart­ed­ly sup­port his call for a ‘“polit­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion against the bil­lion­aires” and have watched with great inter­est as his polit­i­cal pro­gram has shak­en up the pres­i­den­tial race.

Yet big busi­ness and its allies dom­i­nate the high­ly unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic polit­i­cal par­ty which Bernie is run­ning under the aus­pices of. This rais­es a big­ger ques­tion: What is Bernie’s deep­er strat­e­gy for trans­form­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty? So far, Bernie has said very lit­tle about this. When he speaks about chal­leng­ing the sta­tus quo, he always seems to be talk­ing about the intran­si­gent Repub­li­can major­i­ty in Con­gress — not the par­ty whose name he is run­ning under. And while the GOP has cer­tain­ly gone off the right-wing deep end in recent years, the Democ­rats have also drift­ed fur­ther and fur­ther in the same direc­tion. Sanders has tak­en most­ly strong pro­gres­sive posi­tions in his cam­paign that are well to the left of oth­ers in the par­ty, but he has yet to put for­ward a longer-term plan about deal­ing with that drift.

So the Sanders cam­paign presents the broad left in the Unit­ed States with a great polit­i­cal oppor­tu­ni­ty, but also with some­thing of a conun­drum: How can sort out the many pos­i­tive aspects of Bernie’s cam­paign while forth­right­ly deal­ing with the sub­stan­tive polit­i­cal prob­lems of run­ning as a Democrat?

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With this in mind, I read Marc Daadler’s recent In These Times arti­cle on Sanders’ impact on Hillary Clinton’s use of attack ads and found it a bit thin. Not because Sanders has not had an impact on Clinton’s use of such ads — Hillary has, indeed, pledged to refrain from attack­ing Bernie dur­ing this cam­paign cycle, which seems like a pret­ty good thing — but because Daalder and oth­er writ­ers are high­light­ing such small-fries vic­to­ries rather than these issues of pow­er and pol­i­tics inside the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty. This is a mistake.

Bernie at recent meet­ing before 2,000 peo­ple at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go on Mon­day exhort­ed his audi­ence to ​“think big!” He’s right: We should be think­ing big. Bernie made social­ism attrac­tive and rel­e­vant in a way that the long-estab­lished broad Left in the Unit­ed States hasn’t accom­plished in many decades of hard work. Some­thing has changed in U.S. pol­i­tics, and the Left seems woe­ful­ly behind the times.

For me, this means we should be putting for­ward a dis­cus­sion about polit­i­cal strat­e­gy to Bernie sup­port­ers and crit­ics, revis­it­ing old­er debates about the Left and the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty while also rec­og­niz­ing the impor­tance of new­er polit­i­cal cam­paigns such as Black Lives Mat­ter and the strug­gle against eco-cat­a­stro­phe — strug­gles that could fun­da­men­tal­ly reshape Amer­i­can politics.

Let’s put it this way: Is Bernie’s cam­paign in form and sub­stance a fair­ly tra­di­tion­al lib­er­al Demo­c­ra­t­ic cam­paign with an anachro­nis­tic social­ist label attached to it, or could it help birth a new social­ist move­ment? If it is to be about the lat­ter, what polit­i­cal strat­e­gy is being put for­ward to bring it about? How can the Sanders cam­paign go beyond rel­a­tive­ly minor, short-term vic­to­ries around attack ads to accom­plish a major polit­i­cal transformation?

For sev­er­al decades, many social­ists, trade union­ists and lib­er­als put for­ward a strat­e­gy of ​“realign­ment.” In a nut­shell, the argu­ment went like this: lib­er­als and the Left should build up the polit­i­cal forces of trade unions and the civ­il rights move­ment (and lat­er oth­er by oth­er pro­gres­sive social move­ments such as the Viet­nam anti-war move­ment, women’s and oth­er social move­ments) in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty to force out the old ​“Dix­ie­crat” wing of the party.

This realign­ment of polit­i­cal forces inside the par­ty, it was hoped, would trans­form it into a polit­i­cal par­ty more akin to a Euro­pean-style labor or social demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty or, at the very least, some­thing like the Old Cana­di­an New Democ­rats. This new­ly trans­formed par­ty could poten­tial­ly imple­ment the type of pro-work­ing class polit­i­cal agen­da that could make the Unit­ed States into a more Euro­pean-style social demo­c­ra­t­ic country.

Some aspects of realign­ment did come about: The Dix­iecrats, for the most part, did leave the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty while the reforms spon­sored by Sen. George McGov­ern did open up the par­ty to more diverse con­ven­tion del­e­gates and opened up pri­maries to more chal­lengers. One result of this was a large num­ber of black del­e­gates and par­ty lead­ers. But the Democ­rats also, at the same time, became a more con­ser­v­a­tive par­ty, and aban­doned much of the lib­er­al­ism that defined it since the New Deal.

What­ev­er you may think about realign­ment as a strat­e­gy, it was, indeed, a big-pic­ture strat­e­gy that was debat­ed and fought over for by the broad lib­er­al-left. I think hap­pen to think it was the wrong strat­e­gy, and have believed for many years that we need to cam­paign for the cre­ation of labor par­ty or, at the very least, inde­pen­dent or social­ist cam­paigns with the sup­port of the labor movement.

The tens of thou­sands of Sanders sup­port­ers that have come out to ral­lies across the coun­try want a dif­fer­ent pol­i­tics in this coun­try. What are we say­ing to them about build­ing a big­ger, more rel­e­vant social­ist left today? Whether you sup­port Bernie’s cam­paign or not, what do you have to say to that question?

Focus­ing on the minor vic­to­ries Bernie Sanders is able to notch miss­es the point of what’s so impor­tant about his cam­paign. The ener­gy he has tapped into has the pow­er to rad­i­cal­ly trans­form our country’s pol­i­tics. As we watch and par­tic­i­pate in and cri­tique that cam­paign, let’s keep those big-pic­ture goals in mind. After all, we’re capa­ble of win­ning much more than minor skir­mish­es over attack ads.