Letter | Bernie Sanders is a socialist?
Published 2:00 pm Wednesday, March 2, 2016
Reading that Mercer Island went 85 percent Democratic in the 2012 election in a Nextdoor Mercer Island entry by Erica Tripard caused me to give some further thought to Bernie Sanders.
His identifying himself as a socialist seems a bit untoward. He hasn’t done anything comparable to well known American Socialist Eugene Debs who ran for president five times. Sanders did give a speech at Georgetown University last fall and explained what democratic socialism meant. He invoked the names of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a pope and Martin Luther King. He also quoted from Pope Francis’ censure on the worship of money.
One can easily imagine most any Democrat delivering such a speech, but Bernie Sanders alone uses the “S” word. Socialism, however, has never been all that popular in the U.S.
Nevertheless, there’s Debs, a charismatic orator, rhetorician and union leader who Sanders much respects. Debs never fetched more than 6 percent of the votes in his six presidential campaigns. However, he and his advocates nearly succeeded in keeping us out of WWI.
They also launched the birth control movement and spurred Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to promote economic and political reforms. Liberal Democrats later adopted Social Security. Socialism also thrived throughout Europe and Israel.
As mayor of Burlington, Vermont and as congressman and senator, and now as a presidential candidate, Sanders has preached the same sermon as Debs. He reminds us daily that the tiny elite that Roosevelt called “economic royalists” dominate the workplace and marketplace. Its wealth and power subverts democracy and fuels inequality.
Sanders appropriates words of Lyndon B. Johnson to demonstrate that his ideas are as legitimate as Johnson’s liberalism, but Sanders is more uncompromising in pursuing those goals.
Obama’s adversaries have called him many things, but “socialist” heads the list, and it is attended by a hammer and cycle. However, young people, with no memory of the 50s, 60s and 70s, have decided they like Sanders, and it’s OK if he wants to call himself a “socialist.”
Ms. Tripard, thanks for the heads up.
Cy Baumgartner
Mercer Island
