Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

Bernie Sanders’s Revolution

The senator may be remembered as a bridge between the promise of America and the fulfillment of that promise.

The founders knew that one revolution would never be enough to fix all of their new nation’s problems. In 1787, even as the Constitution was still being hammered out, Thomas Jefferson reflected on the justice of rebellion, not just in the past but in the future. In a letter to William Stephens Smith, the son-in-law of John Adams, Jefferson wrote, “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion…. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” These harsh words, seemingly so nonchalant about violence, remain controversial. Yet however abrasive, they are also true.

The American Revolution was from the start an incomplete project. It won national sovereignty but left the problem of democratic equality unresolved. The grand claim in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” was, as Martin Luther King Jr. immortally put it in 1963, merely a promissory note or, even worse, a bounced check. Many of the founders, including Jefferson, were avid (if occasionally shamefaced) slavers, and the Constitution they crafted had protections for slavery embedded in its heart.

It would take a second revolution, in the form of the Civil War and Reconstruction, to resolve this most blatant hypocrisy of 1776. And that was far from the only revolution the United States has seen. In ways that even Jefferson couldn’t have predicted, American history has been a series of roiling rebellions, always in the face of violent reprisal, to force the nation to live up to its dream of equality: abolition, Indigenous rights, women’s suffrage, civil rights, and LGBTQ rights, among many others.

No current politician better exemplifies this honorable lineage of political rebellion than Bernie Sanders. Back in 2016, three campaign books appeared that by their very titles distilled the conflicting visions of modern America: Stronger Together, by Hillary Clinton, Crippled America, by Donald Trump, and Our Revolution, by Sanders.

Stronger Together summed up Clinton’s politics of elite comity, her desire to unite moderate Democrats and establishment Republicans behind a neoliberal system that she believed was fundamentally just. Trump’s Crippled America was equally backward-looking, though in a more snarling way. Trump was animated by right-wing grievances that saw America as possessing a past greatness that had been stolen by a corrupt elite, undocumented immigrants, and conniving foreign........

© The Nation