The piece does a good job identifying the “Sanders gap,” but I think it stops at symptoms instead of getting to the underlying cause. It’s true the left has lost institutions like unions and rural associations. It’s also true many of its leaders are more urban and culturally distant from large parts of the country. But those are downstream effects. The more important question is: why did those institutions weaken, and why don’t current leaders rebuild them?
Part of the answer is that we’re now operating in a low-trust environment. People no longer default to believing institutions, whether government, media, or even expert communities. That means political arguments can’t rely on authority alone. They have to make sense to people using their own internal logic and lived experience.
This is where a lot of today’s progressive politics runs into trouble. It’s not that it lacks moral conviction or policy detail. It’s that it often assumes a shared framework that much of the country simply doesn’t operate within. When arguments feel inconsistent with how people understand risk, fairness, or common rules, especially after trust has already been weakened, people don’t just disagree. They disengage.
Sanders was unusual because he largely avoided that trap. He stayed rooted in a class-based, anti-corruption framework that was legible across cultural lines. People didn’t have to share his ideology to understand what he was saying or why he believed it. Just as importantly, he came across as internally consistent over a long period of time, which matters a great deal when trust is low. What made him hard to replace isn’t just his policy mix or personality. It’s that most of the next generation of leaders have already been shaped by the very institutional and cultural dynamics that limit their reach. In some cases, you can even see how being pulled more tightly into the party’s broader framework reduces a leader’s distinctiveness and, with it, their ability to build a wider coalition.
So the succession problem isn’t just about finding the next Sanders. It’s about whether the left can produce leaders who are both substantively progressive and broadly legible outside their own cultural ecosystem, and whether it can do that in a country where institutional trust has already broken down. Until that’s addressed, the gap the article describes is likely to persist.
I am tired of all these factions. They each have some strong points. They each have some weak points. Strong leadership from a 2028 candidate should scramble the whole thing into a winning omelette. Winning presidential candidates have always done this. Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, Obama, even Trump. Let's break some eggs and get on with it!
I don't understand your point here at all. I'm wanting strong leadership to take what's good from the Democratic machine, clean up the Trump mess and do some good in the world. I assume we want the same thing. I don't give a crap about " my side winning".
Sanders had to change to have a chance of support from the Brahmin left who are the volunteers and journos that make the primaries.
He gave up on guns, gave up on immigration, and shut up about NAFTA etc. Go to one of those big rallies he throws with AOC and you see educated political hobbyists of the left. Great guy, and I love that Sanders can still use the words "working class" when everyone else is scared to say them, but the Sanders of ten years ago is gone.
A lot of people in 16 were saying "either Sanders or Trump" that sentiment is still there, but even more so.
Great analysis, but Sanders doesn't require a replacement. His once far Left positions are now mainstream Dem policy. In the areas where Sanders was Right of current Dem dogma, Immigration and Globalization, Bernie moved Left to embrace current Dem policies.
When the Dem Party sported Clinton policies, Sanders was an outlier. Bernie long preached globalization and unrestricted Immigration would level Blue Collar living standards, but recently Sanders abandoned that ship.
Sanders and Dems now march in lockstep in support of taxation, dependency, and Open Borders, above all else. Bernie has always been pro taxes, but once Sanders expected them to support only Americans, in actual need. Whether an aging Bernie became tired or lazy, while he still talks a good game on higher wages, Bernie now seems content to replace larger paychecks with massive government handouts.
Dems are seeking federalize California and New York state policies, that have moved Left, past Bernie, a half decade ago. Many Blue States have doubled state spending in 5 years, not counting massive increases in pension and healthcare costs.
Meanwhile, Dems have sought to encourage mass migration and government dependency, at every turn. 40% of Californians are Medicaid dependent. The number rises each year. Dems view NYC, where more than 1/2 of all households are foreign born or include a first generation immigrant, and 45% of residents are Medicaid dependent, as a template for the entire US.
The fact all immigrants, dwelling legally or otherwise, utilize welfare at rates 40%-150% higher than Americans, depending on their nation of origin, once would have enraged Sanders. Now Bernie is unbothered. In truth, both Bernie and Dems view dependency as a necessary evil. Dependency will bring about single party Dem rule, far faster than any other policy.
The fatal flaw for Dems has been our Republic. The wealthy will not cooperate, by remaining in Blue States. They have moved, en mass, to lower tax Red states, with higher living standards. They will, undoubtedly, continue to do so.
This leaves Dems with only one option, federalize Blue State policies that will leave the wealthy and regular taxpayers, with nowhere to run. Sanders doesn't need a replacement. In the fight for the soul of the Dem Party, he won. All it required was a complete about face on globalization and mass migration.
The problem is that once you scratch beneath the surface ideology, the currently existing Democratic coalition has contradictory material concerns. In one corner you have the professional class and the welfare transfer payment recipients, who benefit from the federal deficit directly through increased asset prices and payments, who work in government jobs or in highly regulated industries, and who benefit from cheap labor and cheap imports (so-called “globalization”). In the opposite corner, you have the downwardly-mobile college-educated young and a few remaining fumes of the “working class”, who are in the party due to “social” issues or because they believe the working class branding that is, plainly, a meme of the past that has not been true in a generation or more. Both of these groups are seeing declines in their material standard of living directly because of the policies which benefit the first two groups. This is a core contradiction that cannot be resolved: the policies which help one group come directly at the expense of the other. The Party will continue to be incoherent and side with the first group of rentiers (also known as the Obama coalition), and will continue to bleed the second group to the Republicans. Sanders was the closest the party will come again to a populist candidate.
Before Bill Clinton in 1992, Dems lost 5 of 6 elections (except the one after Watergate, which they almost lost too) running candidates that were all significantly farther left than Bill Clinton.
McGovern represented the furthest left point of the Democratic nominees in that era, and had the worst vote share of any Democrat in those 6 elections.
By focusing his campaign on draft dodgers (Amnesty), women's rights (Abortion), and drug reform (Acid), he was successfully painted as the candidate of the "counterculture" of "amnesty, abortion, and acid" rather than the candidate of the "working man." He also ran on universal basic income & a very populist economic platform, but it's the cultural stances that killed him.
Those cultural stances implicitly tell voters that even if you share some of their economic interests, you don’t share their worldview—and that’s disqualifying.
It wasn't until Bill Clinton completely rebranded the party, that those votes that were scared away finally came back. Saying that "illegal aliens" (his words, not mine) take jobs and public benefits that would otherwise go to Americans, welfare reform, a balanced budget, the crime bill, etc.
Today, ICE's approval rating is double-digit negative. Trump's approval rating is also double-digit negative. Among those SAME exact respondents, more of them trust the Republican party than the Democratic party on the issue of immigration and border security. Even after seeing 2 videos of people killed by ICE, and disapproving of both ICE & Trump.
If Dems run AOC or anyone even close to her in 2028, her cultural stances like abolish ICE, males playing in female sports, no mandatory minimums for crimes, etc implicitly tells voters that even if she has a few economic policies that they don't despise, she still doesn't share their worldview. She will get tossed like McGovern was.
> "That is no minor weakness for a left largely deprived of the institutions—unions, farmers’ associations, and public interest civic groups—that made New Deal liberalism the vehicle of working-class advance for the better part of the 20th century."
I'm increasingly realizing that part of combatting the New Left requires a return to economics, which the left jettisoned back during Obama's presidency. The is from the online book The Greatest Century That Ever Was by Stephen Moore and Julian Simon:
"Among the most heartening trends discussed in this study are the following: life expectancy has increased by 30 years; infant mortality rates have fallen 10-fold; the number of cases of (and the death rate from) the major killer diseases–such as tuberculosis, polio, typhoid, whooping cough, and pneumonia–has fallen to fewer than 50 per 100,000; air quality has improved by about 30 percent in major cities since 1977; agricultural productivity has risen 5- to 10-fold; real per capita gross domestic product has risen from $4,800 to $31,500; and real wages have nearly quadrupled from $3.45 an hour to $12.50."
Also from the book: "“Real black per capita income increased between 1900 and 1940 by 61 percent and between 1940 and 1985 by 342 percent.”
That didn't happen because of the New Deal, it happened in *spite* of the New Deal (and the taxes required to fund it). I'm not opposed to Social Security but we need to realize that it's engineers and entrepreneurs who create wealth for *everyone* in society, not activists and politicians.
To juxtapose this with socialism: New York City now spends more money on the homeless than the median salary of New York City residents.
There is a reason why the median house in Canada now costs 10 times their median income. There is a reason why Canada's GDP per capita has fallen significantly behind the U.S., dropping from roughly 83% of American levels in 2014 to just 71.4% in 2024.
You would think a country filled with timber, land, and oil should be doing a lot better.
Then there are the blue states that are projected to lose nearly a dozen electoral votes to red states in the 2030 census, due to how many people are not choosing to live in those places.
Then there is Singapore that has tons of public housing and very generous social welfare programs, without all the dysfunction of leftist municipalities. Because they actually punish people harshly for breaking the law, attract businesses to move there, and keep their social programs clean as a whistle instead of haphazardly giving taxpayer money to fraudulent NGOs and non-profits.
Democrats are obsessed with who gets the biggest slice than stopping the pie from shrinking.
Superb article. I really appreciate the breadth and depth of this article. Shame we don’t have a 40 or 50 old Sanders. But we are where we are. Maybe Denis Kucinich?
Listen to Bernie on Joe Rogan. He's cuckoo. The only reason he has high favorability is because the media (like this article) masks his authoritarianism.
If Sanders or anyone else really sees themselves as the heir of FDR, they will be far keener on high military spending, the defense industrial base, and confrontation of aggressive dictatorial powers than today's left is. As wonderful as the New Deal was, it was the Arsenal of Democracy and victory in World War II that ended the Depression.
The piece does a good job identifying the “Sanders gap,” but I think it stops at symptoms instead of getting to the underlying cause. It’s true the left has lost institutions like unions and rural associations. It’s also true many of its leaders are more urban and culturally distant from large parts of the country. But those are downstream effects. The more important question is: why did those institutions weaken, and why don’t current leaders rebuild them?
Part of the answer is that we’re now operating in a low-trust environment. People no longer default to believing institutions, whether government, media, or even expert communities. That means political arguments can’t rely on authority alone. They have to make sense to people using their own internal logic and lived experience.
This is where a lot of today’s progressive politics runs into trouble. It’s not that it lacks moral conviction or policy detail. It’s that it often assumes a shared framework that much of the country simply doesn’t operate within. When arguments feel inconsistent with how people understand risk, fairness, or common rules, especially after trust has already been weakened, people don’t just disagree. They disengage.
Sanders was unusual because he largely avoided that trap. He stayed rooted in a class-based, anti-corruption framework that was legible across cultural lines. People didn’t have to share his ideology to understand what he was saying or why he believed it. Just as importantly, he came across as internally consistent over a long period of time, which matters a great deal when trust is low. What made him hard to replace isn’t just his policy mix or personality. It’s that most of the next generation of leaders have already been shaped by the very institutional and cultural dynamics that limit their reach. In some cases, you can even see how being pulled more tightly into the party’s broader framework reduces a leader’s distinctiveness and, with it, their ability to build a wider coalition.
So the succession problem isn’t just about finding the next Sanders. It’s about whether the left can produce leaders who are both substantively progressive and broadly legible outside their own cultural ecosystem, and whether it can do that in a country where institutional trust has already broken down. Until that’s addressed, the gap the article describes is likely to persist.
I am tired of all these factions. They each have some strong points. They each have some weak points. Strong leadership from a 2028 candidate should scramble the whole thing into a winning omelette. Winning presidential candidates have always done this. Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, Obama, even Trump. Let's break some eggs and get on with it!
WInning just for winnings sake alone is indeed classical leftism.
Anything for power.
I don't understand your point here at all. I'm wanting strong leadership to take what's good from the Democratic machine, clean up the Trump mess and do some good in the world. I assume we want the same thing. I don't give a crap about " my side winning".
A question more relevant would be who will next captain the titanic once she’s refloated? Only the doyenne on Marthas Vineyard will know.
Sanders had to change to have a chance of support from the Brahmin left who are the volunteers and journos that make the primaries.
He gave up on guns, gave up on immigration, and shut up about NAFTA etc. Go to one of those big rallies he throws with AOC and you see educated political hobbyists of the left. Great guy, and I love that Sanders can still use the words "working class" when everyone else is scared to say them, but the Sanders of ten years ago is gone.
A lot of people in 16 were saying "either Sanders or Trump" that sentiment is still there, but even more so.
AOC? Mamdani?
If these are the front runners oi the democratic party, the democratic party is screwed.
Great analysis, but Sanders doesn't require a replacement. His once far Left positions are now mainstream Dem policy. In the areas where Sanders was Right of current Dem dogma, Immigration and Globalization, Bernie moved Left to embrace current Dem policies.
When the Dem Party sported Clinton policies, Sanders was an outlier. Bernie long preached globalization and unrestricted Immigration would level Blue Collar living standards, but recently Sanders abandoned that ship.
Sanders and Dems now march in lockstep in support of taxation, dependency, and Open Borders, above all else. Bernie has always been pro taxes, but once Sanders expected them to support only Americans, in actual need. Whether an aging Bernie became tired or lazy, while he still talks a good game on higher wages, Bernie now seems content to replace larger paychecks with massive government handouts.
Dems are seeking federalize California and New York state policies, that have moved Left, past Bernie, a half decade ago. Many Blue States have doubled state spending in 5 years, not counting massive increases in pension and healthcare costs.
Meanwhile, Dems have sought to encourage mass migration and government dependency, at every turn. 40% of Californians are Medicaid dependent. The number rises each year. Dems view NYC, where more than 1/2 of all households are foreign born or include a first generation immigrant, and 45% of residents are Medicaid dependent, as a template for the entire US.
The fact all immigrants, dwelling legally or otherwise, utilize welfare at rates 40%-150% higher than Americans, depending on their nation of origin, once would have enraged Sanders. Now Bernie is unbothered. In truth, both Bernie and Dems view dependency as a necessary evil. Dependency will bring about single party Dem rule, far faster than any other policy.
The fatal flaw for Dems has been our Republic. The wealthy will not cooperate, by remaining in Blue States. They have moved, en mass, to lower tax Red states, with higher living standards. They will, undoubtedly, continue to do so.
This leaves Dems with only one option, federalize Blue State policies that will leave the wealthy and regular taxpayers, with nowhere to run. Sanders doesn't need a replacement. In the fight for the soul of the Dem Party, he won. All it required was a complete about face on globalization and mass migration.
The problem is that once you scratch beneath the surface ideology, the currently existing Democratic coalition has contradictory material concerns. In one corner you have the professional class and the welfare transfer payment recipients, who benefit from the federal deficit directly through increased asset prices and payments, who work in government jobs or in highly regulated industries, and who benefit from cheap labor and cheap imports (so-called “globalization”). In the opposite corner, you have the downwardly-mobile college-educated young and a few remaining fumes of the “working class”, who are in the party due to “social” issues or because they believe the working class branding that is, plainly, a meme of the past that has not been true in a generation or more. Both of these groups are seeing declines in their material standard of living directly because of the policies which benefit the first two groups. This is a core contradiction that cannot be resolved: the policies which help one group come directly at the expense of the other. The Party will continue to be incoherent and side with the first group of rentiers (also known as the Obama coalition), and will continue to bleed the second group to the Republicans. Sanders was the closest the party will come again to a populist candidate.
The best way to carry out socialism is on a stretcher.
Before Bill Clinton in 1992, Dems lost 5 of 6 elections (except the one after Watergate, which they almost lost too) running candidates that were all significantly farther left than Bill Clinton.
McGovern represented the furthest left point of the Democratic nominees in that era, and had the worst vote share of any Democrat in those 6 elections.
By focusing his campaign on draft dodgers (Amnesty), women's rights (Abortion), and drug reform (Acid), he was successfully painted as the candidate of the "counterculture" of "amnesty, abortion, and acid" rather than the candidate of the "working man." He also ran on universal basic income & a very populist economic platform, but it's the cultural stances that killed him.
Those cultural stances implicitly tell voters that even if you share some of their economic interests, you don’t share their worldview—and that’s disqualifying.
It wasn't until Bill Clinton completely rebranded the party, that those votes that were scared away finally came back. Saying that "illegal aliens" (his words, not mine) take jobs and public benefits that would otherwise go to Americans, welfare reform, a balanced budget, the crime bill, etc.
Today, ICE's approval rating is double-digit negative. Trump's approval rating is also double-digit negative. Among those SAME exact respondents, more of them trust the Republican party than the Democratic party on the issue of immigration and border security. Even after seeing 2 videos of people killed by ICE, and disapproving of both ICE & Trump.
17:38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz75YdeJxQ0&t=1058s
If Dems run AOC or anyone even close to her in 2028, her cultural stances like abolish ICE, males playing in female sports, no mandatory minimums for crimes, etc implicitly tells voters that even if she has a few economic policies that they don't despise, she still doesn't share their worldview. She will get tossed like McGovern was.
> "That is no minor weakness for a left largely deprived of the institutions—unions, farmers’ associations, and public interest civic groups—that made New Deal liberalism the vehicle of working-class advance for the better part of the 20th century."
I'm increasingly realizing that part of combatting the New Left requires a return to economics, which the left jettisoned back during Obama's presidency. The is from the online book The Greatest Century That Ever Was by Stephen Moore and Julian Simon:
"Among the most heartening trends discussed in this study are the following: life expectancy has increased by 30 years; infant mortality rates have fallen 10-fold; the number of cases of (and the death rate from) the major killer diseases–such as tuberculosis, polio, typhoid, whooping cough, and pneumonia–has fallen to fewer than 50 per 100,000; air quality has improved by about 30 percent in major cities since 1977; agricultural productivity has risen 5- to 10-fold; real per capita gross domestic product has risen from $4,800 to $31,500; and real wages have nearly quadrupled from $3.45 an hour to $12.50."
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/greatest-century-ever-was-25-miraculous-trends-past-100-years
Also from the book: "“Real black per capita income increased between 1900 and 1940 by 61 percent and between 1940 and 1985 by 342 percent.”
That didn't happen because of the New Deal, it happened in *spite* of the New Deal (and the taxes required to fund it). I'm not opposed to Social Security but we need to realize that it's engineers and entrepreneurs who create wealth for *everyone* in society, not activists and politicians.
To juxtapose this with socialism: New York City now spends more money on the homeless than the median salary of New York City residents.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/nyc-spends-more-per-homeless-person-than-typical-household-earns-year-data-shows
There is a reason why the median house in Canada now costs 10 times their median income. There is a reason why Canada's GDP per capita has fallen significantly behind the U.S., dropping from roughly 83% of American levels in 2014 to just 71.4% in 2024.
You would think a country filled with timber, land, and oil should be doing a lot better.
Then there are the blue states that are projected to lose nearly a dozen electoral votes to red states in the 2030 census, due to how many people are not choosing to live in those places.
Then there is Singapore that has tons of public housing and very generous social welfare programs, without all the dysfunction of leftist municipalities. Because they actually punish people harshly for breaking the law, attract businesses to move there, and keep their social programs clean as a whistle instead of haphazardly giving taxpayer money to fraudulent NGOs and non-profits.
Democrats are obsessed with who gets the biggest slice than stopping the pie from shrinking.
Who is to lead the army of the envious?
Superb article. I really appreciate the breadth and depth of this article. Shame we don’t have a 40 or 50 old Sanders. But we are where we are. Maybe Denis Kucinich?
Haven't heard much from Kucinich of late. I'd vote for his wife.
Listen to Bernie on Joe Rogan. He's cuckoo. The only reason he has high favorability is because the media (like this article) masks his authoritarianism.
If Sanders or anyone else really sees themselves as the heir of FDR, they will be far keener on high military spending, the defense industrial base, and confrontation of aggressive dictatorial powers than today's left is. As wonderful as the New Deal was, it was the Arsenal of Democracy and victory in World War II that ended the Depression.
I think that was the means rather than the ends.