The Future of the Left After Sanders

Are there any insurgents capable of building a similar left-populist political movement?

A central if underexamined question looming over the 2028 Democratic primary and the future of the American left more broadly is who will claim the mantle of Bernie Sanders’s progressive populism. Many presume Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is Sanders’s heir apparent, based on her star power and the long-established affinity between the two. But Ocasio-Cortez isn’t necessarily Sanders’s protégé, and there isn’t a firm consensus on the left that she is, in fact, best poised to carry the torch, despite her rumored aspirations for higher office. Others speculate that if New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani were constitutionally allowed to run for president, he would possibly overtake his fellow trailblazer of activist-influencer politics and expand Sanders’s movement to the next generation.

Still, the bigger problem facing AOC and others hoping to follow in Sanders’s footsteps—and perhaps achieve what he couldn’t in his two runs for president—is that nearly all are urban progressives taken to represent the worldview of the Brahmin left. They constitute the new “conscience” of the Democratic Party, the voices who have increased the salience of class and economic power in a coalition that had for too long sidestepped the issues that once gave liberal Democrats their raison d’être. They have ensured social justice means more than making America’s educated and business elites look a little more like the rest of the country. In contrast to Sanders, however, they are much less familiar with the plight of rural and small-town Americans and the distinct challenges they face. Sanders, one of the most popular politicians in America, is, at heart, a very New England type of socialist, at ease with the idiosyncratic communitarian and libertarian tendencies that America’s core political traditions have passed down through the ages. And it is doubtful that even his most talented acolytes share this essential quality to the same degree.

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. The left, already handicapped in this regard, is glaringly limited to a handful of highly educated coastal metros, disengaged, if not entirely by choice, from vast sections of the country. Alongside the Democratic establishment’s own aloofness, that has political costs few besides Sanders have warned of. Indeed, if the perspective gained by place and custom still matters in American politics, the left has a blind spot that will only become more conspicuous once Sanders retires from office.

To be sure, there are other rising leaders from the Democrats’ left flank who are trying to capture the grassroots enthusiasm of Sanders’s first campaign for president. Although he represents one of the wealthiest districts in the country, Representative Ro Khanna of California has increasingly fashioned himself as a maverick antiwar Democrat willing to take on the “Epstein class” and powerful lobbies. He co-chaired Sanders’s 2020 campaign, recently announced with Sanders a new wealth tax proposal, and remains a lead sponsor in the House of Medicare for All and other progressive legislation waiting for an elusive filibuster-proof majority. That lends him a certain amount of “parliamentary” authority, though there are doubts he could ever equal Sanders’s gravitas and impassioned following. But again, the main barrier Khanna must overcome is effectively the same as AOC’s, notwithstanding her more working-class district. Unavoidably, he is a world apart from the dairy farms, machine tool plants, and quaint, semi-vacant downtowns that dot Sanders’s “blue” Vermont as well as other states that are much less friendly to Democrats.

Then there are Graham Platner of Maine and Dan Osborn of Nebraska, two former service members running for Senate in their respective states as political outsiders appalled by the crony capitalism that brazenly pervades Washington. Both bear similar anti-establishment messages in heavily rural, white working-class states that bring to mind Sanders’s folk hero stature in Vermont. The resonance inspires a bit of optimism, not least because it is often assumed the American left has been reduced to a coastal urban phenomenon more committed to elite-mediated identity politics than rebuilding a New Deal-style coalition that unites working people across regions.

There are limits in both cases, however, to the comparison that can be drawn with Sanders. Platner, who is vying for the Democratic nomination against Governor Janet Mills, the party establishment favorite, to topple Republican Senator Susan Collins, is an outspoken progressive on nearly every issue, foreign and domestic (the importance of the 2nd amendment excepted). On top of being a fellow New Englander, that consistent left-wing orientation superficially makes him more like Sanders, whereas Dan Osborn, a self-described lifelong independent who avoids overt criticism of Trump and the MAGA base, has pitched a far more tailored anti-monopoly platform in his bid to crack the GOP’s lock on Nebraska.

Yet Sanders, who grew up in a working-class Jewish family in 1940s Brooklyn, spent years on the political margins before converting traditionally Republican Vermont to his brand of politics; as mayor of Burlington and then as an independent member of Congress, he methodically carved out a left-populist yet “heterodox” reputation that won respect and votes from residents who didn’t necessarily identify with the activist left. Platner, whose campaign has not escaped (and arguably embraces) the “nationalization” of political offices and party stances, is shaping up to be a formidable insurgent, but it is unclear he will earn the same reputation in his quest to upend Maine’s staid politics. Osborn, meanwhile, remains a dark horse enigma waging a lonely battle against polarization itself. Even if he defies the odds in his second race, Osborn may prove to be an anomaly rather than a harbinger of a heartland rebellion. Nowhere on the horizon is there a figure who seems capable of inspiring a grassroots movement that reaches an armistice in the culture wars in order to fight corruption and build worker power on a national scale.

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Part of the reason it is difficult to conceive of who might fill Sanders’s shoes is that Sanders, a somewhat unshowy legislator in his early days, evolved from a curiosity into one of the most singular influences on contemporary American politics. His insurgent campaign against Hillary Clinton and the DNC “machine” made him an icon, but he also was (and to some extent still is) an iconoclastic voice within American liberalism. Sanders, for both practical and sincere reasons, hearkens back to FDR to assuage potential converts that “democratic socialism” means the enlightened welfare states of Scandinavia and the unfinished work of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, not the suffocating bureaucratic authoritarianism of the old Eastern bloc. But aside from this carefully drawn parallel with Sanders’s professed hero, he does not fit neatly within the typology of America’s radical and reform traditions.

Conventionally speaking, he emerged far to the left of Kennedy-style liberalism, the direction in which New England and the Northeast in general moved in the latter third of the 20th century. The Kennedy tradition, like its Wilsonian antecedent, was largely in favor of free-trade agreements and confident in America’s soft and hard power to nurture liberal democracy abroad, eventually meshing with Bill Clinton’s Third Way approach. Sanders, by contrast, was a left-wing critic of globalization and fairly protectionist at that, putting him in league with Jesse Jackson, Minnesota’s Paul Wellstone, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, South Carolina’s Fritz Hollings, and Indiana’s Vance Hartke, who all espoused, in different registers, a left-populism focused on preserving good-paying American jobs and rebuilding at home. That partly explains why Sanders attracted independents in 2015 and 2016, some of whom ended up voting for Trump in the general election; Sanders never underestimated the havoc wrought by NAFTA and the China shock and knew it was vital that the left didn’t further hemorrhage or spurn workers in manufacturing and traditional trades.

By the same token, that principled opposition reflected an ambivalence toward globalization that today’s activist left generally hasn’t shared. As many noted in 2016 and then again in the aftermath of the migration surge under Joe Biden, Sanders also viewed open borders not as the progressive position on immigration but as a policy that the right-wing Koch network lobbied for. While he worked tenaciously in his 2020 campaign to deepen support among Latino workers and advocacy groups, Sanders never quite abandoned his earlier position, believing unchecked migration leads to exploitation and thus lower workplace safety standards and wages.

Sanders was also never an eager practitioner of identity politics and the associated theories that became in vogue on so many campuses. He was an early champion of gay rights, supported a woman’s right to an abortion, abhorred racism, and denounced covert US operations supporting rightwing regimes in Latin America. But unlike the “woke” sectarians who scaled the heights of media and academia last decade and their adherents, Sanders was averse to “progressive” race reductionism and similar modes of politics that emphasized difference over common material concerns. Moreover, he never trafficked in attitudes that judged every moral failing or blunder of the US government as an indictment of the people itself; he didn’t ridicule the country’s noblest values as a sham, dismiss its vastly undercelebrated cultural contributions, or regard ordinary workers as oafs and rubes. Americans had a heritage to be proud of, precisely because it was working people who were the agents of both creative change and worthy traditions.

Sanders, in other words, was and is a social republican and a radical “small d” democrat, confident in America’s potential and the ability of all to bring meaning to their communities.

Who, then, are Sanders’s predecessors? Is there something in his intellectual imprinting that distinguishes the 84-year-old from his would-be successors? Long before he leaned into his idealization of FDR, Sanders was an admirer of Eugene Debs, the five-time Socialist candidate for president in the early 20th century. But Debs has never really been Sanders’s model, considering Sanders’s dogged effort to realign the Democratic Party rather than forge an entirely independent movement. In some respects, Sanders shares more in common with Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette or Nebraska’s George Norris—“independent” Republicans of the Progressive Era with vocal rural constituencies who held a communitarian ethos and believed public power and tough regulations would make the economy deliver for the many. Another touchstone is Fiorello La Guardia, the reform-minded mayor of New York who did so much to reify the spirit of the New Deal during Sanders’s boyhood. While Sanders exhorts his listeners to be part of a “revolution,” his message has always been imbued with a strong sense of civic nationalism, as if it had been extracted from a WPA mural. That quality has had an underappreciated effect on his appeal that only Mamdani has come close to matching. Contrary to the caricature of him as an unsentimental and dour figure, Sanders has long sought to replicate the energy and idealism of reformed ward politics in the least likely places, from his start in Burlington to his rural and Rust Belt delegate strategy in the 2016 primary.

Sanders’s unflappable determination—and the aura it has created—is what makes his inevitable departure from the scene so hard to fathom on the left. Whatever the exact alchemy of his influences, it has helped him become an elder statesman in a party bereft of them. Sanders may not be the most poetic orator or exhibit much of a Rooseveltian flair for public philosophy. But a mere gadfly he is not. He has synthesized—perhaps consciously—various elements from America’s past egalitarians, allowing him, a once marginal figure of the Sixties New Left, to embody the “Old Left” in a way no other post-Reagan politician has.

It is an overlooked talent that won’t be easy to duplicate. But as the pro-freedom, pluralist left ponders who might carry the torch forward, its thinkers and cadres must remember it is vital to make the past relevant to the future—and remind Americans it is within their collective power to flourish anew. Sanders did not persevere by believing anything less.