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Praise for Bigger than Bernie
“An indispensable guide to twenty-first-century socialism from the viewpoint of clear-eyed, sharp-witted, smart, funny authors who lay bare the past failures of angry, narrow sectarianism, and offer a bold, dynamic vision for using the Sanders moment to build a stronger left. These authors, like the magazine they write for, give me hope!”
Jane McAlevey, author of A Collective Bargain
“Part history lesson, part guidebook; this is a love letter to the everyday people and movements who transformed this country, and who continue to declare that our lives have meaning and our future is worth fighting for. Bigger than Bernie isn’t just about the man who’s spent the majority of his political career on the fringes. It’s about fighters. It’s about thinkers. It’s about love. It’s about us.”
Phillip Agnew, cofounder of the Dream Defenders
“Hannah Arendt said we should ‘think what we are doing.’ And that is what Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht have done here. Their book not only examines all that democratic socialists have achieved in the past few years but also gives an exhilarating account of what we’ll be doing in the coming years. Anyone who thinks, with dread or relief, that the work comes to an end after Election Day in 2020 will think again. I’m going to keep coming back to them and their book in order to understand where and how it goes in the future.”
Corey Robin, author of The Enigma of Clarence Thomas
“Bigger than Bernie is a comprehensive and necessary read for those longing for a more humane country, and as someone who has been up-close in many of our current fights for justice, I can attest to the power of its analysis. The authors champion non-reformist reforms that arise from and propel social movements, and provide an essential roadmap for achieving permanent change. An energizing and instructive account that brings socialism into the present tense.”
RoseAnn DeMoro, former executive director of National Nurses United
“An urgent and essential text that forces us to think bigger than any one specific candidate about how to create a real and lasting politics of the multiracial working class. As chroniclers of both the Sanders campaign and the long history of class struggle, no one could better capture the promise and perils of this once-in-a-generation moment. I try never to miss a word that they write and you shouldn’t either.”
Krystal Ball, cohost of Rising on HillTV
“Day and Uetricht are two of the most brilliant and courageous intellectuals organically grounded in the marvelous militancy of the Sanders Movement. This indispensable book is a powerful, pioneering analysis of these new radical times, and a compelling vision of where it all might be going.”
Cornel West, author of Race Matters
BIGGER THAN BERNIE
How We Go from the Sanders Campaign
to Democratic Socialism
Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht
First published by Verso 2020
© Meagan Day, Micah Uetricht 2020
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-838-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-840-8 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-841-5 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Garamond by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
Contents
Introduction: Socialism in Our Time
2. Class Struggle at the Ballot Box
3. Socialists in Action
4. The Dirty Break
5. Engines of Solidarity
6. Rank-and-File Revolution
Conclusion: A Better Day
Acknowledgments
Bibliographic Essay
Introduction: Socialism in Our Time
Bernie Sanders has redefined what’s possible in American politics.
The United States has long been thought to be a fundamentally conservative country, one where large numbers of people would never go for that scary, supposedly foreign “socialism.” Pundits and historians have proposed many reasons why. Americans have had it too good, bought off by the overflowing abundance of this country. Socialist utopias have run aground “on the shoals of roast beef and apple pie,” as Werner Sombart famously wrote in 1906. Or, when the point is raised that many Americans have always been poor and overworked and exploited and oppressed, observers have speculated that there’s just something unique and undefinable about the American soul that makes us allergic to socialism. We’re too competitive, too individualistic; cooperation just isn’t in our nature. Not content with these explanations, leftists often focus on the singularly ferocious repression of labor and leftist organizing throughout US history and the successful division of the American working class through racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other forms of bigotry and oppression.
Whatever the reason, it’s true that no socialist party has played a notable role in US politics for the better part of a century. Even after the 2008 financial crash, so clearly the result of a financialized capitalist system that drove the entire economy into the ground in reckless pursuit of profit, it was not the Left but the Right, in the form of the anti-taxation Tea Party, that saw an immediate resurgence. Eventually there was Occupy Wall Street, yet even at those left-wing protests, the concept of socialism remained on the margins. In the dominant culture, the principal use of the word “socialist” was as an absurd but powerful epithet thrown at decidedly non-socialist liberals like President Barack Obama. A mass socialist movement remained out of reach.
Bernie Sanders helped change that. He showed that there was actually a hunger in American life for a critique of capitalism when it was attached to a bold and credible policy agenda for wealth redistribution and working-class empowerment. He called his politics “democratic socialism.” Americans were supposed to be repelled by politicians like him who railed against millionaires and billionaires, and immune to exhortations to unite and fight along class lines. Yet here was a presidential candidate vying for the nomination of a major US political party, giving the party elite a run for their money, and putting