David Michael Miller
In July, when Bernie Sanders drew 10,000 people to the Dane County Coliseum, it was the biggest turnout any presidential candidate had seen so far in the run-up to the 2016 elections. Sanders has broken his own record several times since then.
Crowds of more than 25,000 greeted Sanders in Los Angeles and Portland, chanting and waving signs, turning the 73-year-old socialist senator from Vermont into a rock star.
Unlike Donald Trump, who is light on policy and big on ego, Sanders is an unlikely cult figure. His speeches are heavy on facts and tend toward the dire. “The middle class in this country has been disappearing for the last 40 years,” was one applause line in Madison.
But the crowds coming out to see him are moved to ecstatic appreciation by the fact that Sanders is telling them the truth.
Americans know that the middle class is shrinking, that college debt is crushing a generation of students, that we are being sold a bill of goods by candidates in both parties who equate Wall Street profits with the wellbeing of the nation.
“The American people are sick and tired of a political and economic system that benefits the wealthy and powerful,” Sanders says. “It’s grotesque that the top one-tenth of 1% owns as much wealth as the bottom 90%.”
Meanwhile, all 17 candidates in the Republican primary clown car are running on trickle-down economics. And Hillary Clinton, a former Walmart board member, has a mixed record on trade deals that have helped hollow out wages for American workers. She also continues to raise money from hedge fund managers.
Sanders, by contrast, is a breath of fresh air.
As he packs venues and picks up endorsements, including from National Nurses United and Friends of the Earth, he is also wrestling with the most significant barrier to building a big, progressive movement in this country: the challenge of bringing together white progressives and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Sanders received a lot of negative coverage for failing to respond to protesters who interrupted his speech to Netroots Nation in Phoenix last month, and he was muscled off the stage in Seattle by activists who said they represented Black Lives Matter.
But what’s notable is Sanders’ response.
He has given a series of speeches responding to the concerns of activists who have demanded justice for Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Michael Brown and other recent victims of police abuse.
He released a detailed program to deal with systemic racism.
He appointed, as his national spokesperson, Symone Sanders, an African American woman with a background in criminal justice and racial equity.
And he has been tying together his economic critique with the central issue of racism in America.
In a speech July 25 to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Baton Rouge, La., Sanders spoke directly to the Black Lives Matter movement. America, he said, must “simultaneously address the structural and institutional racism which exists in this country, while at the same time we vigorously attack the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality which is making the very rich much richer while everyone else — especially the African American community and working-class whites — are becoming poorer.” Sanders tied police violence to the “violence of economic deprivation,” and he laid out a vision for a more just society.
It remains to be seen how much Sanders can do to unite black and white people concerned about justice.
Here in Madison, as in Portland, Ore., and Burlington, Vt., white progressives who are inclined to support Sanders have lately had a rude awakening to the deep racial injustice in our communities, where we like to think of ourselves as generous, inclusive and forward-thinking.
Tony Robinson’s death in a police shooting only a couple of blocks from the Willy Street Co-op was a when-worlds-collide moment.
It prompted a lot of discussion about how Madison, frequently ranked one of the best places to live in America, is also among the worst places to raise an African American child.
If Sanders can find a way to bring together the broad and activated Black Lives Matter movement with the progressive movement for economic equality, it could be the start of something big.
The Republican Party has managed for decades to hold together a coalition of people whose interests are far less aligned.
And if tea partiers can gain enough traction to drive mainstream Republicans to the right, why shouldn’t Sanders, whose stands for universal health care, relief from college debt and a restoration of the middle class actually have majority support, make a lasting impact?
Whatever the outcome of the primary, his campaign is a good sign for progressives.
Ruth Conniff is editor of The Progressive magazine.