Bernie Sanders says he’s another FDR, but he's more closely related to the early 20th-century labor leader who ran for the presidency five times as a Socialist.
Flirting with guests and invoking Nazi analogies to describe primary results has reportedly cost Chris Matthews his job as host of MSNBC’s “Hardball.” Fair enough, but know that the show’s audience is also losing that increasingly rare species: a political commentator who is willing to tell the party base what he really thinks, even if it isn’t what the base wants to hear. And in that respect, the timing of Mr. Matthews’s exit is unfortunate.
I think back to the summer of 2015, when Bernie Sanders was challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. The Vermont senator was drawing the biggest crowds of anyone in either party—more than 27,000 at a stop in Los Angeles; 15,000 in Seattle; 28,000 in Portland, Ore. The fix was already in for Mrs. Clinton, the predetermined choice of the Democratic establishment, but Mr. Matthews was nevertheless alarmed by the party’s unabashed enthusiasm for an avowed socialist.
He invited onto his show the head of the Democratic National Committee at the time, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and asked her to explain “the difference between a Democrat and a socialist.” She ducked the question and said she wanted to discuss the difference between Democrats and Republicans instead. But Mr. Matthews pressed her. “I used to think there was a big difference,” he replied. “What do you think it is? A Democrat like Hillary and a socialist like Bernie Sanders.” Alas, Mr. Matthews never got an answer, and the question remains as relevant as ever.
Bernie is now back. He’s raising cash and once again thrilling huge numbers of voters under the banner of the Democratic Party. He’s leading the delegate count and charting a viable course to the nomination. A “Stop Bernie” movement led by party officials is mobilizing, and the decisions of Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to quit the race and back Joe Biden might give it some momentum. But the country’s most popular Democrat, Barack Obama, hasn’t weighed in yet, and millions have already cast early ballots. Nor is there any certainty that thwarting Mr. Sanders will help Democrats in November, since many of his supporters may decide to stay home on Election Day rather than back one of his rivals.
Mr. Sanders suggests he’s another Franklin D. Roosevelt, but FDR didn’t self-identify as a socialist or spend his political career challenging the Democratic Party establishment. Mr. Sanders’s policy positions put him closer to Eugene V. Debs, a prominent labor leader in the early 1900s. Like Mr. Sanders, Debs was an antiwar activist who opposed capitalism, wanted more wealth redistribution, and played the “working class” off against the “elites.” Mr. Sanders has called Debs “a socialist, a revolutionary and probably the most effective and popular leader that the American working class has ever had.” The Socialist Party of America nominated Debs for president five times between 1900 and 1920. He never won a state but did garner 6% of the vote in 1912.
Whatever small interest voters had in socialism got even smaller in the run-up to World War II. The Socialist Party won only 2% of the vote in 1932 and less than 1% four years later. The New Deal and Great Society programs swelled the size of government, but they didn’t make the socialist label any more popular. When Mr. Sanders first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1972 as a candidate of the socialist Liberty Union Party, he managed 2% of the vote. He would lose several more statewide races before becoming mayor of Burlington in 1981. He won a seat in Congress as an independent in 1990 and became only the third socialist ever elected to the U.S. House. The second one left office in 1929.
The left’s current flirtation with socialism reflects in part the failure of Democrats to address the economic concerns of their voters, and it’s of a piece with the right-wing populism that put the GOP through the wringer four years ago and landed Donald Trump in the White House. Mr. Sanders is betting that millions of Democrats thought President Obama was too conservative. He’s hoping that promises to make more stuff “free”—health care, higher education, housing—will entice Americans to accept enormous constraints on private enterprise and unprecedented government intervention in their lives.
These days, the senator prefers to cite Scandinavia as a model for his brand of socialism. But Sweden has one of the most market-oriented economies in the world, and Mr. Sanders has spent the better part of three decades praising not the Swedes but rather the authoritarian regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua and aspects of life in the Soviet Union. Mr. Sanders’s gambit is that most liberals in 2020 can’t tell you the difference between a Democrat and socialist—and that the rest simply don’t care.
This piece first appeared at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal