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By Dustin Guastella
Senator Bernie Sanders has been mulling over a presidential run for the past few months and is set to make an announcement this week or next about his potential candidacy. Bernie, a self-proclaimed and vocal socialist, is a talented campaigner, a remarkably successful politician and broadly popular across the ideological spectrum in his home state. Should he decide to run, socialists need to play an active role in building his campaign, but we also need to think carefully about why a Bernie candidacy is important and how socialists should best support and shape such a campaign. For starters, I don’t think socialists should work for Bernie in the hopes of “reclaiming” the Democratic Party (when was it ours by yellow cabs” href=”http://www.dsausa.org/democratic_left#”>to begin with?). Further, Bernie’s presidential run shouldn’t be seen as a means to pull Clinton to the left, a failing strategy for sure.
The real benefit to building a viable campaign for Sanders in 2016 is the possibility of uniting burgeoning social movements and newly radicalized youth into an organized force. With the help of thousands of grassroots activists, Bernie could run an effective and inspiring campaign. It would be a chance for leftists to flex our electoral muscles and for millions to see that there is an alternative to the policies of neoliberal capitalism. If we’re smart, a Sanders presidential campaign could help us build DSA nationally while uniting coalition forces at the local level that could be mobilized for future socialist campaigns. Using Sanders as a mouthpiece and tribune, we could promote socialist analyses and bring issues like income inequality and workplace democracy into national political debates – and we could do all this not as good liberals but as socialists.
Source: The Case for Bernie: Part One
