The Democratic Party is once again in the wilderness. Donald Trump won not only the presidential election but the popular vote. The scale of short-term and long-term harm that is about to be unleashed on our communities, our country, and our planet is genuinely difficult to comprehend. To work our way out of this hell, it should be clear that Democrats need to chart a new path.
What does that path look like? There is one man in particular whose ideas need to be reckoned with: Bernie Sanders. Bernie has spent his entire career telling the same story about America, and it may just be the antidote to the one that Donald Trump successfully wielded in his return to power. And it’s not just his fans who are saying so. David Brooks, formerly one of Bernie Sanders’s most vehement centrist critics, admitted this week that “maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders–style disruption—something that will make people like me uncomfortable.”
Donald Trump won this election by winning the working class, massively improving his margins among voters without college degrees, young men, and Latinos. These are precisely the groups that Sanders managed to inspire and win in each of his campaigns. Trump dominated the online and new media ecosystem exemplified by Joe Rogan; in 2020, Bernie went on Rogan’s show and won him over. Trump ran on rage, performing solidarity with the many Americans who feel anger right now; Bernie, too, is extremely angry, and he’s never been afraid to show it.
But this is perhaps the most vital thing to understand about Sanders’s approach. Human beings need stories. Stories, to be compelling—to anyone, but especially to people who are unhappyz—need villains. Trump has a story that features clear villains; like every fascist and rightwing authoritarian before him, he directs, channels, and amplifies voters’ anger towards groups that are easy to scapegoat, like immigrants and transgender people, as well as institutions that they feel have failed them, like the elites of both the Democratic and Republican parties. It’s simple, it’s visceral, and it works. Or at least, it works in a vacuum, when unhappy voters are not offered any other story about why their lives are harder, less secure, or more painful than they should be.
There’s no doubt that Biden’s outlook on matters of labor and industrial policy was a massive improvement on the Obama years. But Biden’s term also saw the end of Covid-era expansions of the child tax credit, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance, the reappointment of an austerity-focused Federal Reserve chairman, and a failure to take decisive action as corporations raised the cost of groceries, rent, and other basic goods. Perhaps most importantly, as Biden faded from view as the consequences of his advanced age grew more prominent, he ceased to be an effective storyteller for his own ideas. Trump, for all of his own cognitive lapses, tirelessly kept at one thing: He made working-class people central to his message, not an afterthought. He successfully revived the idea that he could break the corrupt wheel of elite politics. And he outworked Harris in telling a story that made working people feel important.
Bernie has, throughout his entire career, managed to tell similarly simple and visceral stories that give status and importance to the very voters Democrats are losing. He laid that story out quite clearly in the postelection analysis he released this week, writing that while “the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
Like Trump, Bernie’s villains are clear. They’re the billionaires “doing phenomenally well” while “60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck”; the tech executives making “a bad situation even worse”; the health insurers and Big Pharma companies forcing us to pay “the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs”; the war machine spending “billions funding the extremist Netanyahu government’s all out war against the Palestinian people”; and, of course, the “big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party.”
That is a compelling alternative explanation for the frustrations working people are feeling. And when you have a compelling alternative explanation, you don’t need to accept your opponents’ narrative framework. Regardless of the years of Democratic elites weaponizing identity politics against Bernie because of his class-first approach, Bernie has never thrown immigrants and trans folks under the bus, as many Democrats have been eager to do this cycle. What Bernie does instead is center economic issues that have majoritarian support—because the best response to attacks on vulnerable groups is a counternarrative that redirects anger to the real villains, the oligarchs and corporate crooks that are actually making people’s lives worse.
This election provided a great deal of evidence of the electoral benefits of Bernie’s style of economic populism in the kinds of districts and states that Democrats need to contest. Many of the candidates who outshone Harris were to some degree in this mold, including some that fell short but still made massive inroads, like Dan Osborn, the independent union leader and industrial mechanic running against Republican Senator Deb Fischer in Nebraska. Osborn outperformed Harris’s margin by a whopping 14 points, with a campaign that focused relentlessly on calling out concentrated corporate power, special interest money in politics, and D.C. corruption. And Sherrod Brown, a longtime populist crusader against free trade deals whose loss this week was heartbreaking, still outperformed Harris’s Ohio margin by eight points.
There’s international evidence as well. Much has been made—and justifiably so—of the transnational anti-incumbent environment in the post-Covid era. But these comparisons always seem to conveniently leave out Mexico. Earlier this year, Mexico’s former president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a left-leaning populist known as AMLO who has frequently been called “Mexico’s Bernie Sanders,” left office with sky-high approval ratings after successfully handing the presidency to his chosen successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, a Jewish climate scientist who is now serving as Mexico’s first woman president after winning in a landslide. Mexico suffered under significant inflation just like the rest of the world. But there was no room for a right-wing demagogue to take advantage of rising prices, because that populist space was already filled.
Naturally, AMLO isn’t perfect; neither is Sanders. But he points to a future where liberal politics doesn’t have to be weighed down by the baggage of socially elite condescension or the association with a broken status quo that Donald Trump was able to so effectively weaponize against the Harris campaign. In a Democratic Party strewn with disproven theories of how we can win—tack to the center, win over Dick Cheney Republicans, get billionaires like Mark Cuban on our side, align ourselves with the national security blob, etc.—a politics that combines anti-establishment mores and class-conscious economic populism can offer a compelling alternate vision of the world that can compete well against and perhaps ultimately defeat Trump’s antisocial, anti-inclusive, fascistic, authoritarian populism.
Obviously, Sanders is not going to be the Democrats’ 2028 presidential nominee. If there’s one other lesson we hopefully will learn from this catastrophe, it’s that the Democratic Party needs to begin allowing a new generation of leaders to take the baton. But on every major strategic decision Democrats make over the next four years—like, for example, who replaces the cartoonishly inept and hackish Jaime Harrison as our next Democratic National Committee chair—a little Sanders-style disruption, that might make the elites in the Democratic party uncomfortable, should be the order of the day. When Senate Democrats elect their leadership in the new term, Bernie should have a key role in developing the new team. And as Democrats formulate their approach to the midterms—choosing which legislative battles to prioritize, which kinds of candidates to recruit, which electoral message to center—winning back the working class voters who’ve always been key to putting Democrats in the White House should be at the center of every decision.
The battle for America’s—and humanity’s—future is not over. We’ve experienced a crushing defeat. But we’re not out of the fight. Republicans will overreach over the next few years with extremist policies and unpopular corruption. There will be openings for Democrats. But if we continue letting the same pocket-lining Democratic consultants keep us on our current trajectory—as a party shedding working-class support in exchange for higher-income and highly educated voters, in a country in which two-thirds of Americans do not have college degrees—we will never claw our way out of this hell. The numbers simply do not add up. Democrats have an opportunity now, and an obligation, to choose a different course. They’re fortunate enough to have a leader who’s been modeling it for decades.
