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Bernie Sanders plunges into civil war over the future of the Democratic Party, criticizing his “corporate” colleagues who blamed progressive politics for their string of losses in the 2020 election.
“With the blame game breaking out, corporate Democrats are attacking so-called far-left policies like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal for electoral defeats in the House and Senate,” Sanders wrote in an editorial for USA Today. “They are dead wrong.”
While Democrats will retain control of the House, their majority will shrink by at least six seats next year, making it the thinnest in decades. At the same time, Democrats have won just one Senate seat, where scrutiny rests on two January races in Georgia. If the Democratic candidates win those two races, they’ll get a 50-50 split, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris able to vote for a tiebreaker.
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In the week after the election, Democrats passed the blame on who was ultimately responsible for mediocrity. The moderates pointed the finger at their colleagues who adopted the “movement to defound the police” and not to push back socialism harder.
But progressives have argued that these liberal policies help galvanize the party base and are popular among the general electorate – a sentiment that Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, echoed.
2020 presidential candidates Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, left, Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent from Vermont, and former Vice President Joe Biden, arrive on stage ahead of the Democratic presidential debate in Charleston, Carolina South, in February 2020. Photographer: Alice Keeney / Bloomberg via Getty Images
Sanders, who ran for president in 2016 and 2020, noted that 112 Medicare-for-all co-sponsors were on the ballot last week and they all won their races. Ninety-eight Green New Deal co-sponsors were in contention, and only one lost.
“It turns out that supporting universal healthcare during a pandemic and making major investments in renewable energy as we face the existential threat of climate change to our planet is not just good public policy,” he wrote. “It is also good politics.”
The Vermont senator, an independent who is Caucasian with Democrats, also pointed to progressive voting initiatives that have passed last week, including a minimum wage hike of $ 15 an hour in Florida; 12 weeks of paid family leave in Colorado; the legalization of marijuana in New Jersey, Arizona, Montana and South Dakota; and a tax increase on Arizonans earning more than $ 250,000.
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“The American people are fed up with billionaires and Wall Street getting a lot richer, while veterans sleep rough, our infrastructure crumbles and kids drop out of school deeply in debt,” Sanders said. “They want a government that works for everyone, not just a few. It’s the right thing to do, it’s the moral thing to do and, for the Democratic Party, it’s the way to win elections. . “
The battle between progressives and moderates is likely to intensify in the coming weeks as President-elect Joe Biden seeks to build his cabinet. Progressives pushed Biden to bring in Sanders as Secretary of Labor, a job the senator indicated he was prepared to take on.
“What is true is that I want to do whatever I can to protect the working families of this country who are under enormous duress right now. Whether it is in the Senate, whether it is in the administration Biden, who knows? ” Sanders said during an appearance on CNN. “Let’s see how this plays out.”
Still, Democrats have privately admitted that if Republicans retain control of the Senate and Mitch McConnell remains the majority leader, progressives have no chance of confirmation.
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