Bernie Sanders invokes FDR, MLK in passionate defense of socialism

It won’t receive the coverage it deserves, because Sanders doesn’t fit neatly into the media’s preferred narratives, but it was significant nevertheless.

The defense of Democratic socialism did not entirely abandon the rest of the world.

Sanders has also cited Denmark as a place where democratic socialism has worked. “I really, really wanted to come”, said Sonja Erchak, a 19-year-old Georgetown sophomore, while standing outside waiting for the speech to start.

Following the speech, Seattle city council member Kshama Sawant – a member of the Socialist Alternative Party and the second-most prominent elected socialist in the US after Sanders – applauded Sanders for offering “a unique opportunity to spread socialist ideas to a new generation”.

‘Unemployment insurance…abolishing child labor…the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining…strong banking regulations, deposit insurance, and job programs that put millions of people to work were all described, in one way or another, as “socialist.”‘ he said.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders told Los Angeles Times author Sam Pizzigati that his op-ed outlining Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plan for a 100% “war super tax” on the rich was something that “needed to be explored and considered”. Our economy has been steadily deregulated since the 1980s, when neoliberalism first triumphed under President Reagan. Corporations run the country and write the laws now. The oil companies? Wall Street? He would like single-payer health care.

Presidential frontrunner Bernie Sanders has never shied away from calling himself a “democratic socialist” – a term that became a slur in post-WWII American politics – despite being widely criticized for endorsing his political philosophy. “In fact, it used to exist in the United States”. “Necessitous men are not free men”, Sanders quoted Roosevelt. That was Roosevelts vision 70 years ago. “It is my vision today”, Sanders said in a speech at Georgetown University. “But at the same time, we will rebuild the disappearing middle class of this country”.

He also sought to join the dots between his economic principles and a foreign policy that many critics have said is comparatively under-developed during the campaign.

People are not truly free when they are unable to feed their family.

The Sanders campaign was encouraging people to use the social media hashtag #BernieAtGU to respond to the speech or explain what “economic and social justice” means to them. “People are not truly free when they are unemployed or underpaid, or when they are exhausted by working long hours”, Sanders said.

Thirty years later, in the 1960s, President Johnson passed Medicare and Medicaid to provide health care to millions of senior citizens and families with children, persons with disabilities and a few of the most vulnerable people in this county.

The so-called “socialist” programs liberate the middle class from the basic necessities of life. This isn’t communism – it’s what most of the free, industrialized world looks like. “I don’t believe government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production”, he said, thus disavowing the strict Marxist definition of socialism with a dose of grandfatherly humor.

“Let me define for you, simply and straightforwardly, what democratic socialism means to me”, Sanders said. It’s about creating a government in which influence doesn’t scale with capital. His ambitions are too modest to be called revolutionary.

Sanders also took a veiled dig at Clinton, whose surrogates have tarred him in the press for his “extreme” socialist views. “It just so happened we happened to be the first people”.

Sanders began his speech-the text of the prepared remarks is here-with a throwback to Franklin Roosevelt.

He’ll be marginalized for saying these things. “Remember, FDR won four times as essentially a democratic socialist”. If Sanders’s platform is extreme, it’s because the country has been transformed in the last three decades by capitalist vultures with no vision of or interest in the common good.

Yet, Sanders is confident that the race isn’t over.

Anticipation for Sanders’ was running high at the Jesuit university.

What about terrorism? Sanders doesn’t have a lot of foreign policy experience and he applied to be a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. At a campaign rally in Cleveland last week, Sanders tacked on a chunk about the refugee debate onto his normal, economically-focused stump speech. And in Sanders telling, it’s only the “democratic” part of that phrase that is truly radical.