Sanders Says ‘Democratic Socialism’ Builds On Work Of FDR, LBJ And MLK

“And, by the way, nearly everything he proposed was called ‘socialist'”.

– Raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. ‘The very rich get much richer.

And of course the Medicare and Medicaid programs President Johnson signed into law in the 1960s are also fundamentally socialistic.

“I don’t believe in special treatment for the top 1 percent, but I do believe in equal treatment for African-Americans, who are right to proclaim the moral principle that black lives matter”, Sanders said, drawing huge applause for his use of a popular phrase denouncing police violence and social indifference to the needs of black people.

“Every program that conservatives haven’t liked for the past 40 years has been identified as a socialistic program and no one has been standing up to defend socialism”.

Sanders said in a question and answer period afterward that he is not a pacifist – he voted to go to war with Afghanistan and go after Osama bin Laden – but he does not think the US should have invaded Iraq. You know, we’ve got a rigged economy kept in place by a system of corrupt campaign finance. Bernie points this out over and over again, and he’s vilified for it, often by the people in whose interest he speaks. “Necessitous men are not free men”, Sanders quoted Roosevelt.

“I don’t believe in a few foreign “ism”, but I believe deeply in American idealism”, Sanders told the students, drawing parallels between his views and those Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr. and Pope Francis to tell to impress upon the audience how largely misunderstood the term is. “It is my vision today”, Sanders said in a speech at Georgetown University.

“We’re in no danger of having a whole bunch of Syrian refugees come to our country any time soon”, O’Malley said. “It’s time we had democratic socialism for working families, not only Wall Street, billionaires and enormous firms”, he said. The health care insurance that they have is made unaffordable by high premiums and co-pays. Sanders is directly challenging the gospel of libertarianism, which sees blind opportunity as the essence of freedom.

“People are not truly free when they are unable to feed their family”, he said before a crowd at Georgetown University. Sanders called for the establishment of healthcare as a right, tuition-free public college, comprehensive parental leave reform, and increased taxes on the wealthiest people and corporations in the United States. 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”.

Sanders has long embraced the socialist tag, and used his speech to link his values to Roosevelt’s 1944 call for a “Second Bill of Rights” with promises of well-paying jobs, housing, health care and general economic security for Americans.

“He saw tens of millions of its citizens denied 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. It’s about creating a government in which influence doesn’t scale with capital.

Sanders himself has said that if he can clarify his political philosophy, he will win the election. His ambitions are too modest to be called revolutionary. “As we develop a strongly coordinated effort, we need a commitment from these countries that the fight against ISIS takes precedence over the religious and ideological differences that hamper the kind of cooperation that we desperately need”. “It just so happened we happened to be the first people”.

He’ll be marginalized for saying these things. “This is not a radical idea”. He reinvigorated democracy. He transformed the country. Yet Sanders was on comfortable terrain as he focused the conversation on the rallying cry that has become his calling card in the presidential race.

Or even democratic socialism. These are positive signs, but the real question is whether Sanders’s ideas will persist should he lose the nomination to Clinton.

Sanders has run an extremely clean campaign only focusing on issues, and really, this doesn’t change that.

The Independent Senator turned Democratic presidential candidate began his remarks at Georgetown University by extolling the economic vision of Franklin Roosevelt.