Portside

'Mr. President, the stroke of your pen can have transformative impact for millions of workers.'

Two weeks ago in Chicago, 200 political activists from a variety of independent political organizations, as well as individual activists, carried out a rich discussion and an amicable debate about how to collaborate in the work of building a large political alternative to the left of the Democratic Party. Just days before, Bernie Sanders, declared his candidacy, running within the Democratic Party as a socialist. Here are two views on left electoral politics.

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Sanders’s views are in sync with a longstanding American socialist tradition. Throughout our history, some of the nation’s most influential activists and thinkers, such as Jane Addams, John Dewey, Helen Keller, W.E.B. DuBois, Albert Einstein, Walter Reuther, Martin Luther King, and Gloria Steinem, embraced socialism.

Sanders’ candidacy is less a test of the power of the populist message than a test of populist energy and independence. The biggest obstacle is less to convince voters that he’s right than to convince them that he’s a serious candidate, worth supporting. He has to find ways to get a hearing. And he has to find ways to overcome understandable cynicism. That is the challenge to the emerging populist movements.

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The Democratic Party finds itself with some serious divides that ought to be settled by the electorate. Some are clear-cut policy differences, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an enormous free-trade agreement with Pacific Rim nations that Warren opposes and Clinton backs. The big-picture debate on financial regulation and income inequality is what's most at peril if the Democratic primaries come and go without top-notch opponents for Clinton.

Senator Bernie Sanders proposes raising the percentage of income subject to the payroll tax. “You can start at $250,000,” he says, “and what the Social Security Administration has told us, their actuary has told us, is that if you do that, you’re going to make Social Security solvent for the next 40 years on top of the 18 years it’s solvent. “

Bernie Sanders’s announcement may well signal a turning point in the domestic politics of Mideast policy. Despite his strong progressive vision, Sanders has in the past been reluctant to criticize Israel. He, like many on the American left, held up Israel in general as a progressive cause, regardless of the country’s colonial actions in the Palestinian West Bank or its illegal blockade of Gaza.

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