He favored nationalization of industry in the 1970s, and he defended Ortega and Cuba in the 1980s.
By Elliot Kaufman Feb. 2, 2020 3:04 pm ET
Bernie Sanders in 1981. Photo: Donna Light/Associated PressAgree or disagree with Bernie Sanders, at least he’s consistent—or so he claims. “Having a long record,” the Vermont senator said in October, “gives people the understanding that these ideas that I’m talking about—they are in my guts. They are in my heart. This is who I am as a human being, and it ain’t gonna change.”
That’s true up to a point. During half a century in public life, Mr. Sanders has dependably denounced “oligarchy” and proclaimed himself a “democratic socialist.” But his definition of the term has radically changed. Last year he said his goal was “an economy in which you have wealth being created by the private sector, but you have a fair distribution of that wealth.” He added: “I think that countries like Denmark and Sweden do very well.”
He had a different vision in the 1970s, when he sought statewide office four times as the nominee of the Liberty Union Party of Vermont. Campaigning for U.S. Senate in 1971, he demanded the nationalization of utilities. In 1973 he proposed a federal takeover of “the entire energy industry,” and in 1974 he wanted a 100% tax on all income above $1 million. In 1976 he asserted that workers needed to “take immediate control of the economy if we are to survive” and called for “public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries.” He had a plan for “public control over capital.” As late as 1987 he asserted that “democracy means public ownership of the major means of production.”
By the time Mr. Sanders won his first election—as mayor of Burlington, Vt., in 1981—he had become an independent. He had also begun a dalliance with the Socialist Workers Party, a communist group that had followed Leon Trotsky. Mr. Sanders endorsed the SWP’s presidential nominee in 1980 and 1984, spoke at SWP campaign rallies during that period, and in 1980 was part of its slate of would-be presidential electors.
The SWP promoted a foreign policy openly hostile to U.S. interests, and Mr. Sanders expressly endorsed some aspects of it. Last year the Washington Examiner quoted him from a 1980 press release: “I fully support the SWP’s continued defense of the Cuban revolution.” The party even backed Iran’s new theocracy while it was holding U.S. Embassy personnel hostage. In a 1979 speech, presidential nominee Andrew Pulley said: “Who are these hostages anyway? Well, we can be sure that many of them are simply spies . . . or people assigned to protect the spies.”
In 1985 Mayor Sanders visited Nicaragua. On returning, he called its Soviet-backed leader, Daniel Ortega, “impressive” and said it “makes sense” for the regime to suppress newspapers given the threat from the U.S.-supported Contra insurgency.
Mr. Sanders’s 1997 memoir, “Outsider in the House,” makes no mention of the SWP, and his governing style as mayor was not so radical. “Mr. Sanders did not campaign as a Socialist,” the New York Times reported in 1981, quoting the mayor-elect: “I’m not going to war with the city’s financial and business community.” In “Why Bernie Sanders Matters” (2015), biographer Harry Jaffe writes that as a candidate “Sanders went out of his way to assure homeowners he would not raise their taxes.” Perhaps because he knew Burlington’s aldermen—and the voters—would balk at radical domestic measures, he projected his ideological ambitions abroad. If he did that as president, the consequences would be real.
He has tempered his enthusiasm for leftist Third World tyrants but remains cagey. Mr. Ortega left power in 1990 but returned in 2007. “He has since become a dictator, and I think that’s unfortunate,” Mr. Sanders said last month. Critics knew that in the ’80s. Earlier he cast his previous support as simple antiwar activism: “I plead guilty to, throughout my adult life, doing everything that I can to prevent war and destruction.” And in 2016 he said: “When I talk about democratic socialism, I’m not talking about Venezuela, I’m not talking about Cuba.” That wasn’t always the case.
After three decades in Congress, he has settled on a populist vision that fits in on the Democratic left. In a major speech last June elaborating his idea of socialism, he cast himself in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt and urged listeners to “reclaim our democracy by having the courage to take on the powerful corporate interests whose greed is destroying the social and economic fabric of our country.” He enumerated a series of positive rights—to “quality health care,” “as much education as one needs,” “a good job that pays a living wage,” “affordable housing,” “a secure retirement” and “a clean environment.” But he said nothing about state control over the means of production or Fidel Castro’s revolution.
“The world has come around to see things like he does,” longtime Sanders staffer Phil Fiermonte told Mr. Jaffe in 2015. Maybe, but Mr. Sanders has come around further, to judge by his own words. Given what he used to stand for, inconsistency wouldn’t be his greatest fault.
Mr. Kaufman is an assistant editorial features editor at the Journal.