Others pay lip service to much-needed reforms as good ideas but claim they are politically impossible, without even fighting for them. This group, to which many liberal American politicians today belong, might say they support some social welfare programs. But they typically insist on complicated, divisive, and often degrading means testing to ensure that only those who “deserve” the benefits get them—all for programs that are woefully insufficient even for those who do receive the benefits. They write off universal social programs as a fantasy. Rahm Emanuel, the Democratic former Chicago mayor and chief of staff for presidents Clinton and Obama who champions the party’s pro-corporate, rightward turn every opportunity he gets, wrote in an October 2019 op-ed against Medicare for All, “Our approach to health care needs to be centered on political reality, not a pipe dream.” After the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton famously denigrated Bernie Sanders’s argument for Medicare for All or free college tuition for all as akin to a promise of giving every American a pony.
With so many politicians dismissing transformative political change in this way, it’s no surprise that many working-class people are resigned to a diminished quality of life. A class-struggle politician aims to turn that resignation into hope and determination. This is what we mean by “raising the expectations of the working class.”
A good example of this in recent decades is the fight for single-payer health care. When Sanders first introduced his version of a single-payer bill to Congress in 1993, he said, “The American people believe that health care must be a right of all citizens and not just the privilege of the wealthy.” He supported the policy before introducing the bill and has supported it since, throughout entire decades during which it was written off as a fantasy. On the campaign trail in 2016, he used his massive platform to convince people that working-class Americans deserve Medicare for All, and that it is completely politically possible to achieve it, as long as ordinary people and politicians alike are prepared to fight for it.
We haven’t won Medicare for All yet, but as overwhelming numbers of Americans now support it—recent polls have regularly found that majorities of people and even occasional majorities of Republicans back a universal public health insurance program—Sanders’s approach has been vindicated.
There’s no better personal example of this transformation in action than the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the millennial socialist who seemingly out of nowhere won a race for the House of Representatives in 2018. At an October 2019 Sanders rally in Queens, New York, in front of twenty-six thousand people gathered on a sunny day in front of the East River, the Manhattan skyline in the background, Ocasio-Cortez told a story:
Last February I was working as a waitress in downtown Manhattan … I didn’t have health care, I wasn’t being paid a living wage, and I didn’t think that I deserved any of those things. Because that is the script that we tell working people here and all over this country, that your inherent worth and value as a human being is dependent on an income that another person decided to underpay us. But what we’re here to do is to turn around that very basic logic.
It wasn’t until I heard of a man by the name of Bernie Sanders that I began to question and assert and recognize my inherent value as a human being that deserves health care, housing, education, and a living wage.
Sanders did not wait until the idea for Medicare for All had been fully poll-tested and trial-ballooned before beginning to agitate for it. Instead, he stepped out ahead of the populace. He made demands that were ambitious and struck a chord with people and spoke to their suffering—spoke to, for example, the hardship of underpaid young workers like Ocasio-Cortez. In the process, he expanded the horizon of people’s political imaginations.
Still, it’s not enough to make ambitious demands. A class-struggle politician also has to explain why those demands haven’t been met, focusing on the obstacles thrown up by the ruling class and on the underlying dynamics of capitalism that empower the wealthy few. They must use every opportunity they can to tell a new story about society, one that offers an explanation for why so many people suffer while a select few enjoy their lives in relative comfort. This new story has an antagonist and a protagonist: the bad guy is the tiny capitalist class, and the good guy is the huge and diverse working class.
For a class-struggle politician, the adversary does not go unnamed. As one corporate lobbyist complained in May 2019 in the New York Times, “To a hammer, everything is a nail. And to Sanders, everything is an issue created by millionaires and billionaires.” This clarifying and polarizing message is a very good thing indeed—both because it happens to be true (the rich have incredible control over our lives and everything that transpires on our planet, and are the ones responsible for most of our worst ills), and because it’s extremely effective political communication.
Politicians from both major parties routinely issue vague calls for unity and harmony. But class-struggle politicians know that class conflict will never disappear under capitalism—it’s inherent to it. The only question is whether the working class will succeed in fighting back. So they don’t paper over conflict. They call instead for a specific type of unity: that of the working class in struggle against a common enemy.
Among the working class, class-struggle politicians urge solidarity across lines of difference. Bernie Sanders explained this in a speech at that same October 2019 rally, when he asked the 26,000 in attendance to look around them and identify someone who seemed different from themselves. “Are you willing to fight for that person who you don’t even know as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself?” he asked. “Are you willing to fight for young people drowning in student debt even if you are not? Are you willing to fight to ensure that every American has health care as a human right even if you have good health care? Are you willing to fight for frightened immigrant neighbors even if you are native born?”
Finally, a class-struggle politician is someone who understands that the only way to actually make lasting change is to build and harness the power of working people outside the state. They know that even when they’re in office, they will be up against the formidable power of the capitalist class. To truly transform society, they understand that they need huge numbers of ordinary people to build mass movements that can exert pressure of their own.
As Sanders put it in an October 2019 interview with CNBC’s John Harwood:
BERNIE SANDERS: Right now you have a Congress and a White House that are dominated by a corporate elite who have unbelievable amounts of money and influence over the political and economic life of this country. I’m not going to be dominated by those guys. I will take them on and I’ll beat them.
The way we beat them is with the understanding that real change has never taken place without millions of people standing up and demanding that change. That is the history of the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the gay movement, the environmental movement. I will not only be commander in chief of the military, I will be organizer in chief. I will be organizing with a strong grassroots movement.
We already have the nucleus. It’ll be involving the labor unions, the African American communities, the Latino community, the young people of this country. All people who believe in justice, working-class people, who are prepared to stand up and fight and take on the corporate elite …
JOHN HARWOOD: But even if you get elected, even if it’s successful to the point that Democrats win a small majority in the Senate, is [conservative Democrat and West Virginia senator] Joe Manchin going to vote for your program? Is [conservative Democrat and Montana senator] Jon Tester going to vote for your program?
BERNIE SANDERS: Yeah. Damn right they will. You know why? We’re going to go to West Virginia.
Your average politician sits around and he or she thinks, “Let’s see. If I do this, I’m going to have the big money interests putting 30-second ads against me. So I’d better not do it.” But now