Written by Robert Douglas   

I am both heartened and pessimistic when Bernie Sanders channels the socialistic energy of Jack London’s 1908 classic, The Iron Heel.

I’m in the Amen Corner when Sanders critiques an America ruled by a modern-day oligarchy which London called the ‘Iron Heel” because it crushed the life and soul out of the middle and working classes.

And I applaud the way the presidential hopeful tilts at Wall Street and its toadies in government.

But I fear the revolution he’s calling for may remain as unfinished as the one London's socialist protagonist — Ernest Everhard — fights for at the end of The Iron Heel.

London’s fiction purports to be a manuscript written by Everhard’s wife, Avis, recounting their role in fomenting revolution against the Iron Heel in the early years of the 20th century. Long lost, it has been found in the distant future.

At one point Everhard is elected to Congress where his legislation on unemployment relief is blocked when the House is bombed. The Socialist Party is falsely blamed and all its members are imprisoned.

“There are no Republicans nor Democrats in this House,” he says before that. “You are lickspittlers (bootlickers) and panderers of the Plutocracy. You talk verbosely in antiquated terminology of your love of liberty, and all the while you wear the scarlet livery of the Iron Heel.”

Sounds like Sanders holding forth on the need for campaign finance reform.

In fact, re-reading The Iron Heel against a backdrop of current news of a widening income gap, record bank profits, failing schools, crumbling infrastructure, protests against police brutality and widespread public cynicism because governments cater to special interest lobbies often at the expense of the common good, I find myself double-checking the publication date.

London’s 1908 analysis of everything from trade practices to corporate consolidation to a dying middle class is eerily contemporary.

And Sanders, as a self-described “democratic socialist,” has an Everhardesque message that we need a political revolution to take back our democracy from the ruling class who has bought it is resonating with many citizens feeling as disenfranchised as the people in London’s imagined world.

But Sanders’ odds of beating what some are calling a modern-day Oligarchy are as slim as Everhard’s fight against The Iron Heel of fiction.

Even if he were to win the Democratic Primary and go on to defeat Donald Trump or another Repubican nominee, his road to revolution would be met with opposition led first by a corporate media that (a century before Citizens’ United eased restrictions on campaign spending) London characterized as a “parasitic growth” whose function is to “serve the established by moulding public opinion.”

Of course, it is a stretch to draw too strong a comparison between present-day fact and fiction from the past, but an enduring quality of literature is the ability to cast a shadow of past thinking upon current events. It can help shape the way we view our reality.

We can only hope that we are not left with a similar conclusion reached by Everhard after his party came up short: “I had hoped for a peaceful victory at the ballot box. I was wrong. . . . We shall be robbed of our few remaining liberties. The Iron Heel will walk upon our faces” — as it did, literally and figuratively in London’s story.

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Robert Douglas is a former union official and former business editor for The Palm Beach Post and Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. You can contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , like him on RBDMedia.com on Facebook or follow him atRBDMediaDotCom on Twitter.​