If I Run

By Bernie Sanders, Reader Supported News

29 December 18

et me take this opportunity to wish you a very happy holiday season and a wonderful new year.

Whenever I am asked about running for president in 2020, I answer that if I am the best candidate to beat Donald Trump, then I will probably run. That is the truth.

If that happens, the political, financial and media elite of this country will stop at nothing to defeat us. You know that. We’ve lived through it together once before. Our ideas terrify them. So what they will do is try to divide us up with attacks — some old, some new — and our political opponents will spend obscene sums of money on ads to defeat us.

I just did not expect the attack ads to begin before I even made a decision. But they have…

Right now, a group of Wall Street Democrats known as the Third Way is running ads in early primary states — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — calling me out by name and saying our ideas, like Medicare for all, are a path to defeat in 2020.

They not only want to discourage or defeat a Sanders candidacy, they want to make sure that the progressive agenda is not advanced by anyone. They want us to go back to their failed corporate approach which has led to a massive level of income and wealth inequality, a bloated military budget and a failure to address the crises of climate change, a broken criminal justice system and inhumane immigration policies.

Last time we ran, we made the financial elite pay a price for their attacks on our progressive agenda. It is just as important we do it again today.

Our agenda terrifies the political and financial establishment of this country.

But the truth is, their agenda should terrify all of us.

Our ideas will lift people out of poverty, they will guarantee health care as a right for every man, woman and child, and they will make certain that every person in this country with the ability and the desire can get the education they need, regardless of the income of their family.

Ours is not a radical agenda. It's the agenda the American people want.

Their agenda, paid for by wealthy campaign contributors, has led to record levels of inequality, a health care system that costs more per capita than any other developed nation while leaving millions uninsured and underinsured, and grotesque amounts of student debt that rob many of our young people of their futures.

Theirs is the agenda that made Donald Trump possible. Ours is the agenda that will defeat him.

And that’s why it’s so important progressives stand up to their attacks today:

Make a $50 donation to our campaign as a way of saying we will NOT let the political and financial elite scare candidates from supporting a progressive agenda. Make them pay a price for their attacks.

In 2016 we faced the kitchen sink. If we run again, you should expect no less. But the political revolution is stronger and larger than ever, and they will be no match for us if we’re in this fight together.

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

How This Year's Wins for Democracy Set Us Up for a Bold, Hopeful 2019

By Chris Winters, YES! Magazine

28 December 18

Our fragile democracy needs the will of the people to protect it, but the events of 2018 prove that Americans are up to the challenge.

hose of us constantly assessing the national political scene could be forgiven for looking at the coming year with more than a bit of trepidation. True, new Democratic control of the House of Representatives means we might get the investigations of President Trump that Republicans have refused to do.

And as a fairly bleak 2018 comes to a close, we’re getting a taste of what might be more to come: a continuing shutdown of the federal government over funding for a border wall, simmering international crises that threaten to drag in the U.S. and an administration untested by a major crisis, and partisan monkey business in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina, where Republicans are moving to strip power from offices won by incoming Democrats.

The big unknown is special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign, administration, and businesses and their connections to Russia—and how the president might react to each new drip of information to trickle out of the locked grand jury courtrooms.

So yes, it could be a very bad year.

But wait.

We could choose to look at the coming year not as a pot of misery getting ready to boil over. With the right attitude, you might see—if you squint—that the proverbial glass is half-full of hope. Some things are going in the right direction. 

These past two years have energized a wide swath of sensible people who have come to realize that apathy is unacceptable in the face of an administration determined to corrupt the rule of law and strip vulnerable populations of their rights. That energy has borne fruit: a historic midterm transfer of power in the House of Representatives, with 40 seats changing from Republican to Democrat. A similar upheaval is taking place at the state level, with seven governorships and five legislative chambers also going blue.

That awakened activism isn’t going away, especially since the 2020 presidential election is going to get started next summer.

While it is true that Trump’s core supporters haven’t wavered in their adulation, much of that support is reinforced by a steady media diet that starts at Fox News and goes further right. But reality has a way of penetrating even the most hermetically sealed of information bubbles. Even Trump’s cheerleaders on the morning Fox and Friends show called him out loudly in a few cases, most recently for his announcement that we were pulling troops from Syria without making contingency plans for an orderly withdrawal—or even notifying our allies who will be left without support.

There were quieter successes, too, that bode well for the year in front of us. Many of those were driven in large part by a court system that has resisted many attempts to corrupt justice. A federal judge in December upheld Maine’s ranked-choice elections. That points the way to fairer elections, ensuring that third-party votes don’t become spoilers. The judge ruled that states have wide leeway to interpret the Constitution, and ranked-choice voting falls squarely within that purview. Some states already are following Maine’s example: Utah plans to use ranked-choice voting in local elections in 2019.

The same goes for redistricting, as more states look at the dysfunction created by blatant partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina and elsewhere and decide to give the task to some sort of independent body. Also in the Tarheel State, a federal judge blocked the state’s attempt to purge voters from the rolls en masse through a loophole in the law.

And speaking of voting rights: Though the administration uses the unsubstantiated shibboleth of voter fraud to justify preemptively stripping poor people and people of color of the vote, and states impose onerous ID requirements that make it hard for them to register, those have had the opposite effect, spurring people to get even more involved in voter registration.

One of the most blatant attempts at vote suppression was a North Dakota law passed late in the midterm election cycle that required people registering to vote to have a street address, seemingly tailor-made to disenfranchise the state’s sizable Native American communities. It backfired. Tribes worked to ensure that those living even on the remotest parts of reservations would be able to register to vote. They succeeded in force, by some estimates setting voter participation records in the state.

And so we begin the new year with greater resolve and tools to safeguard our democracy.

Our ongoing humanitarian crisis on the Mexico border continues. Two children died in U.S. custody. The courts have stepped in, however, and are starting to reject some of the administration’s attempts to keep refugees out. In November, a federal judge rejected a plan that would have prevented people who entered the country illegally from seeking asylum. In December, yet another judge blocked the administration from denying asylum to people in the migrant caravan fleeing domestic abuse or gang violence in their home countries.

These judges are not just holding back the tide of autocracy, but they’re advancing the cause of justice one small court ruling at a time.

For so many reasons—which I won’t list here because this is a glass-half-full uplifting look at the year ahead, after all—the U.S.’s first experience with a modern autocrat looks likely to end in a chaotic implosion. But the Trump years have demonstrated that, while our democracy is a fragile thing that needs the force of law and the will of the people to protect it, Americans have been rising to and meeting that challenge.

Some of our leaders in Washington, D.C., are starting to recognize that.