It won’t receive the coverage it deserves, because Sanders doesn’t fit neatly into the media’s preferred narratives, but it was significant nevertheless.
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In defense of his ideology, his beliefs, his platforms, Sanders delivered what he billed a “major speech” Thursday, a defense of the term democratic socialism. Sanders joked concerning the destructive connotation of the word “socialist” in the USA.
And, by the way, nearly everything he proposed was called “socialist”.
– Raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Unemployment insurance, abolishing child labor, the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining, strong banking regulations, deposit insurance, and job programs that put millions of people to work were all described, in one way or another, as “socialist”.
And of course the Medicare and Medicaid programs President Johnson signed into law in the 1960s are also fundamentally socialistic. People are not truly free when they have no health care.
No one understood better than FDR the connection between American strength at home and our ability to defend America at home and across the world. While Sanders also said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should eventually be removed from power, he added that “our priority must be to defeat [ISIL]”.
Sanders conceded that a Democratic socialist system would include higher taxes and more taxes for corporations and the country’s wealthy elite, in addition to expanded social programs.
On education, Sanders continued to call for free tuition at public universities.
In that remarkable speech this is what Roosevelt said, and I quote: ‘We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom can not exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men”. It builds on what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said when he fought for guaranteed economic rights for all Americans. “All over the world, countries have made the determination in that all of their people are entitled to health care and I believe the time is long overdue for the United States to join the rest of the world”, he stated. It is time that we did.
Sanders described a suite of policies that he said would give people a “living wage”.
“People are not truly free when they are unable to feed their family”, he said before a crowd at Georgetown University.
Sanders said “Donald Trump and others” talking about kicking out Latinos, ‘if they want to open that door, our job is to shut that door’.
“He saw tens of millions of its citizens denied the basic necessities of life”.
Winding up his explanation of his political ideology, ‘So the next time you hear me attacked as a socialist, like tomorrow, remember this: I don’t believe government should take over…the grocery store down the street, or own the means of production.
“Democratic socialism, to me, does not just mean that we must create a nation of economic and social justice”. It’s about creating a government in which influence doesn’t scale with capital.
Bernie Sanders, often criticized for endorsing this political philosophy, explained that his view is in sync with America’s development. His ambitions are too modest to be called revolutionary. “We’re not turning our backs on women and children who have been thrown out of their own countries with the shirts on their backs”.
Our country would do well to return to being a country of, by and for We the People. The question is whether we want to be an oligarchy, which is what we’ve become.
Christian Mesa, an 18-year-old freshman, was so thrilled to find out Sanders would be making the speech that he staked out the venue the night before to make sure he knew exactly where to line up.
He’ll be marginalized for saying these things.
Speaking at Georgetown University, the Democratic candidate battled perceptions his ideas are foreign or “radical” and framed his proposals as a modern version of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. He reinvigorated democracy. He transformed our country.
Back in September, Sanders used a joke to make the point.
Or even democratic socialism.
Much of Sanders’ agenda would be paid for by steep tax increases on the wealthy and Wall Street transactions. Sanders isn’t really a socialist, but he’s certainly not a typical Democrat.
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The speech was created to answer those two major questions about Sanders as the Democratic presidential nomination race prepares to enter the homestretch to the Iowa caucuses in early February.
