Why Do I Support Bernie Sanders?

Tristan Nab
Nov 2 · 10 min read
Senator Bernie Sanders holds a rally at the University of Arizona endorsing David Garcia: October 23rd, 2018

Preface: A good friend and colleague of mine is the most passionate supporter of Beto O’Rourke I have ever met. After yesterday’s announcement that the former Texas congressman would end his 2020 presidential bid, he decided to write an article about what Beto’s campaign meant to him. I thought this was a brilliant idea and decided to write an article of my own on why I support Senator Bernie Sanders. This is a very personal story as well as a reflection on Bernie Sanders, his policies, and the movement he has led for decades.

To anyone who knows me, it is no secret that I grew up in a strictly conservative household. I bought into all the lies and false narratives from the right-wing propaganda machine that is Fox News. I thought I knew everything there was to know, spouting off whatever nonsense I heard on the television because I was told it was true and, being born and raised in a red state, had no one really tell me otherwise.

That all changed during the 2012 election when my aunt and uncle (family friends) who I had grown close to broke me free from that bubble; that prison of hateful rhetoric and ideology.

My aunt and uncle were the driving force behind my shift in worldview. As a woman struggling to fight to get on disability after being diagnosed with fibromyalgia and a man working his hardest to provide for him and his wife while himself being diagnosed with diabetes, it was hard for me to reconcile my love and respect for them with my conservative beliefs, which told me that they were lazy moochers looking to make a quick buck off the government. Either my love for them had to change or my political beliefs did and it was an easy choice. These were the people that raised me while the situation at home was complicated and they fought hard every day just to survive. It wasn’t them that was the problem — it was the system.

After coming to this profound realization, I was disgusted by the beliefs I had held my entire life and found solace in the message of Barack Obama. He represented himself as the change I knew we needed so my aunt and my uncle could live the life of dignity they deserved without having to worry about whether or not they could afford their apartment or their medicine. Barack Obama was in his second term and, surely, this meant he would throw caution to the wind since he had no reelection campaign to consider. Finally, he would help people all over the country like us. But he didn’t. Obamacare was not enough. His incrementalist approach was not enough. Nothing he did made their lives less stressful and I watched them continue to struggle. The hope he promised us faded.

Then in 2015, I heard about a candidate that could finally give my aunt and uncle the life they fought so hard for all those years; the life they deserved. That man was Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. I decided to look into the presidential candidate and see what he was all about and it was incredible. For the first time in my life, I was truly inspired by a politician.

During Sanders’ 2016 campaign, I attended one of his rallies in Phoenix, Arizona with my uncle. I had never been so excited before. The line took us two hours to get through and it was worth it. We were greeted with the song ‘Uprising’ by Muse while we waited for the Senator to take the stage. When he did, I was in disbelief. Here he was, talking about Medicare for All and taking on the 1% who were responsible for the suffering of the working class and I got to be there and listen to him in person. It was utterly captivating.

Never before had a candidate talked about the human cost of policies so uniquely and authentically. As his campaign continued, I researched more and more. This was a man who was on the right side of history on everything from the Civil Rights Movement to the fight for LGBTQ+ rights to union worker rights even when it was not convenient for him to be. While Joe Biden was working with segregationists in the Senate, Bernie was on the front lines defending equality. It was clear that Bernie Sanders wasn’t just talking about his principles, but he had been living by them his entire life.

When Sanders did not secure the Democratic nomination, I felt defeated. I thought Hillary Clinton would win, but at what cost? I felt proud that my candidate had moved Clinton’s platform to the left, but I couldn’t trust that it was genuine and, as we found out, it wasn’t. She was beholden to the interests of the people and the corporations that kept people like my aunt and uncle down and discouraged. That is why we got Trump. The status quo has failed millions of Americans and the willingness of corporate Democrats and Republicans to ignore that and embrace the ultra rich was to blame. It was not the Obama-Trump or Sanders-Trump voters, it was not Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, but people like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden who cozy up to the interests of their rich donors when those interests directly contradict those of the working class and poor. They were looking for something, anything different and they could have had it in Sanders, but he didn’t get the nomination. As horrible as Donald Trump is, he represented something new. When Obama’s neoliberal policies failed the working class, they weren’t keen on keeping them.

This is not, of course, to say that Donald Trump is in any way better than Hillary Clinton. She would have made a much better president than him, but that is the lowest bar I can fathom. Donald Trump is a dangerous, misogynistic, xenophobic moron who has only made things exponentially worse since being sworn in. If I were old enough to have voted in the 2016 election, I would have voted for Hillary Clinton without a doubt. It does, though, speak to the frustration of the American people with the systems we have in place that Donald Trump was the nominee to begin with instead of Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, or any of the other establishment Republicans that ran in 2016. Trump represented change on the right; change for the worse. Bernie Sanders represented change on the left; change for the better.

This dichotomy is important. While voters in general were attracted to Sanders and Trump because of their anti-establishment rhetoric, the two candidates could not be more different. Donald Trump claimed to be against the elitist class and the corrupt system in Washington. He promised to deliver healthcare for everyone. He told voters he knew the system and that is why he could dismantle it. He lied. Trump tapped into the frustration and the desperation of the poor and working classes for his own personal gain. He never wanted to implement anything that would help anyone not named Donald Trump. Bernie Sanders was and is genuine in his fight for the people that the establishment has purposefully and maliciously devastated for decades.

Not long after the 2016 election, my uncle was hospitalized in critical condition. It was horrifying. I sat beside him while he lied in a hospital bed, unconscious, hooked up to loud, intimidating machines and all I could think was that this was the end and I would never get to have a proper goodbye. Then he woke up. He was diagnosed with kidney failure and my heart sank again. The world felt like it was caving in and I wasn’t alone in feeling that. My aunt, my sisters, we all felt the weight of this diagnosis. They needed to buy even more medicine just so he could live, none of which was cheap. Then there was the dialysis treatment. Then the bills. The healthcare industry was bleeding them dry and profiting off his terminal illness.

Republicans had control of the House, the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court and all they wanted to do aside from give their billionaire friends tax breaks was take my aunt and uncle’s healthcare. They wanted to let him slowly die so they could get richer. The greed of the Republican party is so brazen that we are constantly told by Democrats that we must accept less for it while they, too, profit off my uncle’s illness. Any politician that tells us we cannot achieve a single-payer system that takes money from the healthcare industry cannot be trusted. Bernie was the only politician I had ever seen that was willing to stand up to them and fight to keep my aunt and uncle from bankruptcy and homelessness and death because they were both sick and disabled.

Then, in 2018, something incredible happened. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and so many other progressive candidates began talking about the same ideas Bernie was talking about in 2016 and they won their elections. They took on the establishment and won. Support for Medicare for All reached 70%, becoming an idea accepted across party lines. Student debt cancellation and tackling corporate greed became widely acknowledged issues. Climate change was at the center of one of the most progressive agendas since FDR’s New Deal. Progressives were taking power and working towards the goals I thought were lost when Clinton secured the nomination. I expected Republican resistance, but not the level of centrist sabotage to these popular ideas and the platform that largely won them back the House; a platform handed to them by Sanders. I guess I overestimated their loyalty to the American people over the almighty dollar.

Because of the center-left’s unwillingness to adapt to the changing times and needs of the working class and poor, the new wave of progressives was halted. My aunt and uncle still couldn’t afford their medical bills and their medications and the rent on their home, so they lost their home. When nearly all their friends had abandoned them, it looked certain they would have to live on the streets. Luckily enough, my uncle’s sister helped them and they had to move to another state. It is disgusting to me that any politician would actively choose anything less than the systemic change that the progressive left offered that could have prevented this.

There exists a false narrative that Bernie Sanders is just an angry old man who yells for no other reason than to be loud and that his movement is powered solely by anger. I cannot stress enough how wrong that is. Bernie Sanders does yell and he is loud. He does tap into the anger of the poor and working classes. But what is so profoundly misunderstood is that the Senator’s message is one of hope in arguably one of the darkest times in human history. He shouts and he yells out of his frustration with the establishment and the 1%. He is loud because he cares. His message in 2016 was so inspiring and uplifting that it encouraged working class people to challenge the system, to organize, to run for office and promote the idea that we deserve dignity and basic human rights. Senator Sanders has built a mass movement, the likes of which I have never seen in this country.

Another false narrative propagated by the media to discredit and drive down support for the progressive movement Bernie has built is the idea of the ‘Bernie Bro’. I understand that I myself would technically fit into this stereotype as a young white man myself, but I am the exception to the Sanders coalition, not the rule. Of all the 2020 presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders has the most diverse range of supporters while others struggle to reach the same levels of support across demographic lines. The reason for this is simple. Sanders has a message that extends beyond just propping himself up. Instead, he speaks to the broadest audience of all the 2020 candidates: the working class and the poor. In reality, his supporters are made up of all races, genders, ethnicities, and sexualities. The Sanders coalition looks like America.

Today’s progressive movement is one that is unprecedented. It is made up of Walmart employees, bartenders, truck drivers, fast food employees, and employees in just about every other field you encounter every day. It has led to the election of progressives across the country, it has created organizers, built confidence in workers to strike for their rights, empowered unions, and driven up support for the idea that the 99% need to take on the 1% in order to live the dignified life they should be living in the richest society the world has ever seen.

There are those that seek to exploit this movement’s momentum to propel themselves into higher power and we have seen this most clearly in the 2020 Democratic primary. As candidates began entering the race, there were two clear frontrunners: Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Several candidates tried to tap into this new level of progressive support and came out in favor of proposals such as Medicare for All. Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Tulsi Gabbard Andrew Yang, and Marianne Williamson among others all declared their support for the bill at the beginning of their bids. Today, Bernie Sanders is its lone supporter. This tells voters that the only one who can be trusted to stay true to their convictions and actually fight for them and the answer is clear: it’s Bernie.

Every single proposal of the Bernie Sanders 2016 and 2020 campaigns is aimed at helping the poor and working class and no other candidate comes close to matching how comprehensive his agenda is. If your top priority is getting every American healthcare, your candidate is Bernie. If your top priority is fighting climate change, your candidate is Bernie. If your top priority is ending homelessness or the prison industrial complex or taking on the 1% or cancelling all student debt, your candidate is Bernie.

At a time where 40,000 Americans die a year from a lack of healthcare coverage or an inability to afford their medication, where 80 million people are uninsured or under-insured, where we have 600,000 Americans living in homelessness, where millions of Americans cannot afford to pay their student loan debt, and where, quite frankly, the fate of the world is at stake, the problems we face can only be met by enacting the radical agenda for change set by the progressive left. Incrementalism had its time and it failed. When it comes to this election, we cannot afford to let this moment pass us by. Make no mistake: any and all of the neoliberal candidates from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris to Pete Buttigieg will lose to Donald Trump. He is a fascist and we can only beat him by fighting his fear with genuine hope. That will only come from a progressive and that is why I support the one man who has led this movement his entire career: Vermont Senator Bernard Sanders.Second chances are rare. This is our moment. We cannot afford to lose this fight and if we are united, there is nothing that can stop us.

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