Sanders Has an Advantage, and It’s Not About Economics

Bernie Sanders’s most prominent message is economic, organized around a critique of capitalist inequality, an indictment of the ultrawealthy and a call for expansive new social programs. It helped propel him to a strong second in the 2016 Democratic primary campaign and has returned as the marquee message for his 2020 campaign, which he announced on Tuesday with a promise to “complete the revolution.”



Unfortunately for his 2020 campaign, Sanders is less distinct on economic policy than he was in 2016. His rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination have either embraced broad ideas like Medicare for all or unveiled their own: Elizabeth Warren’s universal child care proposal; Cory Booker’s plan to drastically reduce housing costs; Kamala Harris’s LIFT Act, which would build on the earned-income tax credit and create a new monthly cash payment for most middle-class households.



But Sanders isn’t without an advantage. If in 2016 his foreign-policy thinking was underbaked, then in 2019 he stands as one of the few candidates with a fully formed vision for American foreign policy. It’s one that ties his domestic focus on political and economic justice to a larger project of international cooperation and solidarity, anti-authoritarianism and promotion of democratic values. It’s a vision that rests on the conviction that progressive politics must continue past the water’s edge.



Sanders articulated the substance of his foreign policy views in two speeches: one in 2017 at Missouri’s Westminster College — speaking from the stage where Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech — and one last October at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.



In his Johns Hopkins address, Sanders offered a big-picture reading of this moment in international relations. For him, the ideological struggle of the 21st century doesn’t pit a liberal, democratic America against illiberal, authoritarian opponents, but instead pits liberal, democratic peoples everywhere against illiberalism at home and abroad. It’s a “worldwide movement toward authoritarianism, oligarchy and kleptocracy” against one toward “strengthening democracy, egalitarianism, and economic, social, racial and environmental justice.” In this conception of the world, President Trump is just one of many “demagogues who exploit people’s fears, prejudices and grievances to gain and hold on to power.”



These movements don’t emerge out of nothing. Sanders contends that they are fueled by the enormous disparities of wealth and opportunity that define global capitalism. This is the subject of his Westminster College speech — an attempt to link domestic economic issues to relations among states. “This planet will not be secure or peaceful when so few have so much, and so many have so little — and when we advance day after day into an oligarchic form of society where a small number of extraordinarily powerful special interests exert enormous influence over the economic and political life of the world,” Sanders said, adding later that “inequality, corruption, oligarchy and authoritarianism are inseparable.”