The Last Lion: Bernie Sanders

It may be hard to believe but one day Donald Trump will no longer be President of the United States. Whether or not his Republican party crown passes to J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio, his successor will have to contend with an opposition Democratic Party likely to see resurgence in this coming November’s congressional elections. Which means that come November 4th, 2026 the day after this contest, the proverbial pistol fires for the 2028 presidential election cycle.

The Democrats will reap the benefits of a re-engaged base as well as attract the interest of the ‘swing’ independent voters that often constitute the margin of electoral victory. To that end, they have a finite block of time to settle on their directional course and to consolidate that identity for a public tried out by the Trump years. In order to present a coherent philosophical approach to governance, much less settle on the policies they wish to present, the Democrats must first settle the uneasy tension between the two solitudes of their party: the progressive ‘liberal’ wing, and the more pragmatic ‘third way’ of those professing centre-left beliefs towards governance.

This conversation (or food fight for getting Democrats to agree has traditionally be as easy as herding cats into a sack) will take place in the twilight of one of their most iconic figures.

In a world full of Trumpian sound and fury, a singular politician has been a consistent , vigorous, principled contrarian voice. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, officially an 'independent' who caucuses with the Democrats has carried the loyal opposition torch and proven more resilient in the public consciousness than the figures who beat him for the nomination of the Democratic party, remaining a dominant force even as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden fade from the national stage.

A central if underexamined question looming over the 2028 Democratic presidential primary season and the future of the American left is who will claim the mantle of Senator Sanders’s progressive populism. Many presume that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) of New York is Sanders’s likely heir apparent, based on her star power and the long-established affinity between the two. But Ocasio-Cortez isn’t necessarily Sanders’s protégé, and there isn’t a firm consensus on the left that she is, in fact, best poised to carry the torch, despite her rumored aspirations for higher office. Others speculate that if New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani were actually constitutionally allowed to run for president, he would possibly overtake his fellow trailblazer of activist-influencer politics and expand Sanders’s movement to the next generation. But for the discussion around figures like these there are pitfalls: AOC stumbled badly when posed a question around the future security of Taiwan while attending the Munich Security Conference and Mamdani has just started his term, with a whole lot to prove.

The larger challenge facing AOC and others hoping to follow in Sanders’s footsteps—and perhaps achieve what he couldn’t in his two runs for president—is that nearly all are urban progressives taken to represent the worldview of the ‘Ivory Tower’ left whilst disregarding the centrist moderates that most likely make up the great ‘Silent Majority’ living in the suburbs or more rural hinterlands behind the great coastal cities. They constitute the new “conscience” of the Democratic Party, the voices who have increased the salience of class and economic power in a coalition that had for too long sidestepped the issues that once gave liberal Democrats their raison d’être, choosing instead the off-putting pursuit of identity politics. They have ensured social justice means more than making America’s educated and business elites look a little more like the rest of the country. In marked contrast to Sanders, however, they are much less familiar with the plight of rural and small-town Americans and the distinct challenges they face. Sanders, one of the most popular politicians in America, is, at heart, a very New England type of socialist, at ease with the idiosyncratic communitarian and libertarian tendencies that America’s core political traditions have passed down through the ages. And it is doubtful that even his most talented acolytes share this essential quality to the same (if any) degree.

That is no minor weakness for a left largely deprived of the institutions—unions, farmers’ associations, and public interest civic groups—that made Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism the vehicle of working-class advance for the better part of the 20th century. The left, already handicapped in this regard, is glaringly limited to a handful of highly educated coastal metros, disengaged, if not entirely by choice, from vast sections of the country who feel ignored – “flyover people.’ Alongside the Democratic establishment’s own aloofness, that has political costs few besides Sanders have warned of. Indeed, if the perspective gained by place and custom still matters in American politics, the left has a blind spot that will only become more conspicuous once Sanders retires from office.

There is a reason why Sanders won the same ‘Battleground states’ that Donald Trump did in the primaries against Hilary Clinton. Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania voters were looking for authenticity, not the blow-dried conventional packaging of a ‘modern’ campaign as well as politicians with whim they could connect and find resonance with. It’s not surprising therefore that Trump again won those crucial states against Kamala Harris. Both she and Clinton assumed that voters there cared about the same things that they did – abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, gun control and insulting those who were even thinking of voting for Trump by implying they were stupidly potentially casting their ballots for a would-be dictator.

To be sure, there are other rising leaders from the Democrats’ left flank who are trying to capture the grassroots enthusiasm of Sanders’s first campaign for president. Although he represents one of the wealthiest districts in the country, Representative Ro Khanna of California has increasingly fashioned himself as a maverick antiwar Democrat willing to take on the “Epstein class” and powerful lobbies. He co-chaired Sanders’s 2020 campaign, recently announced with Sanders a new wealth tax proposal, and remains a lead sponsor in the House of Medicare for All and other progressive legislation waiting for an elusive filibuster-proof majority. That lends him a certain amount of “parliamentary” authority and proximity to the titular leader of the progressive movement, though there are doubts he could ever equal Sanders’s gravitas, charisma and impassioned following. But again, the main barrier Khanna must overcome is effectively the same as AOC’s, notwithstanding her more working-class district. He is a world apart from the dairy farms, machine tool plants, and quaint, semi-vacant downtowns that dot Sanders’s “blue” Vermont as well as other states that are much less friendly to Democrats.

Then there are relative newcomers like Graham Platner of Maine and Dan Osborn of Nebraska, two former military service members running for the Senate in their respective states as political outsiders appalled by the crony capitalism that brazenly pervades D.C. Both bear similar anti-establishment messages in heavily rural, white working-class states that recall Sanders’s folk hero stature in Vermont. The resonance inspires a bit of optimism, not least because it is often assumed the American left has been reduced to a coastal urban phenomenon more committed to elite-mediated identity politics than rebuilding a New Deal-style coalition that unites working people across regions.

There are limits in both cases, however, to the comparison that can be drawn with Sanders. Platner, who is vying for the Democratic nomination against Governor Janet Mills, the party establishment favorite, to topple the vulnerable five-term Republican Senator Susan Collins, is an outspoken progressive on nearly every issue, foreign and domestic (excepting the importance of the 2nd amendment). Besides also being from New England, that consistent left-wing orientation gives him a certain superficial similarity to Sanders, whereas Dan Osborn, a self-described lifelong independent who avoids overt criticism of President Trump and the MAGA movement, has pitched a far more tailored anti-monopoly platform in his effort to break the GOP stranglehold on Nebraska.

Nonetheless Sanders (from a working-class Jewish family in 1940s Brooklyn), still spent years on the political margins before converting traditionally Republican Vermont to his brand of politics; first as mayor of Burlington and then as an independent member of Congress, he slowly carved out a left-populist yet “heterodox” reputation that won respect and votes from residents who had no real identification with the activist left. Platner is shaping up to be a potential force, though at this stage it’s unclear whether he will create the same reputation in his quest to upend Maine’s politics. Osborn, meanwhile, remains a dark horse enigma for should he actually prevail in the electoral contest, he may prove to be an anomaly rather than a harbinger of a burgeoning heartland rebellion in the same way that Governor Andy Beshear is in solid red state Kentucky. Nowhere on the horizon is there a figure who seems capable of inspiring a grassroots movement that might find a compromise between the culture war messaging so prevalent on the left in order to tackle systemic corruption and build a ‘rainbow coalition’ on a national scale.

Part of the reason it is difficult to conceive of who might fill Sanders’s shoes is that Sanders, a somewhat unshowy legislator in his early days, evolved from a mere curiosity and possible footnote into one of the most singular influences on contemporary American politics. His insurgent campaign against Hillary Clinton and the DNC “machine” made him a popular icon among many voter groups who had felt ignored or disenfranchised by the Democratic party elites, but he also was (and to some extent still is) an iconoclastic voice within American liberalism. Sanders, for both practical and sincere reasons, hearkens back to the New Deal days hewing to the belief that the kind “democratic socialism” he seeks to bring to American government would be modelled along the same kind of system employed by Scandinavia’s enlightened welfare states as well as the unfinished work of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights. This is in stark contrast to the narrative levied by Trump and his cohorts who have consistently attempted to paint the Vermont senator as a raging, hopelessly idealistic and naive communist. The simple fact is that Sanders is not an easy politician to classify for he does not fit neatly within the typology of America’s radical and reform traditions.

To better understand the man and his politics it’s important to note that Sanders emerged far to the left of John F. Kennedy-style liberalism, the direction in which New England and the Northeast in general was moving in the latter third of the 20th century. The Kennedy tradition, like its Wilsonian antecedent, was in reality far more conservative and center left than naïve analogies of ‘Camelot’ would otherwise suggest, largely in favor of free-trade agreements and confident in America’s soft and hard power’s ability to nurture liberal democracy abroad. This thinking would eventually evolve into Bill Clinton’s Third Way approach. Sanders, by contrast, was a left-wing critic of globalization and fairly protectionist at that, putting him in league with the late Jesse Jackson, Minnesota’s Paul Wellstone, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, South Carolina’s Fritz Hollings, and Indiana’s Vance Hartke, who all espoused a left-populism focused on preserving good-paying American jobs and rebuilding at home. That partly explains why Sanders attracted independents in 2015 and 2016, some of whom, frustrated by what they saw as the triumph of the ‘system’ in Hillary Clinton’s and Joe Biden’s wins ended up voting for Trump in the subsequent general elections; Sanders never underestimated the havoc and employment displacement wrought by NAFTA and the China cheap manufacturing shock.

By the same token, that principled opposition reflected an ambivalence toward globalization that today’s activist left generally hasn’t shared. As many noted in 2016 and then again in the aftermath of the migration surge under Joe Biden, Sanders also viewed open borders not as the progressive position on immigration but as a policy that the right-wing Koch network lobbied for. While he worked tenaciously in his 2020 campaign to deepen support among Latino workers and advocacy groups, Sanders never quite abandoned his earlier position, believing that unchecked migration leads to exploitation and thus lower workplace safety standards and wages. He may have ended up taking some similar policy positions as Trump but for different reasons.

The other key characteristic of Sanders views is that he’s never been an eager practitioner of identity politics and the associated theories that became in vogue on so many campuses. He was an early champion of gay rights, supported a woman’s right to an abortion, abhorred racism, and denounced covert US operations supporting rightwing regimes in Latin America. But unlike the “woke” sectarians who scaled the heights of media and academia this last decade and their shrill adherents, Sanders was averse to “progressive” race reductionism and similar modes of politics that emphasized difference over common material concerns. Moreover, he never trafficked in attitudes that judged every moral failing or blunder of the US government as an indictment of the people itself; he didn’t ridicule the country’s noblest values as a sham, dismiss its vastly undercelebrated cultural contributions, or regard ordinary workers as oafs and rubes (aka the ‘masses’). To him, Americans had a heritage to be proud of, precisely because it was working people who were the agents of both creative change and worthy traditions.

Sanders, in other words, was and is a social republican and a radical “small d” democrat, confident in America’s potential and the ability of all to bring meaning to their communities and by extension, endow the country with positive purpose.

Who, then, are Sanders’s predecessors? Is there something in his intellectual imprinting that distinguishes the 84-year-old from his would-be successors? Long before he idealized FDR, Sanders was an admirer of Eugene Debs, the five-time Socialist candidate for president in the early 20th century. But Debs has never really been Sanders’s model, considering Sanders’s dogged effort to realign the Democrats rather than forge an entirely independent movement like the Progressive Party. In some respects, Sanders shares more in common with Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette – “independent” Republicans of the Progressive Era with vocal rural constituencies who held a communitarian ethos and believed public power and tough regulations would make the economy deliver for the many. Another likely touchstone is Fiorello La Guardia, the reform-minded mayor of New York who did so much to translate the spirit of the New Deal into front-line policy Sanders’s boyhood. While Sanders exhorts his listeners to be part of a “revolution,” his message has always been imbued with a strong sense of civic nationalism, as if it had been extracted from a WPA mural. That quality has had an underappreciated effect on his appeal that someone like Mamdani has sought to copy. And contrary to the caricature of him as an unsentimental and dour figure, Sanders has long sought to replicate the energy and idealism of reformed ward politics in the least likely places, from his start in Burlington to his rural and Rust Belt delegate strategy in the 2016 primary.

For the upcoming presidential 2028 contest, there will be a carnival tentful of so-called ‘New Democrats’ who attempt to paint themselves as ‘centrists’ but whose historical records reveal themselves to be more “woke” than they profess to be. For example, current poll frontrunner Governor Gavin Newsom of California may want to display a certain willingness to make controversial comments about ‘political correctness’ but his own environmental policies have levied additional gasoline taxes upon his state, a situation exacerbated by the current Persian Gulf crisis. In fact, as of March 2026, California consistently has the highest gas prices in the U.S., averaging roughly $1.00 to $1.20+ more per gallon than Arizona. On March 20, 2026, California’s average was ~$5.66/gallon, while Arizona’s was ~$4.46/gallon. Key factors driving this difference include higher California taxes, environmental regulations, and specialized fuel blending. While no one would dispute the challenge posed by climate change (it’s more of a disagreement over the severity) there is a measurable financial impact on the people such measures are meant to save.

Sanders’s unflappable determination—and the aura it has created—is what makes his inevitable departure from the scene so hard to fathom on the left. Whatever the exact alchemy of his influences, it has helped him become an elder statesman in a party bereft of them (does Joe Biden even realize how irrelevant he’s become?). Sanders may not be the most poetic orator or exhibit much of Rooseveltian penchant for a clever turn of phrase, but he is not a mere gadfly. He has synthesized—perhaps consciously—various elements from America’s past egalitarians, allowing him, a once marginal figure of the Sixties New Left, to embody the “Old Left” in a way no other post-Reagan politician has. It is also very possible that he is indeed the last lion of a progressivism that may still have relevancy but simply no longer has an avatar who can embody its tenets.

At the very least, his approach, philosophy and outlook won’t be easy to duplicate. But as the pluralist left ponders who might carry the torch forward, its thinkers and cadres must remember it is vital to make the past relevant to the future—and remind Americans it is within their collective power to flourish anew. Sanders did not persevere by believing anything less.