The Bernie Sanders Moment
THE white-haired politician stands before 10,000 cheering supporters in Madison, Wis., and calls for “political revolution,” denouncing a “rigged economy” that produces “a grotesque level of inequality,” returning to a theme that ’60s radicals have long been trumpeting.
It may have seemed, only a few years ago, that the ’60s radical moment was consigned to documentaries on Woodstock, pushed out of the spotlight for Occupy Wall Street and a new generation of activists to enter stage left. But here it is again. And it is perfectly timed to crusade against what Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, calls an “oligarchy.”
In Mr. Sanders’s run — and in the absence of a White House bid from Senator Elizabeth Warren — progressives have found a candidate they can support wholeheartedly. To understand the moment that the 73-year-old Mr. Sanders is enjoying, we have to see how he got here, waiting for national politics to catch up.
The road he took out of the 1960s student movement was not the most conspicuous one, but it was the widest. And Senator Sanders now represents a culmination of one of the primary currents of the left in the past half century.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the headlines about the New Left went to the tiny minority who planted bombs and burned down R.O.T.C. buildings to stop the Vietnam War and usher in a phantasmagorical “revolution.” Far more numerous, however, though less photogenic, were the activists who resolved, in the words of a Students for a Democratic Society document written in 1965, to convert the antiwar movement “from protest to radical politics,” by which they meant to develop “independent and mass constituencies” out of “the immediate aspirations of the poor, welfare recipients, trade-unionists, students, and others.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/opinion/sunday/the-bernie-sanders-moment.html?_r=0
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