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Bernie Sanders and the Noose of American Elections
Bernie Sanders, who aims at being the Democratic Party's nominee for the President of the US, has earned an unexpected following with his staunch critique of the super-rich and his promise to reduce glaring class inequalities. But his foreign policy offers no fundamental departures from the received view. Moreover, his ascendancy signifies yet again the impossibility of a third space in American politics which has forever oscillated between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
In the early 1960s, a young Jewish man from Brooklyn, New York, by the name of Bernard Sanders, whose father was the sole member of his family to escape the Holocaust, enrolled as an undergraduate at the University ofChicago. His political awareness would at once be sharpened at that storied institution, where the student chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was just reorganising itself as a chapter of the more militant Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had been established in 1960, was similarly pushing American civil rights leaders into adopting more militant positions. Sanders plunged into this political ferment, assuming a position as chairman of CORE’s social action committee and committing himself to a struggle to integrate student housing at the university (Perlstein 2015). Sanders led the firstsit-in at the university in 1962 and, the following year, joined the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”
Career as Mayor
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