A decade after Bernie Sanders’s first presidential run, Branko Marcetic argues that American politics now divides into a before and after. Sanders did not create the socialist revival by himself, but his campaign gave radical demands a national audience and a practical political language.
The change is measurable:
- DSA grew from just over 6,000 members in twenty-six chapters to roughly 120,000 members
- More than 250 socialists now hold elected office, up from only a handful before 2016
- At least seven socialists are projected to sit in the next US House
- Socialist officials now govern New York City and hold power on councils and in legislatures across the country
- Many of today’s leading socialist politicians worked on Sanders’s campaigns or name them as their political awakening
Sanders’s method mattered as much as his platform. He described banks, insurers, billionaires, and medical debt in ordinary language, connected democratic socialism to the New Deal, and presented ambitious programs as practical answers to familiar problems rather than doctrines for an initiated few.
The legacy is not a finished victory. The movement still has to turn campaigns into durable organization while surviving repression, hostile media, and its own factional habits. Marcetic’s sharper point is that Sanders modeled a pragmatic radicalism capable of widening the left without surrendering its demands—and proved he was no longer politically alone.