A Tale of Two Parties (and Two Bernies)

Bernie Sanders' endorsement of Zohran Mamdani shows he's one of the great losers of American politics over the last fifty years

For just a moment we saw a Bernie Sanders we hadn’t seen for years. Ten years, in fact.

On Wednesday, Sanders was speaking to Tim Dillon when he made rare sense about the need for America to have borders. He even praised President Trump.

Would you believe it?

“If you don’t have any borders, you don’t have a nation,” Sanders said.

“Trump did a better job. I don’t like Trump, but we should have a secure border. It ain’t that hard to do. Biden didn’t do it.”

These views are, I think, Senator Sanders’ true views on the subject of national borders; although he hasn’t said them out loud very much in the last decade, since he was screwed out of a real shot at being president by the Clinton wing of the Democrat party.

Shutting up has been the price of remaining on the inside.

How different things were in 2015, when the Senator from Vermont could thunderously denounce mass immigration as a “Koch brothers proposal,” the Koch brothers being billionaire capitalists Charles and David Koch. Speaking to Vox’s Ezra Klein, Sanders said he was against open borders because the policy benefits the capitalists, not the workers: The capitalists get a flood of cheap labour, and wages go down. The native workers either have to work for less or lose their jobs entirely, as well as their communities.

You don’t “address the problem of international poverty,” Sanders added, “by making people in this country even poorer.”

Of course it makes perfect sense. It’s true. You only have to look at the H-1B debate that took place last Christmas—when the world’s richest man told critics of his use of cheap Indian coders to stand back and f*ck their own faces— to see that.

Even at the time, ten years ago, Sanders faced accusations from within the left that he was pandering to right-wing narratives about immigration and privileging the lives and well-being of Americans over foreigners. Dylan Matthews, also of Vox, wrote a furious, retarded response to the interview with Klein in which he said both of those things.

It’s worth remembering, for a moment, just how close the Democrats came to fighting 2016 on populist terrain. Instead of making 2016 about neo-vaginas, drag-queen storytime, white supremacy (and war with Iran), the Democrats could have brought the battle directly to Donald Trump, offering a “more compassionate” populist vision that might easily have won that election.

Even someone like Steve Bannon thinks that. He’s said so many times. Indeed, Bannon still believes the greatest threat to Trump comes from an economic-populist left, and I’m not inclined to disagree with him. If the left fielded a more charismatic Bernie-2015-style candidate, a man who didn’t look like he’d shuffled out the front door of the nursing home while nobody was watching, Trump’s successor or Trump himself if he runs a fourth time could be in trouble.

It won’t happen, though. The Democrats are doubling—nay, tripling—down on the mistakes that lost them 2016 and 2024.

Within days of transporting us, briefly, back to 2015, Bernie was well and truly back in the fold and reading from the correct script.

On Sunday, he was in Brooklyn with AOC and Kathy Hochul at the big Zohran Mamdani rally. The theme: “New York is not for sale.”

Sanders was blabbing about “oligarchy” again, after AOC had said her piece about how New York was “built” by “Italians fleeing fascism” and “Native Peoples standing for themselves” and “Latinos seeking a better life.” No mention of the Anglo-Dutch colonists who actually physically built the city.

Sanders said a Mayor Mamdani would represent “not the billionaire class” but working families.

“In the year 2025, when the people on top have never, ever had so much economic and political power, is it possible for ordinary people, for working class people, to come together and defeat those oligarchs?” Sanders asked.

“You’re damn right we can.”

Mamdani is way out ahead in the polls. In a three-way race with Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, he beats Cuomo 46.7% to 28.6%, with Sliwa a distant third on 16.2%.

Early voting has now opened, and New Yorkers are turning out in record numbers. In the first two days, five times more people voted than in the first two days of the last mayoral election, four years ago: 164,190 voters against 31,176. I doubt the majority of them are energized Cuomo or Sliwa voters.

At this stage, it’s hard to imagine anything other than a Mamdani win.

It will be a win for a new New York. A New York whose population has changed massively because of open borders since 9/11, when the prospect of a Muslim mayor—let alone a Muslim mayor who consorts with a terror suspect linked to an earlier bombing of the World Trade Center—would simply have been unthinkable.

Demographics is destiny.