With Bernie Sanders’s recent endorsement of Joe Biden, ending his second run for the presidency, an assessment of his long career’s significance seems warranted. There is no better place to start than Hamilton College, where Sanders taught for a semester in the spring of 1990. Many students are unaware of the popular politician’s connection to our school, and except for a few digitized articles from the Spectator, the college’s newspaper, it appears that his time at Hamilton is little more than a distant memory to most.
Sanders was brought to Hamilton by Dennis Gilbert, then head of the Sociology Department. They developed a strong relationship that led to Gilbert leaving Hamilton later in 1990 to assist Sanders’s first congressional campaign. Both are clearly men of the left: Sanders’s policies easily show it, while Gilbert’s scholarship more subtly supports this assessment. Gilbert published a book in 1991 that was arguably favorable to the Sandinistas, a Marxist-Leninist party with a violent approach to taking power in Nicaragua, and commented on the Nicaraguan situation often in the Spectator. The issue was a popular topic on the Hamilton campus, but Gilbert seems to have been even more interested in it. Sanders backed the Sandinistas and even attended one of their rallies during a personal trip to Latin America.
A trip to the college’s archives allowed me to retrieve a course catalogue for the Spring 1990 semester, where I found that Sanders taught two courses, focusing on democratic socialism and urban sociology. The descriptions of them are as follows:
235S Democracy and Socialism: An examination of the current state of American democracy and a look at democratic socialism as an alternative to capitalism. Why are the richest people in America getting richer, while the poor are getting poorer? Why are our citizens increasingly not voting? The role of Big Money and the media in perpetuating capitalist ideology. Democratic socialism and its relevance to democratic values as the United States enters the 21st century.
335S The Problems and Potential of Urban Life: An examination of such urban problems as weak and corrupt political leadership, low citizen participation, crime, failing educational systems, deteriorating infrastructure, unhealthy environment, low-wage jobs, and homelessness. The importance of cities for the cultural and intellectual life of the nation. The quality of urban life and the role of recent federal policy. Field trips to various governmental agencies in Utica integral to the course.
When he is mentioned in the Spectator, Sanders is sometimes described as a social democrat, which may be loosely defined as an egalitarian who wishes to soften or humanize capitalism through governmental policies that stop short of actual socialism. Interestingly, however, the first course focused on “democratic socialism as an alternative to capitalism,” and there are many references in the Spectator to Sanders as a plain socialist who wishes to “redistribute wealth and power.” This begs the question of exactly where he lies on the political spectrum. Many have debated whether he is a social democrat, a democratic socialist, or something more radical, despite his insistence that he is a democratic socialist and not something else. Sanders appears to be deeply indebted to Karl Marx, and at Hamilton he mediated an open discussion titled “Marxism: A Rescue Attempt?” along with Gilbert. Sanders opened the discussion by pitting capitalism and socialism against each other and asserting that the former had not defeated the latter, even with the imminent demise of the Soviet Union. He argued that there were many serious problems in capitalist societies which needed to be addressed, ranging from poverty and wealth inequality to the lack of universal health care -- issues which Sanders continues to focus on today.
The rest of the discussion seems to have dwelled on theoretical applications of Marxism, with Gilbert assessing Vladimir Lenin’s idea of the vanguard (leading and only useful) party as a “powerful but problematic idea.” Professor Robert Kurfirst, a visiting instructor in the Government Department at the time, argued that Marx’s ideas are still relevant if they are detached from the idea of revolution. While Sanders is not recorded as having joined the discussion after his opening remarks, it is safe to assume that he agreed with his colleagues that changes in or replacement of capitalism, whether it be the abolition of private property that Marx desired or a simpler drive for equality, must be brought about democratically.
Yet Sanders has not been immune to distasteful impulses. It is plain that he wishes to greatly increase the scope and active role of federal power to achieve his goals, even refusing to deny that he would bring back the “era of big government” in 2016. And Professor Bob Paquette, former professor of history at Hamilton and my mentor at the Alexander Hamilton Institute, has been known to occasionally describe Sanders as a communist in disguise. “Communism” is a label he was allegedly ambivalent about disavowing in the 1970s, once stating that “I don’t mind people coming up and calling me a communist … at least, they’re still alive.” And his relationship, in terms of attitude, with authoritarian regimes is troubling. From happily singing in his underwear with Russians while honeymooning in Soviet-era Moscow in 1988 to praising Cuba’s literacy programs despite flagrant human rights violations in the county, he has not been a stranger to making what can fairly be considered enabling comments about America’s enemies.
Regarding Cuba, Sanders has even said Fidel Castro’s literacy program was well-intended despite being imposed by a dictator, seeming to ignore the nation’s historically high literacy rates and the nature of the program as statist indoctrination. This parallels his and Gilbert’s sympathy for the Sandinistas in 1990. Sanders clearly seems blinded by his ideology, unwilling to change his opinions despite overwhelming evidence against them. A particularly potent example is his long-standing position that America should operate under a system of Scandinavian socialism like Sweden’s, a claim that many students at Hamilton and on other campuses also boldly make without understanding the benefits of the capitalism they oppose. A major difficulty with this opinion is that Sweden is not a socialist state, but rather a social democracy with a homogeneous population whose wealth is largely historic and which enjoyed healthy growth after a free-market rebound following disastrous policies of economic redistribution, according to a comprehensive policy report by the Cato Institute. Taxation is certainly high there, although somewhat low for corporations, but the country arguably still has a capitalist ethos and system. As Swedish historian Johan Norberg writes, a Swedish model for America would actually mean a more open economy.
With these points in mind, how do professors at Hamilton remember Sanders? Professor Dan Chambliss, who was on leave that semester and whose position he filled, says he has almost “zero recollection” of Sanders beyond his being an interesting man to have teach here. Suggesting that capitalism and socialism are not a simple dichotomy but a spectrum (contrary to how Sanders framed the tension between them in the “Marxism: A Rescue Attempt?” discussion), Chambliss says Sanders merely wants to open more room for discussion on the issues he cares about. But he believes it’s an understatement to call him a social democrat, and that Sanders has consistently wished to shift the political vocabulary to show that socialism “isn’t actually that bad.” When asked about his comments on Cuba, Chambliss deemed it a “bogus issue” that was taken out of context, although he conceded that he does not know what Sanders’s actual views on the country are.
Others remember him differently. Most notably, Paquette has rejected the predominant narrative of Sanders as a sweet old man who wishes for peace and equality, instead describing him as an ideologue who became cantankerous when he discovered that Paquette, despite being educated in Marxist theory by his mentor Eugene Genovese, was not a man of the left himself. When I asked Paquette for a comment on Sanders, he responded:
Bernie Sanders occupied an office above mine in the Kirner-Johnson Building during the spring semester 1990. We had few conversations after the first unpleasant one, when he learned I was not a fellow Marxist, nor a fan of Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas, a hot-button issue at the time. A strident class warrior, hardly an avuncular type, he tended to pronounce rather than converse and became animated when his left-wing clichés were challenged.
Regardless of how people at Hamilton remember him, Sanders has one defining quality: his consistency. While Chambliss was quick to note that he has not stubbornly remained the same in all of his viewpoints over the past 30 years, the progressive face of the Democratic Party has nonetheless remained a strident class warrior and champion of what he calls social justice throughout his career -- a fact that both his supporters and his detractors can respect. Some of his more reasonable goals have come to fruition, such as greater acceptance of gays in the military, while his radical ideas remain a cause for concern for proponents of the free market and others who fear a greater expansion of government. There have been occasional changes in his platform and his voting record, although they may be indicative of an incremental move to the left, paralleling a shift in his self-representation. By and large, however, from his time at Hamilton to the present, Sanders’s song has remained the same.
