Nor has Trump thrown anti-war activists in prison as FDR did during World War II.
In 1934 a radical democratic socialist, Upton Sinclair, won the Democratic primary for California governor on the progressive platform End Poverty in California. Sinclair proposed that the state take over idle factories and farmland and turn them over to cooperatives. FDR, rather than back Sinclair, worked with the national Democratic leadership to undermine his campaign, and switched to support the Republican opponent, who eventually won.
Almost ten years later FDR had that generation's "democratic socialist" Henry Wallace blocked from continuing as his vice-president.
Sanders in 1989 and Today
Sanders, in spite of his excellent exposes of class inequities, has degenerated over the years. Thirty years ago he wrote We Can't Tail After the Democrats, which was a clear indictment of the bankruptcy of his current strategy.
"We need a new, progressive political party in the U.S. because on almost every important issue the Democratic and Republican Parties, both controlled by Big Money, are indistinguishable.
"We need a new, progressive political movement in this country because the Democrats and Republicans are not only incapable of solving any of the major problems facing this country, they are not even prepared to discuss them.
"The boldness and clarity that we need to articulate can never be done through the compromised and corrupt Democratic Party - dominated by Big Money... We must begin to have the courage to fight for power - not handouts. We are the majority of people and must act accordingly."
What he said then remains true. But he has since remade himself into a salesman for the fairy tale that the Democrats can be remade into a tool for the 99%. Sanders does do important mass political-educational work, showing how the corporate elite run the US for their own interests and threaten the future of life on the planet. (Similarly, candidate Tulsi Gabbard is an excellent vocal opponent of US interventions and regime change.) Yet Sanders' whole approach is to try to convince the 1%, beg them to "do the right thing." That strategy is not going to work any better than it did in ending the war on Vietnam.
There will arise "a new, progressive political party," as Sanders wrote in 1989. But it won't be so easy as he made it seem. The corporate rulers do not intend to allow it and have many tools in their hands to derail it. They control the two parties, the government, the national-security state, the legal system. They maintain a monopoly of the media and corporate wealth of the country. They are easily able to shut down any threat to their control, as the mass anti-Iraq war movement, the trade-union protests in Madison, Wisconsin, and the Occupy Movement show. The rulers have been ingenious at neutralizing, co-opting and marginalizing any movements independent of their two parties.
The corporate elite still so controls the anger at the 1% that its present expressions remain locked inside the very two-party confines they have set up to ensure their rule over us. The Bernie Sanders campaign seeks to corral socialist sentiment inside the corporate Democrat Party just as the Trump campaign seeks to corral fascist sentiment inside the corporate Republican Party. As social and economic conditions become more acute, this will change. A new progressive political party can arise, but only out of a mass working-class struggle, just as the CIO arose out of a mass working-class struggle.
[1] Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years 1933-1937, pp. 372, 675
[2] Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, pp. 65, 67
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