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BERNIE’S ADVICE TO HIS FELLOW ELECTED SOCIALISTS  
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Bernie Sanders
December 9, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Over the weekend, Bernie Sanders spoke to a gathering of over a
hundred democratic socialist elected officials. Here’s what he said.
_

“You gotta do your job. And if you do your job well, people will
give you the latitude to talk about many, many other issues.” —
Bernie Sanders’s advice to his fellow elected socialists.,

 

_Over the weekend, Bernie Sanders spoke to the __How We Win
conference_ [[link removed]]_, a gathering of
democratic socialist elected officials and their staff in New Orleans
sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America Fund, Jacobin, the
Nation, and other partners. Below is a transcript of his remarks._

Thank you for inviting me to say a few words. Let me begin by thanking
all of you for having the guts to run for public office. It’s a lot
harder to go out and knock on doors to represent constituents with the
problems they face seven days a week. So I want to thank you very much
for that. Despite the horror in the White House right now, they’re
out there all across this country. We’re seeing strong progressive
growth. It is not just Zohran Mamdani in New York or Katie Wilson in
Seattle. From coast to coast, you are seeing progressive democratic
socialists standing up, taking on the establishment and winning
elections.

And one of the great secrets of the corporate media is that right now
in the House of Representatives, the Congressional Progressive Caucus
has about one hundred members, including dozens and dozens of very
strong progressives. That is the result of the hard work all us have
done over the last number of years.

I’ve been asked to give you some advice. What I’m gonna tell you
is probably what you already know. Number one, here is a radical idea
— do your job that you were elected to do. Now, I’ll tell you a
story. Here is the story. I was elected to be mayor of Burlington,
Vermont; won it by ten votes way back in 1981. We had a strong foreign
policy. We had exchange programs. We dealt with national issues. But
I’ll never forget there was an article in the local newspaper and
the report asked some guy, “But what does it mean? What do you think
about having a socialist as your mayor?” And the guy said, “Well,
I don’t know much about socialism, but I do know they’re getting
the snow off of the streets a lot faster than they used to.”

You gotta do your job. If you’re on the city council, the school
board, the state legislature, you gotta do it. And if you do your job
well, people will give you the latitude to talk about many, many other
issues. But don’t lose focus regarding the job that you are elected
to do.

Second of all, establishment Democrats have the brilliant idea that
the only people they can talk to are establishment Democrats. They
literally have lists of people: “Don’t knock on this door; don’t
knock on that door. Only on these.” I strongly disagree with that
suggestion. Knock on every door in your district. And what you’ll
find when you do that is you’ll have the right-wing people slam the
door in your face. You’ll have some unpleasantness. But by and
large, what you’ll find is that there is a lot more commonality of
interest than you might have appreciated. In my view, the reason
Donald Trump is president of the United States today is not because
people voted for a trillion dollars in tax breaks for the 1 percent or
massive cuts in health care. He is the president of the United States
because of Democratic establishment candidates’ failure to provide a
real analysis and agenda that meets the crises that we face today.

Establishment Democrats believe that you can tinker around the edges,
you can tell the world how terrible Donald Trump is, and that’s
fine. But right now, what the American people understand is that
übercapitalism — an oligarchic form of society, which is what we
have today — is a disaster for the working class of this country. We
don’t have to tinker around the edges. We have to create a very new
form of society.

So for just your average person out there, you are in many cases going
nowhere in a hurry. You understand that with real inflation accounted
for, wages are basically the same as they were fifty years ago,
despite a huge increase in worker productivity as a result of all of
the expansion of technology. And almost all of the gains of that new
technology have gone to the 1 percent. And ordinary workers know that
there’s something wrong with 60 percent of our people living
paycheck to paycheck while Elon Musk owns more wealth himself than
about the bottom 52 percent of American society. They know that.

Here is a radical idea — do your job that you were elected to do.

They know that there’s something wrong when we have a campaign
finance system that is totally corrupt and allows billionaires in both
political parties to buy elections. That’s a broken system. I say
these things because you’re gonna have Republicans who understand
this as well. They understand if you look at the basic necessities of
life — just think for a moment: you’re living in the richest
country in the history of the world, and it cannot even provide the
basic necessities of life for working people.

Just take a look at the health care in your community. Talk about
health care. Everybody will tell you that despite spending twice as
much per capita on health care as any other nation, the health care
system is totally broken. Everybody knows that. The educational system
is largely broken, and the childcare system is a disaster. Kids
can’t afford to go to college, or they’re leaving school deeply in
debt. Public schools are under enormous pressure. Teachers are
underpaid. They’re dealing with all kinds of disciplinary issues,
kids who come from troubled families or are acting out in school. We
are dealing with a situation where our food system, just nutrition . .
. we are the most obese and unhealthy nation on Earth because you have
a food industry that makes huge profit by selling our kids crap, and
the price of groceries is soaring.

People understand that. I flew in from the National Airport in
Washington; there was a four-hour delay because they couldn’t figure
out how to de-ice the plane. All over the country you are looking at
basic problems people are struggling with. The system is failing. Our
job is not to run away from that reality but to offer a real
alternative. Because in my view, what the future is gonna be about
isn’t establishment Democrats. All over Europe, for example, the
establishment parties are fading away. The struggle is going to be
between the Trumpists of the world — right-wing extremism — and a
democratic socialist alternative, which recognizes the problems that
we face and provides concrete and real and bold solutions for working
families.

So what Donald Trump does is go, “Yeah, we got a lot of problems.
And the problem is undocumented people, the problem is the trans
community, the problem is that we have Somalians who are
‘garbage.’” That’s what demagogues do. They take the problems
that we face — often that they cause — and then you blame a
powerless minority. Our job is to recognize the problems are real and
to put the finger on the _real_ cause of the problem, which is the
greed of the oligarchs in this country. So that’s where we’re at
now. And it ain’t gonna be easy. Especially with Trump in the White
House.

To summarize, the American people know the system is broken. They are
hurting. They can’t afford groceries. They can’t afford health
care. They can’t afford education. They can’t afford a lot of
things. And at the same time, the billionaire class has never had it
so good. The establishment Democrats cannot talk about these things
because, very often, they’re getting funded by the billionaire
class. So what we have gotta do right now is get out into the streets.
We gotta talk to our people — _all_ people, not just people within
our zone of comfort. And we’re gonna be providing real solutions to
the crises that we face. So once again, what you have done is
extraordinary. I thank you so much and congratulate you for getting
out on the streets, for winning elections, and for standing up for
working people.

* Bernie Sanders
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* socialist elected officials
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