Bernie Sanders vs. Tulsi Gabbard: A Comparison

Sanders vs. Gabbard: An Overview

Broadly speaking, both Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard are very much on the liberal/progressive side of the spectrum in terms of domestic policy. To summarize, both support a living wage ($15), free college for most (Tulsi) or all (Bernie) people, Wall Street reforms such as reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act and breaking up the big banks, a universal taxpayer-funded health care system where care is free at the point of service (Medicare For All), legalization of marijuana, abolition of private prisons, comprehensive election and campaign finance reform (overturning Citizen’s United, eliminating gerrymandering, stopping voter suppression, making election day a holiday, etc.), both have 100% ratings on their voting records on LGBT rights, abortion rights, and other women’s rights, and both have introduced comprehensive climate change plans (Tulsi’s in the form of a bill in Congress, the Off Fossil Fuels Act, that was introduced 2 ½ years ago).

Gabbard, as mentioned previously, made opposition to important aspects of US foreign policy the centerpiece of her campaign; Sanders, on the other hand, has a very mixed record on foreign policy, for which he has frequently been criticized by the left. Gabbard has also been a stronger voice for civil liberties; for instance, she was the only member of Congress other than Rand Paul to speak out against Julian Assange’s arrest, and the only Democratic Presidential candidate other than Mike Gravel to call for freedom for (and the dropping of charges against) Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning and exoneration for Eric Snowden. Sanders, on the other hand, remained silent about Assange for a month and a half after his arrest, finally commenting to the effect that the Espionage Act shouldn’t be used to prosecute journalists when Assange was charged under it in late May last year, but still not mentioning Assange by name.

Full details on their policy positions and records can be found on their respective websites. Here, my intention is to closely examine their positions and records on three central issues in detail: health care, the environment, and foreign policy. (Recently, I have also written an extensive analysis of the primaries, and discussed the ultimate inadequacy of relying even on progressive Democrats such as Sanders and Gabbard as a vehicle for social change: https://medium.com/@jeffmelton/electoral-politics-in-the-age-of-pandemics-climate-change-and-late-stage-capitalism-a1a746e42d57.)

Sanders vs. Gabbard: Health Care

The US health care system is in dire straits. Costs per capita are twice or more those of almost every other country in the world. More than 30 million people lacked health insurance before the current economic crisis, and the figure is sure to be higher now that tens of millions of people have lost their jobs. Health care costs are the leading cause of bankruptcy. More than 40,000 deaths annually are attributable to a lack of health insurance. The US is the only wealthy country that lacks universal health insurance — and many poorer countries, such as Cuba and North Korea, provide universal health care coverage. Not surprisingly, health care is consistently ranked as the #1 issue by voters, and the majority of them support a Medicare For All system.

It is well-known that Bernie Sanders advocates Medicare For All. But what is meant by Medicare For All? Simply put, it is the brand name for the US version of single payer national health insurance, first introduced as a bill in Congress by Rep. John Conyers in 2003. The current bills in Congress are S.1129, introduced in the Senate by Bernie Sanders, and H.R.1384, introduced in the House by Rep. Pramila Jayapal from Washington. Tulsi Gabbard is a co-sponsor of H.R. 1384.

The name comes from the fact that the current government-funded health insurance system for those age 65 and over is called Medicare. The idea of Medicare For All is to expand that system to everyone and to modify it so that it covers all medically necessary care at minimal or no point of service cost to patients. Like current Medicare, Medicare For All would be taxpayer-funded and would guarantee high-quality medical care to all Americans. It would also substantially cut overall health care costs by vastly reducing administrative costs and profits for private corporations — countries with such systems typically have half or less the per capita health care costs of the US.

The term “single payer” refers to the fact that there is only one institution paying for the care that is guaranteed to the entire population — the government. That does not necessarily mean that private insurance is abolished entirely. Neither Bernie Sanders’ Medicare For All bill in the Senate nor Pramila Jayapal’s bill in the House call for public coverage of procedures considered optional such as cosmetic surgery or marriage counseling. And neither bill completely prohibits private insurance coverage of medically necessary procedures, as medical providers have the choice of opting into the Medicare system or not. However, there is guaranteed coverage of all medically necessary care, without deductibles or co-pays, through the Medicare system.

Although Gabbard is a co-sponsor of Jayapal’s bill in the House and would surely sign it if she were President and it came across her desk, her own proposal for universal healthcare is more similar to Australia’s Medicare system than to Jayapal’s bill. Australia’s system allows for a somewhat larger role for private insurance than the American Medicare bills would, because unlike in the American bills, patients/consumers have the option of covering medically necessary expenses with private insurance rather than Medicare. Australia’s system is characterized as a Medicare For All system because the taxpayer-funded government system (as here, called Medicare) is available to everyone and guarantees coverage of the vast majority of costs of all medically necessary care. Everyone who pays taxes pays Medicare tax. Whether Australian Medicare can be considered single-payer can be debated. A sizable majority (a bit over 2/3) of medically necessary expenses are covered by the government, but there is also a sizable role for private insurance. But, on the other hand, one can argue that some of the expenses not covered by Canada’s Medicare system, such as dental and eye care, are also medically necessary care, and yet Canada’s system is still characterized as single-payer. According to Wikipedia, for what it’s worth, Australia’s system is described as a single-payer/private hybrid system.

Some have criticized Australia’s system (and Gabbard’s proposal) for allowing too large a role for private insurance, posing a danger of creating a two-tiered system. That danger may be real — and, indeed, any social program in any country can potentially be undermined by vested private interests, and one can cite many examples of that happening. The welfare state in the Scandinavian countries in 2020 is not what it was 50 years ago. But studies of Australia’s health care system suggest that that hasn’t happened yet. Its health care outcomes are ranked in the top five — often higher — for all health indicators. Its per capita health care costs are comparable to those in Canada, and roughly half those in the US.

Gabbard has said that the sort of health care system she advocates is “loosely based” on Australia’s. That is, she advocates taxpayer-funded health insurance that is guaranteed to all Americans (Medicare For All, in other words), with individuals having the option to purchase private health insurance if they choose. All Americans would be guaranteed quality care from a non-profit institution, the US government — which would be the largest single payer of health care costs in the world, and accordingly have immense power to negotiate with pharmaceutical and health care providers. Unlike Australia’s plan — or Canada’s — her plan would cover dental and vision care, as well as long-term care. At the same time, her plan, like Australia’s, would allow for a larger role for private insurance than Sanders’ plan. Under Sanders’ plan, health care providers could opt out of the Medicare system either partially or completely if they chose, and private individuals could either pay them directly or obtain insurance that would cover such providers. Under Gabbard’s plan, insurees could also opt out of Medicare, typically through employer-provided or union-provided plans, although they would still have to pay Medicare tax and would always have Medicare available if they chose to use it.

In short, although one could criticize some of the details, both Sanders and Gabbard are proposing health care plans that are comparable to and in fact somewhat better than most of the best health care systems in the world, and would constitute a night and day change for the better in our health care system if implemented. All medically necessary expenses, including dental and vision care, would be fully covered by Medicare under either of their plans — which isn’t even the case in Canada’s Medicare system. Obviously, we can’t have that in the United Corporate States of America. There are many corporations that would actually benefit from being freed of the burden of insuring employees; in fact, billionaire investor/businessman Warren Buffett called the for-profit health care system “the tapeworm of American economic competitiveness.” However, clearly the insurance and pharmaceutical industries have too much power over our government for that to come to pass without a massive pro-Medicare For All movement.

Sanders vs. Gabbard: Environmental Policy

Although not as high a priority in voters’ minds as healthcare, the environment is still considered a very important issue by the majority of voters, as well it should be. There is no question that our natural environment is in a heap of trouble, and humans are primarily responsible for that. A recent report from Australia’s Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration predicts that unless drastic action is taken in the very near future to slow down climate change, a combination of shortages of fresh water, food production instability, and extreme weather could pose an existential threat to human civilization by 2050. Even if such a catastrophic outcome is avoided, there is no question that climate change is a very serious problem, with the level of carbon in the atmosphere having passed the 350 parts per million level once considered a tipping point many years ago.

And there are all sorts of other dire environmental problems. Fresh water supplies are being rapidly depleted and polluted. Samples of drinking water from Flint, Michigan found 13,000 parts per billion (ppb) of lead in the community’s water, which is nearly 900 times higher than the EPA’s maximum limit of 15 parts per billion (ppb). Water supplies are likewise dangerously contaminated in scores of communities all around the country by a plethora of sources — lead, mercury, PCBs, agricultural runoff, fracking, mining, oil spills, and the list goes on. Rates of asthma and other respiratory illnesses are at staggering levels in major cities throughout the world because of the severity of air pollution. One third of the planet’s land mass is now desert. Over 200,000 acres of rainforest are cleared or burned down every day, and more than 20% of the Amazon rainforest is gone. We’re in the midst of the largest mass extinction of animals in 65 million years. A combination of overfishing, agricultural runoff, oil spills, dumping of plastic and other trash, and pollution by a variety of toxic chemicals has been deadly to our oceans, where half of all coral reefs have disappeared in the last 30 years, and at present rates of loss, every species of fish or other marine creature currently consumed by humans will be extinct by 2048, less than 30 years away. It is widely acknowledged that our fossil fuel economy is a primary cause of most of these problems, particularly but far from limited to climate change. It is not nearly as widely acknowledged that animal agriculture is also a leading contributor to environmental problems. Neither of these industries are ecologically sustainable. Moreover, our economic system — indeed, our whole way of life — is predicated on infinite growth and thus, most likely, infinite growth in resource consumption, on a finite planet.

Clearly, this cannot go on. How do Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard stack up in terms of their proposals to address these colossal problems? Let’s look at their views and records in detail.

A lifelong environmentalist, Gabbard has been a leader on many environmental issues during her time in Congress. She is the only member of Congress who (while a member of Congress) traveled to Standing Rock to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline.

She has visited Flint, Michigan a number of times, and has been an outspoken critic of the government’s lack of action in cleaning up the water there and in many other cities, and supporter of legislation to put a significant chunk of federal money into doing so. She has been a strong supporter of sustainable agriculture and food self-sufficiency, backing legislation to promote urban gardens, fight invasive species, legalize industrial hemp, and label GMO foods. She doesn’t talk about it much, but she is a lifelong vegetarian who has been vegan for the past few years, and has talked a lot about the ecological destructiveness of animal agriculture.

But what she’s known for in terms of environmental policy — not that this is anywhere near as well-known as her opposition to regime change wars — is that she is the only member of Congress to have introduced a climate change bill, the OFF Fossil Fuels Act. (The Green New Deal is a resolution, not a bill.) The OFF Act calls for the US to transition away from fossil fuels to 100% clean energy by 2035, and 80% by 2027. This applies to both home and industrial energy use and to transportation. The bill also expresses strong support for the principles of environmental justice adopted at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, and calls for a ban on the targeting of poor communities by polluters, an end to fossil fuel industry subsidies, and bans on fracking, nuclear power, and oil and natural gas exports. The bill also calls for providing jobs at a living wage for any workers displaced from their jobs as a result of the transition.

Bernie Sanders also has an excellent environmental record. His Green New Deal plan — which, like Gabbard’s OFF Act, is much more ambitious than AOC’s Green New Deal resolution — calls for a complete transition to renewable energy for transportation and electricity generation by 2030, with an overall carbon emissions reduction target of 71% by that year, and decarbonization of all other sectors of the economy by 2050. As Sanders points out, such ambitious goals have been achieved in the past:

The federal government electrified America as part of the New Deal. The United States of America put people on the moon 50 years ago. We can sure as hell transform our energy system away from fossil fuels to 100 percent renewables today and create millions of jobs in the process.

Like Gabbard’s, Sanders’ proposal calls for providing jobs at a living wage for any workers displaced from their jobs as a result of the transition — in fact, Sanders goes a bit further than Gabbard on the employment front and includes in his proposal a plan to create 20 million new jobs in sectors needed to address the climate crisis. Similarly, like Gabbard’s bill, Sanders’ proposal calls for a ban on the targeting of poor communities by polluters, an end to fossil fuel industry subsidies, and a ban on fracking and rapid phase-out of nuclear power, and recognizes the need to redress environmental racism — although it should be noted that in the late ’90s, Bernie tried to get a bill passed that would have shipped Vermont’s nuclear waste to a dumping ground in a poor Hispanic community in southern Texas, Sierra Blanca. Understandably, he got a lot of heat for that. I’m not aware of any similar blemishes on his record since then. In any case, to continue, Sanders’ plan, like Gabbard’s, includes specific proposals for improving the ecological sustainability of agriculture. Both Gabbard and Sanders also emphasize the need for international cooperation in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and generally encouraging ecologically sustainable practices.

So, how do the two stack up overall on environmental issues? Overall, they are both much better on the environment than any of the other Democratic candidates (except perhaps Gravel). Sanders provides more specifics on some matters in his plan, such as specifying a number of jobs he wants to create, and his plan expresses a commitment to ending unemployment through creating environmentally-friendly jobs. However, I think Gabbard deserves a lot of credit for being out front on this issue. She put forward a very ambitious climate change plan — still to date the only climate change bill in Congress, as AOC’s Green New Deal resolution is lacking in detail and not as aggressive in combating climate change as either her or Bernie’s proposals. She is the only person who was a member of Congress at the time to protest the Dakota Access pipeline in Standing Rock, and she has been a leader on a host of environmental issues, including Flint’s water, toxic waste such as the Red Hill fuel dump, coral reefs, unsustainable agricultural practices, and more. She is also vegan (a rarity in Presidential politics), and seems more cognizant than Bernie Sanders of the damage to the planet — as well as to animal well-being and human health — that is being done by animal agriculture (see this clip starting at 2:25). Sanders, on the other hand, has long been a major supporter of the dairy industry, which is big in Vermont (he even had an ice cream flavor named after him by Ben and Jerry’s, who are big supporters), and of animal agribusiness generally.

To be sure, Sanders deserves credit for speaking out about the air and water pollution emanating from factory farms. But he hasn’t said anything about the other environmental impacts of factory farms — to say nothing of the cruel and heartless treatment of animals on “factory” and “family” farms alike — and he misleadingly implies that it’s “factory farms” specifically that are environmentally problematic rather than simply the fact that a far larger number of animals are being raised to be eaten by humans, to produce milk for humans, etc., than is ecologically sustainable. He mentioned in a tweet last summer that the government of Brazil was responsible for colossal damage to the environment through burning the Amazon rainforest, and proposed imposing economic sanctions on Brazilian corporations for this, but he provides no specifics about why the rainforest is being set on fire. As Gabbard could tell him, primary responsibility for these fires and the overall destruction of the Amazon lies with the beef industry, and the destruction of the Amazon by ranchers and other environmentally damaging industries didn’t start with Bolsonaro’s government; it’s been going on for a long time. All in all, I haven’t seen anything from him yet that indicates that he fully understands the magnitude of the damage to the environment being done not just by “factory farms,” but by animal agribusiness as a whole, and in that regard I see a big difference between him and Tulsi Gabbard. At the same time, this isn’t an issue that she’s talked about a great deal, and she needs to bring it up more often.

On the whole, both Sanders and Gabbard have strong positions and records on environmental issues. Both have articulated the centrality of climate change and other forms of environmental destruction as a societal issue. Gabbard’s views and record are somewhat stronger. However, neither candidate has articulated the central left critique of mainstream environmentalism: human societies will continue to wage a losing battle against environmental destruction as long as capitalism, with its relentless drive for profits and growth, continues to dominate the planet. As Jeff Gibbs, director of the recent documentary film Planet of the Humans, succinctly puts it, “Unlimited growth on a finite planet is suicide.”

Sanders vs. Gabbard: Foreign Policy

Spoiler alert: Overall, Tulsi Gabbard wins hands-down on foreign policy. Both candidates’ views and records are significantly better than the mainstream of the Democratic Party. But Sanders’ views and record put him within the liberal mainstream of the Democratic Party that buys into the premise that the US is sometimes a force for good in the world that intervenes abroad for humanitarian reasons, whereas Gabbard rejects that view, arguing that US intervention abroad almost always makes things worse irrespective of stated motives or intentions.

The contradictions in Sanders’ views are often painful for anti-war activists like myself to observe. In a recent interview he gave with a reporter from the New York Times in response to an article criticizing him for his support for the Nicaraguan government and his opposition to US intervention in Central America during the 1980s, he sounded like a war opponent. He claimed to have done everything he could to prevent it during his political career. He pointed out that he voted against both Iraq wars and is a leading opponent of the US-Saudi war in Yemen. He pointed out that “of course” there was anti-American sentiment among Nicaraguans during the 1980s when he traveled there (and witnessed demonstrations with anti-American chants) because the US was attempting to overthrow their government and killing lots of people, and that the US had previously overthrown often democratically elected governments in many Latin American countries and elsewhere in the world. He mentioned that the elected government of Chile that the US overthrew was replaced with a fascist government. He expressed opposition to ongoing US efforts to overthrow the governments of Venezuela and Iran.

But at other times, he sounds like an imperialist Cold Warrior. He has expressed support for the US policy of arming “moderate rebels” — actually overwhelmingly Islamic fundamentalist terrorists — attempting to overthrow the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. He claims that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election partially because of “Russian interference,” and in general frequently spouts anti-Russia rhetoric and accuses Donald Trump of being in league with Russia. He has spoken of the supposed importance of “beefing up NATO” against “Russian aggression.” In a campaign fundraising email, he referred to deceased Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the most popular political leader in Venezuelan history, as a “dead communist dictator.” And even though he expressed opposition to the Trump administration’s efforts to overthrow the Venezuelan government, he repeated its false claims about the Maduro government, even absurdly insisting at one point that Venezuela was not allowing humanitarian aid in, when Venezuela was in fact accepting aid from any government that would provide it other than the one that was trying to overthrow its government. Sanders even said, in a written response to questions from the New York Times, that he would consider a pre-emptive military strike against North Korea or Iran to prevent them from conducting a nuclear or missile test. Additionally, he has claimed that the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement in opposition to Israeli apartheid is in part motivated by anti-Semitism.

His record reflects this odd mixture of pacifism and bellicosity. Though he opposed the wars in Iraq and opposes the current war in Yemen, and has either abstained or voted against the bloated US military budget in recent years, he has voted in favor of the vast majority of US military interventions during his 30 years in Congress, and voted for several of Barack Obama’s military budgets and a couple of George W. Bush’s. Although he voted against the 2003 Iraq War, in the ’90s, he voted for sanctions against Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands and devastated Iraq’s economy, as well as the bombings of Iraq that decimated key infrastructure such as water treatment facilities and a resolution calling for the overthrow of the Iraqi government. He also supported the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the authorization for use of military force that paved the way for the now-19-year-old war in Afghanistan, US intervention in the nearly decade-long Syrian civil war, and (at least at first) the overthrow of the Libyan government in 2011, and routinely supports military aid to Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Although I have my criticisms of Tulsi Gabbard’s foreign policy views and record, in general the contrast with Sanders is quite stark. Asked by an interviewer from NPR which US wars she thought were justified, she said it was hard to think of any since World War II. She is well-known for her opposition to regime change wars. She is criticized for overusing this term, and those whose objective is to smear her even claim that this is a “Russian term,” an odd claim given that this is an English phrase, one dating back to American media in the early 20th century and used often by critics of US foreign policy since then. Unlike Sanders, she has not engaged in neo-McCarthyist smears of Russia, and in fact has publicly objected to US politicians’ obsession with Russia. Her opposition to US regime change efforts has been unequivocal.

Like Sanders, Gabbard has spoken out against US covert regime change operations dating back many decades, such as the overthrow of the elected government of Iran in 1953, and points out that they are quite often governments that have been democratically elected. She also points out the vested interests behind US policy, such as the military-industrial complex or the colossal amounts of oil present in many of the countries where the US intervenes, and speaks often of the high human as well as financial cost of war. She speaks highly of Brown University scholar Stephen Kinzer’s book Overthrow, which discusses the history of US regime change efforts dating back to its overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and colonizing of Hawaii in 1893. Recently,she along with Kinzer and former Congressman Dennis Kucinich held a joint event to discuss the situation in Iran and US foreign policy generally. She has also been sharply critical of US aid to Saudi Arabia and its alliance with the Saudi dictatorship, as well as what she has characterized as a genocidal Saudi-US war in Yemen.

Gabbard came into Congress in January of 2013, having emphasized the high human and financial cost of war in her campaign, much as she does today. She called for withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in October of 2011 (the 10th anniversary of the Afghanistan invasion). In September of 2013, after an apparent chemical weapons attack that was blamed on the Syrian government, she voted against a resolution authorizing military force in Syria, and expressed opposition to US involvement in Syria’s civil war, saying that the US should not be the “world’s policeman.” Bernie Sanders also expressed opposition to US use of military force at that time. The following year, a resolution to support the so-called “moderate rebels” trying to overthrow the Syrian government was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama. Both Gabbard and Sanders voted against it. But Gabbard stands alone in Congress in not only consistently opposing US intervention in Syria, but calling out the reality of what US foreign policy’s effects on the Syrian people have been and who the US has actually been supporting — ”moderate rebels” who actually turned out to be linked with Islamic extremists.

In 2017, she and former Congressman Dennis Kucinich went on a fact-finding mission to Syria. She has often been criticized for that trip, because one of the people she met with was President Bashar al-Assad, and it’s been falsely claimed that she supported Assad (whom she has called a “dictator” on numerous occasions). This is just one of the many smears against her leveled by the (mainly Democratic) political establishment in the wake of her calling out the DNC’s rigging of the primaries in 2016, resigning her position as DNC vice chair, and becoming one of Bernie Sanders’ most prominent campaign surrogates. In reality, of course, many US politicians have met with Assad, she doesn’t support him, and she and Dennis met with a great many other Syrians besides Assad during their trip. In fact, they had not even planned on meeting with Assad, but Assad invited them to do so after he heard that they were in Syria. In any event, the consistent message from the Syrians they met was that the US and other countries should stop intervening in their country and that there was no such thing as “moderate rebels” — that Islamic fundamentalist terrorists such as ISIS and al-Nusra were far and away the dominant forces among those fighting to overthrow the Syrian government.

Shortly after her return from the trip, she introduced the Stop Arming Terrorists Act, calling on the US to cease its direct and indirect funding of Muslim fundamentalist extremists in Syria. It only received a few co-sponsors. A parallel bill introduced soon thereafter in the Senate has to date had no co-sponsors (i.e., Bernie Sanders has not supported Gabbard’s bill).

In April of that year, the US bombed Syrian military targets, based on US claims that Syria used chemical weapons. Almost alone among US politicians, Gabbard pointed out the lack of evidence that the Syrian government was responsible for a chemical attack, and expressed opposition to the Trump administration’s attacking without having gathered evidence that Assad was responsible (some sources have questioned whether a chemical attack occurred). Of course, that further fueled claims that Tulsi was an “Assad apologist,” much like people who criticized the lack of evidence that Iraq had WMDs were labeled “Saddam apologists.” A similar situation occurred in 2018, and Gabbard again questioned the Trump administration’s decision to proceed with bombing without any evidence. In both cases, she cited evidence calling into question the claims of Syrian government responsibility for the alleged attacks, and last fall, whistleblowers from the OPCW called out their organization for misrepresenting the conclusions of their investigation of the 2018 alleged attack in a Wikileaks-leaked document. In 2019, Gabbard introduced a resolution calling for withdrawal of US troops from Syria and an end to US involvement, and also introduced a resolution requiring the President to seek Congressional approval prior to any military action against Iran. Gabbard is one of only two members of Congress (along with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand) to vote against the US military budget for the past four years. And in December of this year, in conjunction with being the only member of the House to vote “present” on Donald Trump’s impeachment, she introduced a resolution to censure him for offenses that included violations of the War Powers Act, illegally occupying and pillaging Syrian oilfields, enabling Turkish ethnic cleansing of the Kurdish population of Syria, collaborating with Saudi Arabia in a genocidal war in Yemen, and increasing the risk of war and nuclear proliferation by abandoning international treaties.

There are certainly aspects of Gabbard’s rhetoric and record that can be criticized. She often voted for the overall military budget and various military spending bills during her early years in Congress and, like Sanders, has supported military aid to Israel. Both Gabbard and Sanders have condemned the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement as counterproductive. Sanders even suggested that it was in part motivated by anti-Semitism. And both of them, in my view rather naively, advocate for a two-state solution (a Jewish-dominated state and an Arab/Muslim-dominated state) to the Israel/Palestine conflict (i.e., the Israeli occupation of Palestine), overlooking the extreme dominance Israel has and thus the complete lack of incentive for them to negotiate a fair outcome. Sanders also voted for a resolution expressing approval of Israel’s bombing of Gaza in 2014. On the positive side, both have been very critical of Israeli violations of human rights, and have made clear that the Israeli occupation and settlements and the declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital are illegal acts. All in all, both Sanders and Gabbard have shortcomings on foreign policy. However, overall, Gabbard is clearly better.

Conclusion: Contributions, Limitations, and Implications

Regarding the campaigns of Gabbard and Sanders, I think that overall the movement for peace and social justice in this country has benefited from both Sanders’ and Gabbard’s messages. They have both put important issues on the table nationally — they have both made important contributions to the political conversation about social injustices and needed social reforms, Bernie principally through his class-conscious approach to domestic politics, and Tulsi principally through her emphasis on the staggering financial and human costs of US military interventions abroad — including colossally skewed budget priorities that pinch pennies on even basic infrastructure needs at home while throwing well over half a trillion dollars a year into the black hole of military spending.

I previously mentioned Gabbard’s strong stance on behalf of civil liberties and truth-telling, which includes her outspoken opposition to Julian Assange’s arrest and support for Wikileaks, her introduction of legislation to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, and her battle against unconstitutional spying on US citizens. She was also the lone member of Congress who expressed dissatisfaction with the impeachment process, calling it partisan and noting that it overlooked far more serious misconduct by Trump than merely pressuring the Ukrainian President to investigate Joe Biden. She also took a strong position on environmental issues, as did Sanders, although neither of them made that as much of a focus in their campaigns as I would have liked to see.

My assessment is similar regarding their positions and focus on electoral reform. Both called for a number of important changes such as ranked choice voting, abolition of the electoral college, same day voter registration, and abolition of superdelegates. However, I don’t think either focused on the problems with our electoral process enough, and they both implicitly encouraged people to retain considerable faith in the electoral system — and in electing Democrats (albeit not by itself) as a means of enacting major reforms.

Nevertheless, there is a significant difference between the two candidates in terms of their degree of willingness to go after the political establishment, especially their own party, and to take a stand that went against the majority in either party — and how that difference has played out. Gabbard went farther than Sanders in challenging problems with the electoral system. She introduced and promoted legislation calling for paper ballots or open-source, auditable voting machines, the Securing America’s Elections Act — legislation that Sanders ignored. Gabbard was also an outspoken critic of DNC election rigging, government interference in the electoral process, and corporate media coverage of the election; Sanders was not, for the most part. In addition, for a Democrat, Tulsi Gabbard has gone pretty hard after capitalist corruption and the imperialist war machine, including within her own party. Sanders, for his part, seldom went after his own party, famously denying that his “good friend” Joe Biden was corrupt and apologizing to Biden for an editorial by Sanders surrogate Zephyr Teachout documenting Biden’s corruption in detail. A particularly striking example of Gabbard’s greater willingness than Sanders to call out the corruption of her own party was a campaign appearance in April 2019, when she had this to say about the rot within her own party:

The most attacks I get are not from Republicans. They are from Democrats. They are from people in the mainstream media. They are from people in the foreign policy establishment . . . People who represent the interests of the military-industrial complex. . . . People will get into a lot of conversations about political tactics and “How do we win this race?” and “Who’s going to beat Donald Trump?” Bluntly, I might get in trouble for saying this. What does it matter if we beat Donald Trump if we end up with someone who will perpetuate the very same crony capitalist policies — corporate policies — and waging more of these costly wars?

Sanders, for his part, deserves credit for emphasizing the extent and injustice of economic inequality in this country, and calling out the corruption of “the billionaire class” that makes it very difficult to change this state of affairs. During one of the last debates of the primary, Sanders railed against “a corrupt political system bought by billionaires like Mr. Bloomberg” (one of his opponents in the race). Sanders also recognizes and to some extent emphasizes that the reforms he advocates cannot be brought about simply by getting himself or other progressive Democrats elected to high office, because vested interests with deep pockets stand in the way:

This is not about Bernie Sanders. You can have the best president in the history of the world but that person will not be able to address the problems that we face unless there is a mass movement, a political revolution in this country. Right now the only pieces of legislation that get to the floor of the House and Senate are sanctioned by big money, Wall Street, the pharmaceutical companies. The only way we win and transform America is when millions of people stand up as you’re doing today and say “Enough is enough.”

But again and again, Sanders pulled his punches against the Democratic establishment, even going so far as to criticize his own campaign surrogate, Zephyr Teachout, for documenting Joe Biden’s long history of corruption — and saying that he wasn’t corrupt! Sanders ran much of his primary campaign as if he were already running a general election campaign against Donald Trump, repeatedly claiming that Trump was “the most dangerous President in modern history,” focusing on Trump’s “racism, sexism, xenophobia, [alleged] homophobia, and religious bigotry.” Meanwhile, Sanders displayed his own xenophobia and implicit racism with his neo-McCarthyist rhetoric about Russia and his contrasting of “good” European “democratic socialist” governments like Sweden with the “bad” “authoritarian” governments of Cuba or Venezuela, where lots of brown people live. He even essentially Russiagated himself when the corporate media and security state accused Russia of helping his campaign (without his knowledge) by agreeing that these baseless claims were credible.

Most crucially, he did not seem temperamentally suited to do what was necessary to put himself in a position to win a race where the media wasn’t going to do him any favors — “take the gloves off” and directly criticize his opponents’ policies and views or call them out for being “sold out” corporate Democrats. At times it was hard to tell that his “good friend” Joe Biden — a characterization of Biden that he repeated over and over — was in fact his chief rival for the Democratic nomination. There were some policy issues, such as Biden’s support for the Iraq War and his calls for cuts in Social Security, where Sanders criticized Biden — though he never pointed out Biden’s leading role in pushing “weapons of mass destruction” lies and promoting the Iraq War. But there were many other issues where Sanders had little to say about Biden’s record. Biden wrote the 1994 Crime Bill that paved the way for the US’s unprecedented level of mass incarceration, but Sanders had little to say about it — perhaps because he voted for it. Sanders portrayed Biden as a decent guy who was just mistaken on certain issues, not as the corrupt, warmongering, and mendacious servant of the ruling class that his nearly 50-year political career makes clear that he is — nor did Sanders or any of Biden’s other opponents ever bring up the numerous sexual misconduct allegations against Biden, or, aside from Julian Castro, raise concerns about the signs of cognitive decline he has exhibited.

Sanders’ kid-gloves treatment at times of his Democratic opponents, along with various internal problems in his campaign that I explore further elsewhere, and a better-organized effort by the political establishment to derail it, meant that he was unable to replicate the success of his 2016 campaign, and abandoned the effort and endorsed Joe Biden in April 2020. Much as in 2016, a concerted corporate media smear campaign along with a rigged electoral process presented a considerable handicap that Sanders and his campaign would have needed to put up a much stronger fight to overcome. For her part, Tulsi Gabbard lacked the fundraising capabilities, name recognition, or reputation that Sanders entered the race with, and the media smear campaign and DNC electoral shenanigans succeeded in preventing her campaign from ever breaking out of the single digits in polls or primary results, save in American Samoa.

Ultimately, what both candidates seem to only partially grasp is that the institutional power of the Democratic Party and its backers in the corporate media is simply too great an obstacle for efforts to reform it internally to succeed, or even for someone with their old school liberal (and in Tulsi’s case moderately anti-imperialist) politics to be elected President. In a nutshell, as Jill Stein says, you can’t have a revolution in a counterrevolutionary party. Not only are social movements necessary to social change, but generally speaking, they effect change in spite of the Democratic Party, which has time and time again proven to be an obstacle to social movements, dragged along kicking and screaming by the labor movement of the ’30s, the civil rights and antiwar and other movements of the ’50s through ’70s, but never serving as a reliable ally. Bernie has in fact, despite his nominally being an independent except when he’s running for President, been a de facto Democrat throughout his political career, serving as the outreach chairman of the Democratic Party in recent years, caucusing with the Democrats, campaigning doggedly for Hillary Clinton in ’16 after he lost the nomination to her, barely uttering a peep (at least compared to many of his supporters) about the fact that the nomination was stolen from him by Clinton and the DNC, and trashing third party candidates like Ralph Nader: “Not only am I going to vote for John Kerry, I am going to run around this country and do everything I can to dissuade people from voting for Ralph Nader… I am going to do everything I can, while I have differences with John Kerry, to make sure that he is elected.” Undoubtedly he will continue in much the same vein for the remainder of this election season. Already he has endorsed and praised the right-wing Democrat who beat him, Joe Biden, calling him a “decent man” despite there being a rape allegation against him as well as a long and thoroughly corrupt political career.

To her credit, Tulsi has not dissed third-party campaigns or third parties, she did not actively campaign for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and she has been much more vocal about Clinton’s and the DNC’s corruption than Bernie has. Nonetheless, like Bernie, she is very committed to trying to reform the Democratic Party, an effort that, based on my experience and my reading of history, I think is doomed to fail. And I also have to say that both of these candidates fall short of my ideals in terms of their political outlook in other ways as well. I already mentioned my disagreements with their take on Israel and Palestine, that they’re just not quite there yet in terms of their understanding of the situation and their recognition of how much political pressure on Israel it will take to bring about justice for the Palestinian people. Finally, the bottom line on their politics is that they are both liberal or perhaps social democratic reformers. To their credit, they support major reforms to capitalist governance in the United States, but they do not really support socialism even though Bernie calls himself a “democratic socialist.” They support reforming capitalism so that it will serve the needs of working people better — and even that only goes as far as the relatively short leash the Democratic Party keeps them on will let them. And for a socialist like me, that’s not enough.

[This article is based on a video series I did during the Democratic primary campaign comparing the candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard, the two most progressive candidates who participated in the 2019–2020 primaries for most of the campaign. I’ve written it to provide a written document, with hyperlinks, for those who wish to take a closer look at the 2020 campaign, and as a companion piece to my summary of the 2020 primary campaign and its significance, Electoral Politics in the Age of Pandemics, Climate Change, and Late Stage Capitalism.]

Jeff Melton is a social psychologist, copy editor (oceaneditors.com), writer, and longtime activist on a plethora of social justice issues. If you like what you’re reading here, please consider supporting my work on Patreon so that I can do more of this. Even $1 will help!