When Bernie Looked at George Wallace, He Saw Adolf Hitler.

Bernie Sanders saw George Wallace as a latter-day American version of Adolf Hitler — posing the same kind of threat to decency and democracy. Bernie did not admire George Wallace, at all. He loathed Wallace and what he stood for, as an unrepentant racist and demagogue for so many years.

Does this need saying? You would think not. Bernie, as we all know, was arrested for protesting housing segregation in Chicago…before Wallace rose to national prominence with his divisive, racist campaigns for President. Yet, a conservative rag, the Washington Examiner, has tried to kick up a shit-storm with an entirely out of context quote from an interview Sanders gave in 1972. Naturally, the #NeverBernie crowd seized on it, to do their tired, old “See? We told you he’s a racist or a sexist” dance.

If Sanders was being at all complimentary to Wallace, he was damning him with faint praise. The full context of what Bernie meant is in the original local news story the Examiner quoted — and it’s been written about by CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski, who noted that Bernie was comparing Wallace to Hitler — able to tap into frustrations and excite the basest of prejudices and hate. It goes without saying that the CNN report last May, which you must read, wasn’t trumpeted by the #NeverBernie crowd, because it was very flattering and didn’t take anything out of context. That original story, though deserves some context, too. It seems to have been an interview Bernie gave in context with a piece he wrote for the Liberty Union party newsletter.

I want to write about that 1972 pamphlet he produced, because it’s really eye-opening. For a Bernie stan, it’s red meat. A delicious treat. For those who want to understand Bernie Sanders today, all you have to do is read what he wrote after his disturbing conversations with voters about George Wallace. It also shows how insightful he was about the coming storm.

The day began with a false smear on Sen. Sanders, but it led to me this glorious historical piece from which we can really get to know the authentic Bernie Sanders, and why he’s the right candidate for this moment. So, let’s get on with it, you say!

A week after George Wallace was shot (and paralyzed from the waist down), while on the campaign in 1972, in Laurel MD, not far from my current location — Bernie hit the streets and interviewed the locals in St. Albans, VT. What he heard there clearly shook him — maybe even scared the shit out of him. He heard voters who were responding to Wallace. They said politicians don’t care about them, but Wallace, at least, “seems to care.”

Bernie presents a long series of quotes from his “people on the street” interviews, and then offers a deeply pessimistic essay about what he’s learned. He found a deeply frustrated populace. Bernie wrote about Wallace that he “can tap these frustrations, play with them, and use them for destructive ends.”

After listening to Wallace supporters, Bernie wrote that:

“these people are in trouble — and they know it — and they are disgusted with the political doubletalk and deceit of the politicians.”

These interviews seem to really inform Bernie’s views on politics, even nearly 40 years later, and offer great insight into why he is running the campaign he has now.

Bernie notes these interviews helped him understand the spectacular failure of Ed Muskie ‘s campaign in the snows of New Hampshire — why “Muskie — who attempted to say nothing and antagonize no one — fell flat on his face.”

To be honest, one could say the same about other New Englanders who ranfor President — Dukakis in ’88 and Kerry in ’04. It was already “too late for cliches and slick advertising” in 1972, according to Sanders. The times have been crying out for someone different for decades.

He dismissed the “professorial” George McGovern who “issues long drawn-out position papers explaining how “working people” will benefit from his being President.” Sen. Sanders probably felt similarly about Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Reams of position papers, and a complete inability to connect them to the voters. One can wonder about the campaign of Sen.Elizabeth Warren who has made a big deal about having a “plan for that” — for so many issues, but then struggling to defend the details and to resonate with voters beyond her well-impressed base.

What Bernie writes about Wallace seems eerily familiar, eqully applicable to Donald Trump. Bernie noted that voters think “George Wallace ‘tells it like it is’ — and they trust him. And if his finger nails are not always clean, and if his English is not quite Harvard, and if he raises his voice once in a while — well that’s fine.”

We really could say the same about Trump and his connection with his supporters, 35–40 years after George Wallace’s political peak. Trump’s appeal is the same, and his supporters are largely the same kind of people.

What Bernie writes about the “Wallace phenomenon” was really insightful and amazingly predictive. According to Bernie:

“What the “Wallace phenomenon” indicates is that this country is reaching a point at which there is no turning back...The contradictions are too irreconcilable, the tensions too great. Something has got to give. There will, I believe, be fundamental change in America in the not too distant future — one way or the other. And George Wallace presents one way. Unfortunately, it’s really no way at all.”

Bernie wasn’t wrong, in that the rise of Ronald Reagan was not too far off in the future. He nearly took over the GOP four years later, but 8 years later, the ‘Reagan Revolution’ fundamentally changed the country and we are still reeling from it, and struggling to escape the choke-hold the right-wing has been putting on our politics for the last 40 years.

Trump, however, has tapped into something far darker than Reagan, and it’s something Bernie wrote about in the 1972 piece — his takeaway from his interviews with Wallace supporters.

“Democracy in America (in any sense of the word) just might not make it . My mind flashed to scenes of Germany in the late 1920’s. Confusion, rebellion, frustration, economic instability, a wounded national pride, ineffectual political leadership — and the desire for a strong man who would do something, who would bring order out of the chaos.”

Bernie sees Wallace as trying to fill that desire, for a strong man to bring order out of chaos — just as Hitler had done 40 years earlier in Germany. Wallace failed to ascend to the same heights. 40 years later, though, Trump has managed to climb the peak which Wallace could not. He sits atop a morass of hate, greed, selfishness, denial and indifference, facing a decaying civilization and proclaiming “only I can fix it!”

Bernie Sanders offers the starkest contrast possible in that he’s trying to build the broadest coalition, and, in 2020, selling a campaign based in love and compassion, calling each of us to “fight for someone I don’t know.” The campaign emphasizes that it’s not about Bernie Sanders. It’s a people-powered movement, about the people he is trying to give voice to — The slogan is “Not Me. Us.”

It’s fair to say that Bernie isn’t trying to shut out the kinds of people he talked to during that week walking the streets in St. Albans. He talks about representing the “working class” and winning their votes. He offers policies to lift them out of their lot, but he also brings to it a very different style — perhaps one he’s picked up a little from George Wallace. About those Wallace voters, Sanders writes:

“Their attraction to Wallace goes well beyond the issues . They see in Wallace a man who is standing up to the Establishment — a tough little guy fighting for them. They admire his courage and his straightforwardness. ‘He comes right out and says what he feels.’”

To get their votes, Bernie knows he also has to stand up to the Establishment — to be a “tough little guy fighting for them.” To show courage and straightforwardness. It’s why you will not find much artifice in Bernie Sanders.

It’s also why he’s reluctant to be wonky on the trail. The NY Times rejected endorsing him, complaining that he was light on details. It’s not that there aren’t details there — the Medicare for All plan is extremely detailed, and the Green New Deal provides a compelling vision — an outline of where the country needs to go to create a carbon-neutral economy. It’s just that Sanders knows what he has to do to win in this moment. He can’t be professorial like McGovern, or Warren. He can’t be a bland vanilla cone like Muskie or Buttigieg. And he has to stand up to the Establishment, so he can’t court or defend the Establishment, as Biden does. That’s the ticket to expanding the Democratic base beyond where it was when it flamed out so badly in 2016. That’s the key to winning, at all levels.

However, to circle back to the critics who want to paint him as unable to or unwilling to appeal to black voters, his fears of Wallace’s brand of bigotry and demagoguery wasn’t about fear for his own position, as a Jew in largely Christian America. He knew who was most at risk from Wallace’s politics.

“Could the blacks, long-hairs, “welfare chiselers”, and political dissidents become the Jews and Communists of the Nazi experience? Could it happen here? I see no reason why it couldn’t.”

Bernie has spent the last four years buliding a multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalition that has no parallel. He leads among Latino voters. He leads by large margins among Arab and Muslim-Americans. He has the support of younger people from every stripe — and he’s winning over older black voters. Not by pandering, but by just being authentic — authentically a fighter for justice for all.

Bernie sees this moment as the inflection point he wrote about in 1972. He talked about it in his address last fall at George Washington University, where he laid out his vision of Democratic Socialism, and why it’s the antidote to the authoritarian plague that is infecting this country now.

“If there was ever a moment where we had to effectively analyze the competing political and social forces which define this historical period, this is that time. If there was ever a moment when we needed to stand up and fight against the forces of oligarchy and authoritarianism, this is that time.”

Of course, Bernie brings his particular, socialist critique and perspective in analyzing the forces arrayed against the democrats and socialists.

“The United States and the rest of the world face two very different political paths. On one hand, there is a growing movement towards oligarchy and authoritarianism in which a small number of incredibly wealthy and powerful billionaires own and control a significant part of the economy and exert enormous influence over the political life of our country.”

Bernie sees no daylight between the oligarchy and the authoritarianism that has manifested in Donald Trump’s Presidency.

In opposition, he sees a “movement” of “working people and young people…fighting for justice,” “teachers taking to the streets to make certain…their students get a quality education,” “workers at Disney, Amazon, Walmart and the fast food industry standing up and fighting for a living wage,” “young people taking on the fossil fuel industry,” “women who refuse to give control of their bodies to local, state and federal politicians,” “people of color and their allies demanding an end to systemic racism and massive racial inequities,” and “immigrants and their allies fighting to end the demonization of undocumented people.”

Bernie looks across the globe, and sees a “movement toward oligarchy” that “runs parallel to the growth of authoritarian regimes — like Putin in Russia, Xi in China, Mohamed Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary among others.

Besides a working alliance, these leaders share much in common, as they “meld corporatist economics with xenophobia and authoritarianism.” As Bernie notes, in “the United States, of course, we have our own version of this movement — which is being led by President Trump and many of his Republican allies.”

As Bernie says, “this authoritarian playbook is not new.” It still works though, largely because the challenges we face are the same. The world “ is in many ways not different from the one we faced a little less than a century ago, during and after the Great Depression in the 1930s.”

The United States avoiding falling into the authoritarian morass that consumed Europe in the ’30s. Instead, we turned the other way, to F.D.R., who created much of the social safety net we have today, and which inspired still greater reforms in Europe and in many other areas after WWII. So, now we find ourselves on the precipice again, staring into the abyss. The choice is clear to Bernie Sanders:

“It is my very strong belief that the United States must reject that path of hatred and divisiveness — and instead find the moral conviction to choose a different path, a higher path, a path of compassion, justice and love.

It is the path that I call democratic socialism.”

Sanders closed his 1972 piece by writing that Wallace “raises some of the very real and basic issues, but offers no solutions.” For Bernie — and the Liberty Union supporters he was writing for — “our function must be to raise those issues and offer real solutions.”

In his Presidential primary campaign in 2016, Bernie tried to do that. Again, in 2020, he’s raising the issues and offering real solutions. Not half measures to be sure. Real solutions. With early voting already underway in a few states, and the Iowa Caucus just days away, it seems he may get his chance next year to begin to do more than just talk about the issues and solutions. President Sanders will face the challenges of implementing solutions.

As he predicted in 1972 in his piece on Wallace, the country was approaching a pivot point. It could go one way or the other. With Trump, we definitely went one way, towards the extremes of the “destructive ends” of bigotry, hatred and authoritarianism. With Bernie, we still have a chance to go the other way. I pray we don’t miss the chance, because it may not come again.