Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is warning that President Joe Biden must do better to lift up, engage with, and mobilize the working class in the United States in order to defeat former president Donald Trump in 2024—and the stakes, says the two-time Democratic challenger, could not be higher.
"It will be the end of democracy, functional democracy," Sanders says in a new Guardianinterview when asked about the potential of Trump winning back the White House in this year's election.
In his conversation with the Guardian's Ed Pilkington, Sanders—the democratic socialist who ran powerful presidential campaigns against the Democratic Party establishment in both 2016 and 2020—said that Trump has "made clear" a second term would be much more corrosive and destructive than his first.
"We've got to explain to the American people... what the collapse of American democracy will mean to all of us."
"There's a lot of personal bitterness—he's a bitter man—having gone through four indictments, humiliated, he's going to take it out on his enemies," Sanders warns. "We've got to explain to the American people what that means to them—what the collapse of American democracy will mean to all of us."
Sanders suggested the conditions now in the United States teeter dangerously close to those that preceded the rise of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party in Germany last century as he warned about Trump's power to exploit the anxieties of a population to guide them toward his unique brand of authoritarianism and fascism.
"The challenge we face is to be able to show people that government in a democratic society can address their very serious needs," says Sanders. "If we do that, we defeat Trump. If we do not, then we are the Weimar Republic of the early 1930s."
Numerous polls in recent months have shown Biden performing poorly against Trump in a hypothetical matchup, but with both candidates the clear frontrunners in their respective parties—and the primary season officially kicking off with the Iowa caucuses this week—time is running out for the sitting president to turn around what many Democrats fear is a sinking ship.
If Biden does not do a better job of addressing the needs of the working class, Sanders warns, the consequences will be dire.
"We've got to see the White House move more aggressively on healthcare, on housing, on tax reform, on the high cost of prescription drugs," Sanders said. "If we can get the president to move in that direction, he will win; if not, he's going to lose."
Sanders advised Biden to campaign directly and aggressively on those concerns and told Pilkington he has been in touch with the president's team.
"In my view," Sanders said that Biden must tell voters "that if he is re-elected, within two months he will bring about the sweeping changes the working class of this country desperately need" and present a concrete set of policies to champion.
Asked if the Biden team was listening to his advice, Sanders responded: "As is always the case, not as strongly as I would like."
"The president has got to acknowledge the enormous crises facing people's lives. You can't fool them."
In his mind, Biden has done some good things while in office but it's just not enough and that must be acknowledged because voters who feel strained economically but don't perceive the threat that Trump represents will be lost to the Democrats.
"The president has got to acknowledge the enormous crises facing people's lives. You can't fool them," explained Sanders. "If I say to you all the great things I've done for you, you will come back and say, 'Well, I can't afford healthcare, I can't send my kid to college.' Americans are feeling anxious right now, and we've got to address that."
Sanders' driving advice is for Biden to learn from the example set by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who didn't run for reelection in 1936 by bragging about some of the recently enacted programs of the New Deal in his previous term, but vowed in his next term to do even more and go even further for working people and the common good.
FDR "didn't go around saying, 'Look at all I've done.' He said: 'I see a nation that is ill-clad, ill-housed. We made some progress, but I know there are enormous problems.'"
