How We Got President Bernie Sanders: A History Report

I for one think it can all be traced back to December 9th, 2000. That was the day the Supreme Court, amid strong signs that Al Gore would win after all the votes in Florida had been counted, decided to try to block the process and force Bush onto the country. Intervention surprisingly came from Clarence Thomas, who voted at the last minute to let the recount proceed, making it a 5 to 4 ruling in favor of democracy. (Thomas later said that he could not, in good conscience, let his fellow black voters have their voices taken away.)

Gore's administration had a good first year. First he let the U.S. become part of the Kyoto Global Climate Change Treaty, which secured our reputation abroad. Then with the help of the head of counterterrorism, Richard Clark, he went forth with a plan to kill the Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and end the groups's alarming plans for an attack on the U.S. There's no telling what would have happened if Gore had neglected his duties.

But from there, it seemed like Gore would just be a repeat of the Clinton administration, which Republicans and progressive Democrats alike considered a major disappointment. During his first term, he went forth with a plan to expand NAFTA across Asia and Cantral America, further draining the economy of jobs. The main reason Gore won reelection was because of the weak 2004 Republican nominee, Newt Gingrich, who turned himself into even more of a joke during one of the presidential debates by referring to himself as "a definer of civilization."

The 2006 midterms were a bad time for the Democrats, with low voter turnout due to the growing disappointment among progressives about their neoliberal-in-chief. Hillary Clinton became the Democratic nominee in 2008 for similar reasons.

But the final blow to Gore's party came with the financial crash later that year. Failure to pass financial regulations on the part of the corporate-sponsored Democrats made many of the big banks free to trick their customers into making real-estate investments that could never be payed off, causing the entire economy to eventually explode. Massive bailouts were then awarded to these companies, approved by Gore along with the other corporate Democrats.

This immediately caused almost the entire country to turn against the Democratic Party. Liberals were at last jolted out of the smug delusion of theirs that any politician they chose to support was inherently populist, and now they were stuck with a nominee no better than their last two. Hillary lost the election to John McCain by a more than narrow margin, starting a golden age for conservatives.
McCain started the wars that the Republicans had been waiting for ever since Bush Sr. drew out of the Persian Gulf in 1992, Invading Iraq in 2009 with the cover of liberating the country from Hussein, and Libya the year after that out of supposed hatred for Quaddafi. The wealth of oil executives grew as the rest of the economy suffered during an ongoing recession, the Gulf of Mexico was poisoned during the 2010 BP spill, and the global climate continued to drift towards catastrophic instability.

After the country's government went further to the right in the 2010 midterms, though, it started to become undeniably apparent that the will of the people was in the exact opposite direction. The last straw came in early 2011, when it was revealed that much of the global elite were secretly holding tax-free private accounts in Panama because of one of Gore's free trade deals. Amid the public's overwhelming outrage, along with all the other factors, it was the perfect moment for the start of a progressive movement like the nation had never seen.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont began his presidential campaign on April 30th, speaking in front of the Capitol about the need for radical economic change. By the end of the year, he had become the leader of a national (or even international) movement, inspiring a series of protests called Occupy Wall Street. Running as someone distinctly different from the Democrats that had betrayed progressive ideals and selfishly destroyed the economy, he managed to defeat the severely weakened candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2012 primaries and bring the beforehand hated party back from extinction.

Days after nature issued one final warning to stop heating up the planet by sending Hurricane Sandy, Sanders beat McCain by a stunning landslide. He then proceeded to fight the Republicans in congress at every opportunity, even managing to end both the Libyan and Iraq wars within two years of his inauguration. The 2014 midterms allowed for the elections of hundreds of "Sanders Democrats," or genuinely progressive politicians. Since then, they've repealed the old free trade deals, instated free universal health care like 32 other major countries, worked to stop the warming of the planet, and reinstated FDR's Glass-Steegal.

Now President Sanders is looking forward to another win against the presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, and beyond that, there's no sign that the grip of his agenda will loosen. (Vice-President Elizabeth Warren is sure to run in 2020, officially proving wrong the people who said that Hillary would be the only chance in our lifetime to elect a female president.)

Al Gore was chosen by the majority of Americans, and while it didn't seem like it at the time, the results of the 2000 election would make a very big difference.