Sanders and Warren Are Widening the Democratic Party’s Left Lane

Sanders and Warren Are Widening the Democratic Party’s Left Lane

Sanders and Warren Are Widening the Democratic Party’s Left Lane

They’ve dominated the discourse and upended our traditional politics.

Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky
Pocket
Email

EDITOR’S NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

Early in the presidential race, many political analysts were eager to write off the two most progressive candidates vying for the Democratic nomination. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) had taken the party establishment by surprise in 2016, they argued, but he wouldn’t be able to replicate his success in a more crowded field. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) had policy chops, they conceded, but that wouldn’t help her catch fire with voters who were most concerned with who could beat President Trump.

Those predictions have been proved wrong. Tuesday’s Democratic primary debate in Ohio will feature former vice president Joe Biden in his usual position at center stage, mirroring his place in the center lane of the nomination contest. He will be flanked by Sanders and Warren, who have emerged as his top two rivals for the nomination (with Warren now arguably the front-runner). And they will be competing in a race that, as my Nation colleague D.D. Guttenplan argues, is “dramatically widening the entire left lane of American politics.”

Sanders and Warren are upending the traditional downsized politics of excluded alternatives. Their support for policies such as Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, a wealth tax, student debt cancellation has expanded widely held notions of what is possible. These ideas have been not just mentioned in the mainstream debate; thanks to Sanders’s and Warren’s courage and clarity of vision, they have dominated the discourse. This has often left the rest of the field flailing to defend tired centrist policies or, in some cases, scrambling to move left in an attempt to keep up.

Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

Hold the powerful to account by supporting The Nation

The chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration reaches new lows each week.

Trump’s catastrophic “Liberation Day” has wreaked havoc on the world economy and set up yet another constitutional crisis at home. Plainclothes officers continue to abduct university students off the streets. So-called “enemy aliens” are flown abroad to a mega prison against the orders of the courts. And Signalgate promises to be the first of many incompetence scandals that expose the brutal violence at the core of the American empire.

At a time when elite universities, powerful law firms, and influential media outlets are capitulating to Trump’s intimidation, The Nation is more determined than ever before to hold the powerful to account.

In just the last month, we’ve published reporting on how Trump outsources his mass deportation agenda to other countries, exposed the administration’s appeal to obscure laws to carry out its repressive agenda, and amplified the voices of brave student activists targeted by universities.

We also continue to tell the stories of those who fight back against Trump and Musk, whether on the streets in growing protest movements, in town halls across the country, or in critical state elections—like Wisconsin’s recent state Supreme Court race—that provide a model for resisting Trumpism and prove that Musk can’t buy our democracy.

This is the journalism that matters in 2025. But we can’t do this without you. As a reader-supported publication, we rely on the support of generous donors. Please, help make our essential independent journalism possible with a donation today.

In solidarity,

The Editors

The Nation

Ad Policy
x