“While this campaign is coming to an end, our movement is not.”
Those words spoken by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders during a live-streamed speech April 8 ended the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. They came in the midst of a coronavirus crisis that is proving the most important plank in Sanders’ program: America needs health care for all!
During the race for the Democratic nomination, some candidates discussed serious national problems, issues now even more urgent as the pandemic unfolds. The Bernie Sanders campaign elevated “Medicare For All” into the national conversation. Sanders’ campaign emboldened people to fight for the basic human rights to health care, education, decent wages, housing, and other essentials of life. Andrew Yang’s Humanity First campaign pointed out how technology is increasingly replacing human labor, proposing a universal basic income in response.
These life-and-death issues existed well before the 2020 presidential campaign began. Built on the firm foundation of the many struggles for change which preceded it, the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign in particular helped congeal the somewhat dispersed battles for health care, confronting climate change, free college, public education, immigrants’ rights, housing, and other issues into a more united national struggle. This is now becoming a full-blown movement to transform a country reeling from the coronavirus and the deepening economic crisis. Bernie Sanders’ exit from the presidential race did not and could not end this movement because it’s made up of people who simply have no choice but to fight for change.
The coronavirus has ripped the covers off a rotten system. This country was disfigured by massive, historic inequality, a woefully inadequate health care system, gross racial disparities, and spreading poverty long before the virus emerged, but the pandemic has intensified all the country’s problems and exposed them to the light of day.
The pandemic has dramatically increased widespread misery. It has exposed the total failure of America’s private health care system and for-profit economy. As cities and states scramble to obtain essential equipment like ventilators and masks, heroic health care workers struggle to aid desperately ill patients. Now, with 26 million people filing for unemployment benefits by late April, the country is headed toward the highest poverty rate in more than 50 years.
When the death toll finally begins to decline, we cannot accept a return to “normal.” “Normal” is what created this crisis. We must fight with a vision of a new society as we demand that the government act on behalf of the people. As a start, we should insist that the temporary and partial emergency measures taken at the height of the crisis – things like housing, health care, and prisoner releases – be made permanent and complete. In the effort to hold the government accountable, we should utilize every weapon of influence that our ancestors won for us. One of those is the ballot. The ballot is only one of many tools in the tool kit of social change, but it’s an important one – especially this year. The 2020 election will be the most significant in history. No one should sit it out. Every person eligible should vote – despite the obstacles. In the 2020 elections, we have to find a way at the national, state, and local levels to defend the progressive program advocated in the primaries by Bernie Sanders and other candidates while at the same time doing everything humanly possible to defeat Donald Trump and the other advocates of an outright fascist program. As the coronavirus crisis so graphically demonstrates, nothing less than the future of humanity is at stake.
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