In a recent speech in Montana, former President Donald Trump predicted that “pink-haired Marxists” will be “cheering” if “Comrade Walz and Comrade Harris” win the election this fall. In an appearance on “Fox & Friends,” he said that “no one knew” how “radical left” Vice President Kamala Harris was until she became the Democratic nominee but that “she is more so than Bernie Sanders.” Trump mega-donor Elon Musk has called Harris “quite literally a communist.”
As someone who campaigned for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in 2020, I would love it if the candidate currently ahead in the polls was actually “much more” left-wing than Bernie. Sadly, the picture painted by Trump and Musk is completely detached from reality. Don’t expect to hear anything at the Democratic National Convention that comes within a thousand miles of a democratic socialist program.
I would love it if the candidate currently ahead in the polls was actually ‘much more’ left-wing than Bernie.
Sanders’ signature policy proposal was “Medicare for All,” which would eliminate the for-profit insurance industry and treat health care as a right. This is a relatively modest proposal by global standards. Canadians, for example, have enjoyed free basic health insurance for several decades. But it would be a very big deal in an American context. This is a country where it’s not unheard of for diabetics to die because they try to ration out their insulin and medical debt is a leading cause of bankruptcy. Even people who are lucky enough to have private insurance often stay at jobs they hate for fear of losing it. Providing every American with public insurance would be a massive step in the right direction.
If the Harris-Walz ticket really had Sanders-like inclinations but “more so,” it might want to go beyond the Canadian model and create an American version of Britain’s National Health Service. On the British model, instead of just providing people with free insurance, the government owns the hospitals and pays the doctors. That sounds extreme to American ears, but it’s so popular in the U.K. that even conservative politicians don’t go around saying they want to end the NHS. They’d never win another election if they did.
And if Harris and Walz really wanted to earn that “comrade” label, they’d have to go beyond proposals like these, which would just bring the U.S. into line with other Western democracies, and start thinking in far more radical terms. Perhaps some giant companies owned by billionaires could be expropriated and turned over to the workers. My own hair isn’t pink, but I would certainly cheer if Comrade Harris took up the suggestion once made by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and promoted legislation to turn Amazon into a worker-owned cooperative. Why not let all the people doing grueling and dangerous labor at those warehouses share equally in the revenue they’re creating?
Of course, none of this is going to happen. In real life, “Comrade” Harris ran as a moderate even during her first campaign for the presidency in 2020. She’d been a co-sponsor of Medicare for All in the Senate, for example, but on the campaign trail she tried to split the difference between Joe Biden and Sanders and ended up triangulating her position to the point of absurdity.
“Medicare for All” has always meant “single-payer” national health insurance. In other words, rather than high-income people having better care than everyone else and millions of Americans who aren’t quite poor enough to qualify for Medicaid not having any insurance at all, everyone would get equal access to the same quality of health care.
The principle is the same as the local fire department’s putting out everyone’s fires on an equal basis, whether the building on fire is a trailer or a mansion. We’d all recognize that it would be morally obscene if you had to pay for “fire insurance” and firefighters approached you with a portable card reader to ask for a copay before they turned on the hose, but no one seems to be able to coherently explain why health care should be different. And we could actually put more money in the pockets of middle-income taxpayers who already have health insurance if we swept away all the premiums, copays and deductibles in favor of a modest tax increase to pay for Medicare for All.
Don’t expect jubilant ‘cheering’ from ‘pink-haired Marxists’ or even Bernie-style social democrats.
It’s a powerful idea. But Harris was already backing away from it in 2020. As she awkwardly navigated the race for the Democratic nomination, seeking a lane somewhere between Sanders and Biden, she claimed that she still supported Medicare for All but that her “version” of it would preserve a role for the profit-seeking middlemen in the private insurance companies.
“Private Medicare plans,” she said, would compete with “public Medicare plans.” In other words, we would still have two-tiered health care for the rich and the poor.
And this time around, she’s no longer even interested in splitting the difference. The Harris campaign told CNN that “the vice president no longer supports a single-payer health care system.” At the end of July, the campaign told the Washington Examiner that she no longer supports a federal jobs guarantee, which was part of a Green New Deal resolution supported by Harris and 13 other senators in 2019. Many workers in industries like oil, gas and coal understandably worry that their jobs will be eliminated by a serious effort to transition to greener energy sources. The Green New Deal resolution promised to do the opposite, “guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage” for every American who wanted one. The Harris campaign told the Examiner that Harris “has changed her position” on a jobs guarantee and that “the campaign is trying to be forward-looking, rather than looking backward.” If giving Americans jobs and health care would be “backward-looking” because these were ideas people were talking about in 2019, what about the issue the left has focused on the most in the last 10 months — U.S. involvement in Israel’s war in Gaza? Millions of Palestinians have been driven from their homes since October, and more children were killed in the first five months of the assault on Gaza than in all the war zones in the world for four years before. The issue has sparked so much outrage that, in crucial states like Michigan and Wisconsin, more Democratic primary voters voted for “uncommitted” than the margins by which Biden won those states in 2020. But after hecklers demanded that Harris commit to cutting off weapons, her national security adviser announced that she “will always ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups.” In other words, the U.S. won’t stop supplying the bombs Israel drops on refugee camps any time soon. I’m sure this pleases national security hawks in Harris’ coalition, just as her disavowal of national health care and a jobs guarantee pleases the donor class. But don’t expect jubilant “cheering” from “pink-haired Marxists” or even Bernie-style social democrats. These groups might vote Harris when push comes to shove. They don’t want Trump to return to the White House. But they’d also like jobs, peace and health care, and Harris keeps telling them that none of that is on the table.
Ben Burgis
Ben Burgis is a political commentator and author. He has written articles for Jacobin and The Daily Beast. 
