Bernie Sanders
Related: About this forumBernie's Quiet Revolt
An excellent article from the NY Review of Books.
It may be from a while back, but it is excellent!
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/12/23/bernie-sanders-quiet-revolt/
"Sanders is unusual because he brings together three kinds of radicalism, each with very different roots. First is Sanderss commitment to bringing the progressive ideas of Scandinavian social democracy to the United States, including free and universal health care, free higher education at state colleges and universities, mandatory maternity and sick leave benefits, and higher taxes on higher incomes. In American political history you have to go back to Lyndon Johnsons Great Society or even to the early New Deal to find anything comparable."
"The second strand of Sanderss radicalism is his excoriating account of contemporary American capitalism, and with this he neither looks nor sounds like a consensus-minded Scandinavian social democrat. Here Sanders is willing to name and denounce the new economic royalistswhat he calls collectively the billionaire classin a way that Hillary Clinton, who has relied heavily on their financial backing, has not."
"the third and perhaps least understood strand of Sanderss radicalism comes into play: his ability to organize a previously unrecognized constituencyone that embraces the shrinking middle class, both white- and blue-collar, the working and non-working poor, as well as young, first-time voters with large student-loan debts. One thing that comes over strongly in interviews of those attending Sanders rallies is their sense that they are no longer alone, that theyre joining with thousands who are in much the same predicament as they are, and that together they can change things for the better.
Sanderss success in bringing these people together comes from his grounding, as a student at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s, in the grass-roots politics of Saul Alinsky (19091972), the founder of modern American community organizing. Alinskys crucial insight was that people at the bottom of the system could fight for local political and economic power by forming alliances with sympathetic community groups sharing many of their interests. From the late 1930s through the 1960s, Alinsky focused on the black ghettoes and white working-class districts of Chicago, Rochester, Buffalo, Oakland, and many other cities."