1972 ARTICLE SURFACES SHOWING BERNIE SANDERS BACKED ABORTION RIGHTS YEAR BEFORE ROE V WADE

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12. Are political positions from the 1970's and 1980's really going to be fair game?

In the 1970s, Sanders became involved with the Liberty Union, an anti-war political party in Vermont. In 1971, Sanders’ platform involved the legalization of all drugs, while in the following year he wrote in an op-ed that Congress should “institute public ownership, with worker control, of the major means of production.” Several years later, in 1976, Sanders told the Bennington Banner that a “sane society” required that “capital has to be controlled by the people.”

Sanders ran twice for governor and twice for Senate under the party's banner before ultimately leaving the party.

Still, Sanders was involved enough that he served as the chairperson of the party for several years in the 1970s. In 1972, Sanders backed Benjamin Spock as a presidential candidate over the Democratic candidate, George McGovern.

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Sanders also served as a presidential elector for the Socialist Workers’ Party in 1980, something that he acknowledged in a 1988 television appearance. The group at the time was a Trotskyist party that pressed for the abolition of capitalism and the peaceful establishment of socialism.


“I was asked to put my name on the ballot and I did, that’s true,” Sanders said, in the 1988 appearance. But he insisted he was never a member of the Trotskyist party."

Sanders ran and won a narrow race for mayor of Burlington, Vermont in 1981. Though he ran as an independent, he identified himself as a socialist mayor. He continued to be an independent until he put himself on the ballot as a Democrat in the current presidential race.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/bernies-past-with-the-far-far-far-left