Bernie Sanders - The Vox conversation
by Ezra Klein
When Sen. Bernie Sanders launched his presidential campaign, few treated it as a serious challenge to Hillary Clinton. Sanders, after all, isn’t even a Democrat: He’s an "democratic socialist." But his campaign struck a chord. He’s raised more than $15 million, primarily from small donors, and he’s turning out the largest crowds of the presidential race. But amidst all the media attention given to Sanders’s rapid political rise, there’s not been that much exploration of what he actually believes.
So on July 16, Vox sat down with Sanders for a wide-ranging interview about his policy ideas and political theories. The discussion touched on everything from single payer to open borders to Zionism, but it began with perhaps the best-known but least-understood facet of Sanders’s political philosophy: his self-identification as a socialist. A transcript of the conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.
Ezra Klein
Tell me what it means to be a socialist.
Bernie Sanders
A democratic socialist. What it means is that one takes a hard look at countries around the world who have successful records in fighting and implementing programs for the middle class and working families.
When you do that, you automatically go to countries like Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and other countries that have had labor governments or social democratic governments, and what you find is that in virtually all of those countries, health care is a right of all people and their systems are far more cost-effective than ours, college education is virtually free in all of those countries, people retire with better benefits, wages that people receive are often higher, distribution of wealth and income is much fairer, their public education systems are generally stronger than ours.
And by and large their governments tend to represent the needs of their middle class and working families rather than billionaires and campaign contributors. When I talk about being a democratic socialist, those are the countries that I am looking at, and those are the ideas that I think we can learn a lot from.
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http://www.vox.com/2015/7/28/9014491/bernie-sanders-vox-conversation
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