Is Bernie Sanders going MAGA? Left-wing populists could forge an unlikely alliance

Take Bernie’s positive comments on Musk — “a very smart guy” — and DOGE. One would think that there would be zero ideological overlap between a radical redistributionist and the world’s richest man. Yet Sanders tweeted: “Elon Musk is right. The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row.” He went on to lambast the “Military Industrial Complex and a defence budget full of waste and fraud”. Lex Friedman, stalwart of the now “red-pilled” or Right-coded podcast world, replied “Happy to see this,” while an incredulous “Antifascist” account exclaimed: “Have you lost your fucking mind? Elon Musk is a Nazi oligarch who is in the process of taking our country apart. He’s the enemy.”

Such reactions are to be expected from the progressive base. But it must be remembered that Bernie was shaped by a Sixties Leftism heavily infused by the spirit of the anti-war movement, with its deep animus toward the defence establishment. Until recently this had been an almost exclusively Left-wing position. But as insiders in that establishment have increasingly cosied up to Democrats in response to the rise of Trump, the result has been a set of awkward alliances. For instance, while Bernie praised ex-Congresswoman Liz Cheney for endorsing Kamala Harris, it can’t have been easy for a lifelong peacenik to be on the same team as a politician whose last name is synonymous with neoconservative bluster and military adventurism.

In embracing at least this plank in the DOGE plan, Sanders is merely returning to form as a tried and true Leftist. And herein may be a useful strategy for progressives. Sanders can partially restrain the GOP’s mounting drive toward austerity by working to ensure bipartisan legitimacy for elements of DOGE that would be popular with voters: he could try to redirect Musk’s cost-cutting impulses away from, say entitlements or infrastructure, and toward clearing the coffers of the deep state, or at least opting for more efficient spending choices.

Bernie’s positive remarks about RFK Jr illustrate a similar resonance between these strains of Leftism and MAGA’s anti-elite sensibilities. In an interview with CBS last week, the Senator was clear in voicing disagreement with Kennedy’s “extremely dangerous” stances on fluoridation and vaccines but nonetheless conceded: “I think what he’s saying about the food industry is exactly correct. I think you have a food industry concerned about their profits, could care less about the health of the American people. I think they have to be taken on.” Indeed, it is a testament to the extent of ideological shifting in the Trump era that such anti-corporate stances, at least with the large sector of the economy, now belong more to the Right than to the Left.

Kennedy, who has hitherto only even been known as a hard-edged environmentalist progressive and health nut, seems now to be integrating seamlessly into the Right’s coalition, as evidence by his plum cabinet nomination. His many eccentric takes on public health issues have long struck a chord among the MAGA base, especially in the post-Covid era of heightened hostility to experts. And just as Right-populism has turned against the Pentagon brass, it has also, under Kennedy’s guidance, begun to take aim at the nexus of corporate interests in the foods and pharma industries. Like the President-elect’s promise to drain the swamp of Washington, his prospective HHS Secretary threatens to do the same with the Food and Drug Administration.

For an unreconstructed Leftist like Sanders, this is more than enough reason to sympathise with the “MAHA” agenda. But for the progressive rank-and-file, including the many educated and expertise-abiding Democrats who see nothing but crankery in Kennedy, it may be a tougher pill to swallow. The challenge for Bernie will be in navigating these tensions, finding a way of reckoning with Kennedy’s systemic critique, which is still broadly relatable to liberal elites, while coming up with more nuanced and constructive fixes than just slashing and burning through the federal bureaucracy. This would mean acting as a moderating and refining influence on a future Secretary Kennedy, something he will be well positioned to do from his Senate perch.

So, as it turns out, the idea of a Right-Left populist front has more substance to it than a surface-level reading of the situation may suggest. The question now is: how much farther can it go? Well, Sanders and Trump, entering the national stage at around the same time in 2015, once offered remarkably complimentary critiques of the political and economic status quo.

In fact, at a conference in February 2017, President Trump got the audience of Right-wing activists to cheer the socialist for being “right about trade”, a portent of the shift toward all-out protectionism within the GOP. He could have added that Bernie was right on immigration as well, for in those years he was still able to speak readily about open borders as a “Koch brothers policy” that depressed wages and living standards, an old-school labour view that’s since been called out as heresy by the current ultra-globalist incarnation of the Left.

But given talk of impending mass deportations, could the vintage restrictionist Sanders make a comeback? As with his qualified endorsements of Musk and Kennedy, he could accept the basic premise of Trump’s case and help re-legitimise the once uncontroversial view that uncontrolled migration hurts American workers. He could propose smart policies to secure the labour market (like mandatory national E-Verify) while calling for more humane approaches to resolving the status of the undocumented population. Such an outcome, though admittedly fanciful, would amount to a productive fusion of the best instincts of Trumpism and Leftism.

Rather than a novel aberration, Bernie’s conciliatory gestures may herald a reversion to an earlier convergence between the populist edges of the ideological spectrum. It would seem to confirm the old “horseshoe theory” of politics. Yet as he eyes his exit from elected office, it remains to be seen whether his successors can maintain the course. A favourite for the presidential nomination in 2028, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has not only “dropped her pronouns” but also started to seek out and listen to her own district’s AOC-Trump split voters (and without also denouncing them as having racist inclinations). If she is in fact trending in a similar direction to Bernie, it may suggest that the Left have more than a passing interest in holding up an olive branch to MAGA.

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Michael Cuenco is a writer on policy and politics. He is Associate Editor at American Affairs.

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