Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders has sat in Congress since 1991, first in the House and from 2007 in the Senate, and calls himself a democratic socialist, which no other member of that chamber does. He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and in 2020, lost both times, and shifted the party's stated positions on health insurance and the minimum wage a long way while doing it. It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, written with the Nation journalist John Nichols and published by Crown in February 2023, is the argument rather than the memoir: that concentrated wealth is not a by-product of the American economy but its design, that it has bought the political system it needed, and that the answer has to be structural instead of charitable. Critics on the right read it as a case against markets; critics on the left ask why he stayed inside a party that beat him twice. Vermont returned him to the Senate again in 2024.