What Bernie gets right about saving democracy | Will Bunch Newsletter

An “Indian Summer” of 80-degree days under blue-grey skies, a second straight “Red October” launch for the Phillies in baseball’s playoffs, and the Eagles with another 4-0 start. It should be a moment to savor, but the sudden loss of a popular Philadelphia journalist and the gathering storm of our deteriorating politics have darkened the skies. More below on the late Josh Kruger, who fought for a better Philly right up to the untimely end.

📮 An interesting, if low-key response to last week’s question about replacing indicted New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez. Those who want a traditional politician mostly favored Rep. Andy Kim (although one reader interestingly suggested the stateless Hillary Clinton), while others backed outsiders like the Eagles’ Jason Kelce. One reader suggested “Jon Stewart, who would bring a needed perspective to the US Senate.” I agree that he’d be an inspired choice — America’s Zelensky? (Reminder: Include your real name in the email!)

This week’s question: Workers at the Southeast’s iconic Waffle House chain are calling for a raise to $25 an hour. Do food-service workers, a backbone of the U.S. economy, deserve to make that much, or is it too much? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

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I’m old enough to remember when Republicans were planning to halt the political rise of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — the 21st-century icon of the American left who made serious runs at the White House in 2016 and 2020 — by tying him to Russia. His critics on the right even believed they possessed “the smoking gun” — footage from Sanders’ 1988 10-day honeymoon in the then-USSR, when the then-mayor of Burlington, shirtless, sang “This Land Is Your Land” with his vodka-imbibing Russian hosts.

Never mind that, as Sanders and his allies reminded folks, 1988 was a time when Americans were encouraging new freedoms in the Mikhail Gorbachev-led nation, and that friendship ventures like the honeymoon junket were cheered on by no less of an anti-communist than Ronald Reagan.

Jump ahead just a few years, and the only U.S. politicians on Capitol Hill aligned with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, are the growing number of Republicans determined to end aid to Ukraine’s democratic government as it fights off the invasion that Putin launched last year. Sanders, on the other hand, has become one of the most vocal supporters of continued military assistance to the Kyiv government — to the consternation of some allies on the far left.

“I look forward to seeing Congress provide, in the very near future, financial support for Ukraine which is valiantly struggling against Russian aggression,” Sanders tweeted Saturday night after Congress passed a bill to fund the federal government for another 47 days, but only by cutting off aid for Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. The vote set off an expected battle on Capitol Hill over whether the funds can be restored.

The Ukraine stance puts the Vermont senator on the other side from some past supporters — most notably the academic Cornel West, who used to be a featured speaker at Sanders’ rallies but now is running for president on the Green Party banner. West wants an immediate ceasefire — criticizing Putin, but also NATO, as an “instrument of American imperial foreign policy.”

His White House dreams over at age 82, Bernie is still out there being Bernie — supporting strikers and progressive candidates around the country. But he has also risen to the current moment, highlighting the “democratic” part of his longstanding political philosophy of democratic socialism. Sanders is well aware that it’s impossible to improve the lives of working people under dictatorship, and Putin is not the only autocrat he’s fighting against. The Vermonter offered an early endorsement to President Joe Biden as essential to preventing another Donald Trump administration — eager to prevent his left-leaning and often young supporters from wandering off the reservation in November 2024.

“In the United States, and in fact around the world, support for the establishment and their institutions is in decline,” Sanders said last month in a speech in Manchester, N.H. “People want change. And change will come. The question is: what kind of change will it be?” He sees the only practical answer to fascism as defeating Trump in 2024 and pushing the Democratic Party to do even more for working-class people, in a second Biden administration and beyond.

“Democracy comes first — good economic policy should result from good democracy,” Ari Rabin-Havt, who was deputy campaign manager for Sanders in 2020 and penned the book The Fighting Soul about the experience, told me. He explained that the senator has been remarkably consistent on foreign policy. That means that Sanders is repulsed by Putin’s power grabs. It also means that he is willing to criticize the United States when it fails to pass the democracy test — from Central America in the 1980s to our support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen because, in Rabin-Havt’s words “the Saudis are authoritarian thugs.”

On the homefront, Rabin-Havt said Sanders’ early POTUS endorsement is certainly centered on thwarting Trump, but it’s also because Biden has proved to be a much more progressive president than the Democrats’ wary left flank expected when the Delawarean announced his campaign in 2019. The president has worked closely at times with Sanders, who now chairs the powerful Senate Budget Committee.

A Trump victory next fall would be devastating to Sanders’ agenda, just at the moment when the organized labor movement is flexing its muscles and stands more popular with the U.S. electorate than at any other time in his long career. For example, as Rabin-Havt noted, Biden appointees have made some little-publicized but important pro-union moves on the National Labor Relations Board that would surely be undone with Trump as 47th president.

Sanders’ pro-democracy moves have been echoed by a younger superstar of the left, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who also has endorsed Biden and his Ukraine policies, which caused her to be heckled at a recent event. But this is not a moment for radical risk. A Biden presidency has brought progress on issues such as climate change and gun safety, while a Trump restoration threatens dictatorship. And Bernie Sanders is doing his part to ensure that this land remains your land.

Question: Justice Clarence Thomas has *finally* recused himself from a case where he was was demonstrably entangled. Is this just a one-off? Or will he and Justice Alito now step aside this term where their oligarch sugar daddies’ interests compromise appearance of impartiality? Via Jim Haigh (@jimhaigh) on X/Twitter

Answer: In case you missed it on a busy news day, Justice Thomas surprised legal observers on Monday by recusing himself from a ruling rejecting an effort by the former Donald Trump legal adviser John Eastman to shield some of his communications from Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection investigators. Thomas — for whom Eastman had been a law clerk — had previously raised eyebrows by not recusing himself from Jan. 6 cases, despite revelations his wife, Ginni, was deeply involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Since then, ProPublica has raised major ethical questions about Thomas and his luxury travel and other perks from conservative billionaires. I think there’s little doubt that the articles are causing this embattled justice to change his behavior — a remarkable endorsement for watchdog journalism.

The Philadelphia mentality — whether it’s on the field at the Linc or in the hard-bitten streets — is to just keep coming against all obstacles. That was Josh Kruger, who was very candid about his past struggles with drug addiction and homelessness and as an HIV-positive gay man. And he used that candor and hard-won awareness to never stop crusading for a better Philadelphia and a better world, both as a city official working with the unhoused, and more recently as a freelance writer for a number of publications, including The Inquirer. That fight came to an abrupt end Monday morning when he was shot to death inside the entrance to his home in the Point Breeze neighborhood. Kruger was just 39.

Police sources told The Inquirer that they are working to ascertain whether Kruger’s murder was the result of a domestic dispute. Even though it is not certain at this time whether his writings or his politics were a factor in his death, it’s still infuriating that we live in an era when journalists are considered by too many Americans to be “enemies of the people.” Kruger wasn’t just a pillar of the Philadelphia community. He also used his platform to promote ideas that might improve the city where he lived.

Yet rather than allowing a kind and thoughtful soul to rest in peace, a stunning number of fascists — I just don’t know what else to call them — swarmed on social media to mock and attack a dead man on the day of his murder.

For example, my initial X/Twitter post expressing shock at the news of Kruger’s passing had, as of Monday night, received more than 60 separate comments from people either mocking or celebrating his death — folks taking advantage of site owner Elon Musk’s love affair with what he calls “free speech.” The right-wingers high-fiving about the death of a fighter with a gentle heart was a grim confirmation of America’s downward spiral. A day that started with shock and sadness over Kruger’s death ended with deep regret that Kruger wasn’t still here to give his critics the holy hell they deserve.

Ironically, I wrote today’s main piece about Bernie Sanders before I realized that it’s the 12th anniversary of my first visit to the protest that would flow into his presidential campaigns: 2011′s Occupy Wall Street. Looking back, it’s hard to describe the visceral excitement of that moment, when a generation battered by rising income inequality, social injustice, and soaring student debt finally took to the street. I wrote of my visit to Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park: “The ebbing and flowing tide of protestors who occupy the privately owned ground — they call it Liberty Park — by night and who march through Manhattan by day, have come here without specific demands, just a sense of outrage and their belief that too much power is concentrated among millionaires and billionaires who bought off both political parties with unlimited campaign cash.” Read the rest in my Oct. 3, 2011, front page story for the Daily News: “There’s something happening here: A day at Occupy Wall Street.”