Howie Hawkins on Bernie Sanders
May 2020 interview of Hawkins by G. Baszak
. . .
GB: Some might say that it was the function of Bernie Sanders all
along to get young people to place their hopes in the Democrats...

HH: I think it’s true. My friend, the late Bruce Dixon used the
sheepdog metaphor. Whether it was Bernie’s intention or not, that was
the effect. And I think that was his intention.

His wife, Jane Sanders, spoke to the Left Forum in New York City in
2018 and told the audience in the opening plenary to register as
Democrats. I stood in the back and gave it a thumbs down. She said, I
know you’re not going to do that, but you should. He wanted that so
that people would vote for him in the primaries this time. That’s been
his function.

It’s a shame. I knew him in the 70s when he was a third-party
candidate with the Liberty Union. I worked on his campaign and dropped
leaflets for him. When he set up his Eugene Debs slideshow, I arranged
showings of it. But then when he wanted to get into Congress after
being mayor of Burlington, he got a deal with the Democrats in Vermont
and basically said, don’t run a serious candidate against me as a
Democrat, and I will make sure that progressives in Vermont won’t run
in some of the races that you do want to win. They’ve had this deal
going on. Bernie is nominally an independent, but in practice he’s
functionally a Democrat. For example, in the last Senate election in
2018 when he got re-elected to the U.S. Senate, he was in the
Democratic primary and then he declined the nomination. So he’s on the
ballot as an independent, but there was no Democrat because he’d
gotten their nomination too.
. . .