Bernie Sanders

The ideas that I am talking about are ideas that are widely supported. Everything that I talk about raising them, minimum wage, health care for all, a tax system which demands the billionaires pay their fair share, those are all popular ideas, but people didn’t know. You got to run for president and have 20,000 people come out to your rallies and win 23 states. They say, “Hmm. Well, maybe those ideas are not so crazy after all, and we’ve got to entertain them.” The establishment doesn’t like that. They really don’t. They want to tell you, and this is their main… This is how they succeed. What they say, Lex, is, “The world is the way it is. It always will be this way. We got the wealth. We got the power. And don’t think of anything else. This is the way it is. You have no power. Give up.” They don’t say it quite that way, but that’s really what the intent is.

And what we showed is, guess what? Running an outsider campaign, we took on the Democratic establishment, we came close to winning it, and we did win 23 states. And the ideas that we’re talking about are the ideas that working class people, young people believe in.

The following is a conversation with Bernie Sanders, senator from Vermont and two-time presidential candidate, both times as the underdog who, against the long odds, captivated the support and excitement of millions of people both on the left and the right. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Bernie Sanders. MLK Jr

Growing up, did you ever think you’d be a politician?

Nope. Not in a million years.

Yeah. I know that you hate talking about yourself, which is rare for a politician, I would say. What’s your philosophy behind that? You like talking about the issues. You like talking about-

Yeah, I do. Everybody talks about themselves. It’s not about me. Nice guy, not a nice guy. What politics should be about? Is the issues facing the people of our country, the people of the world, and how we’re going to address it. That’s what it should be.

That said, there’s a interesting aspects to your life story. For example, in 1963, you were very active in the Civil Rights Movement, got arrested even for protesting segregation in Chicago, and you attended the famous March on Washington where MLK gave his I Have a Dream speech. What was that like?

It was extraordinary. Took a bus ride down with fellow students in the University of Chicago, and there was a zillion people there. I’m not sure if it was the first time I’d ever been in Washington in my life, but it was a very impressive moment. And what he was talking about, people very often forget about that, it was not only racial justice, it was jobs. Jobs and justice, that was the name of that rally. And so it’s something I’ve never forgotten.

What influence did he have on you? What’d you learn about the way he enacted change in the world?

King was a very impressive guy, more impressive, I think, than people think that he was. And what he did is he created his movement from the bottom on up. So he developed real organization, grassroots organization which put pressure on communities and officials to end segregation, to open up voting patterns. And I think what has to also be remembered about King, which is really quite extraordinary, is he won the Nobel Peace Prize. And there was, oh, you’re great, you’re wonderful. But then to the end of his life, he took on Lyndon Johnson on the war in Vietnam. And as soon as he did that, suddenly the editorial pages throughout America, the establishment papers no longer thought he was so great. In fact, the message sent out, “You’re black. Deal with civil rights. Don’t worry about foreign policy. We’ll take care of that.” But he said, “If I talk about peace and nonviolence, I can’t sit back and allow what’s going on in Vietnam to continue without speaking out.”

Incredible courage to do that. And by the way, when he was assassinated at a fighting for the rights of AFSCME workers, garbage, guys that delivered the garbage who were treated terribly, low wages, bad working conditions. And he went out to support their right to form a union. That’s when he got killed. Corruption in politics

So on the war front, one of the things that people don’t often talk about, your work in politics. You gave what I think is a truly brave speech on the Iraq War in 2002, I believe. You voted no on the Iraq Resolution, you voted no on the Patriot Act, and you basically predicted very accurately what would happen if we go into Iraq. What was your thinking at the time behind those speeches, behind voting no on the Patriot Act on the Iraq Resolution?

It maybe ironically came out of maybe the war in Vietnam and the ease and lies that people told. We went into Vietnam under a lie. We lost close to 60,000 Americans. Millions of people in the Vietnam and Cambodia died as a result of that. So I think twice about it. And then the war in Iraq, you had people like Dick Cheney and others telling us, “Oh, they have nuclear weapons and all that stuff. It’s the only way we can resolve the issue.” I didn’t believe it. I didn’t agree with it. And you’re right, it turns out, historically, I was right.

What’s the way to fight this thing that Martin Luther King tried to fight, which is the military industrial complex?

It’s huge. It gets to the broader issue of where we are as a nation. And what I almost uniquely in Congress talk about is the fact that we are moving, Lex, to an oligarchic form of society. And not a lot of people are familiar with that term, but what it means… We talk about oligarchy in Russia. Oh, Putin is surrounded by the oligarchs. Well, guess what? What do you think is happening in the United States? So what you have right now is an economy with more concentration of ownership than we’ve ever had. All right? That means whether it’s agriculture, transportation, healthcare, whatever it may be, fewer and fewer massively large corporations control what’s produced and the prices we pay. And then you look at our political system, and we don’t talk about it. What is the reality of the political system today? And that is that billionaires are spending huge amounts of money to buy this election. In Trump’s campaign, you got three multi-billionaires spending over $200 million, three people. Democrats have their billionaires. It’s not quite as concentrated.

But at the end of the day, billionaires play an enormous role in terms of electing politicians and in Washington in determining what legislation gets seen and not seen.

But it’s not just single billionaires. It’s companies with lobbyists.

You got it. Let me give you one example, lobbyists. We pay, in the United States, by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. This is an issue I’ve been working hard on with some success. Take a wild and crazy guess how many lobbyists are there from the drug companies in Washington D.C.?

Over a thousand.

Over a thousand. There are 100 members of the Senate, 435 members of the House, 535 members of Congress. There are 1800 well-paid lobbyists representing the drug companies, including former leaders of the Republican and Democratic Party. That is why, one of the reasons why we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. Military-industrial complex, you’ve got a revolving door. People go from the military into the General Dynamics, into Lockheed Martin, and the other large companies, and what we see there is an institution in the Pentagon. We spend a trillion dollars a year on the Pentagon. It is the only federal agency that is not able to submit to an independent audit. So if you think there’s not massive fraud and waste and cost overruns in the Pentagon, you would be sorely mistaken.

Do you think most politicians are corrupt in accepting the money, or is the system corrupt? Or is it a bit of both?

If the corrupt means that, “Hey, here’s $10,000, vote this way,” it doesn’t work like that. Very, very rare. Occasionally. Very, very rare. That’s corruption. What happens is that if you are in a campaign… And right now, the amount of money that people have to raise, you’re running for Senate in Ohio, you’re talking about 50, $60 million. Where the hell are you going to get that money? It’s not going to be $10 donations. You’re going to be surrounding yourself with people who have the money. You’re going to go $5,000 [inaudible 00:09:02], etc. So you surround yourself with those people who say, “Oh, these are my problems. This is what I need, and this is… I need a tax break for billionaires,” blah, blah, blah, blah. So you live in that world. They are your financial support.

They are, in a sense, your political base, so you’re very cognizant of what you do in terms of not upsetting them. So it’s not corruption in the sense of people taking envelopes with huge amounts of money to vote a certain way. That very, very rarely, if ever, happens. It is the power of big money to make politicians dependent on those folks. And that’s why when I ran for president, what I probably may be most proud of is the fact that we received millions and millions of campaign contributions averaging 27 bucks apiece, I think, in 2016.

Have companies, lobbyists ever tried to buy you, tried to influence you?

We don’t welcome them into our office. I do deal with these guys, but it’s usually on a confrontational tone. No, so they don’t come into my office very often telling me their problems.

So how do we fix the system? How do we get money out of politics?

Like many other issues, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. It exists in other countries. If you go to… Every country has their own election system, but nobody has a system where billionaires can spend unlimited sums of money through super PACs to elect the candidates of their choice. So first thing you got to do… One of the things, Lex, I found that the more important the issue, the less discussion there is. The less important the issue, the more discussion there is. A number of years ago, the United States Supreme Court, in one of its more pathetic decisions, passed the Citizens United decision. What Citizens United Decisions said is you’re a multi-billionaire. You want the freedom. You’re a free person in a free country. You want the freedom to buy the government, and how terrible it would be to deny you the freedom to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a campaign to elect the candidates. And they said that’s your freedom, and that’s what Citizens United is about.

We’ve got to end that. And in my view, we move to public funding of elections. That means you want to run for governing, you want to run for Senate, show that you have some support, get $5 contributions from X number of people to show you you’re not a flake. You have some support and the government will pay a certain amount more, and there’ll be a limit in the amount of money that can be spent. So it’ll be a real… You can run against me and I’m not going to outspend you 10 to one. That’s what we should be moving toward in my view.

How do we make that happen when there’s so much money in the system and the politicians owe to the people who paid for their election? Does it have to come from the very top, essentially sort of a really strong, popular populist president?