Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) at a Fighting Oligarchy rally in Rochester, MN on Saturday.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Well, it seems to me we have two fundamental chores in front of us. Number one, every single day, we have got to take on Trump and his authoritarianism and his kleptocracy and his unconstitutional behavior. When we take on Trump, we are fighting for the preservation of American democracy. But we have got to do, my friends, more than that. All right? It’s not good enough to say, hey, I am anti-Trump. What we have also got to do is build an unbeatable coast-to-coast grassroots movement that is going to reform the Democratic Party, that is going to take on the oligarchs who control our nation, and is going to bring forth an agenda that works for the working families of America. In other words, what I am saying here, being anti-Trump is important, but it is not enough. Trump’s approval rates are plummeting. Democratic Party approval is extremely low. People are looking for an alternative. People want a vision as to where we go as a nation. Status quo politics is not good enough. So what do we do? What is our agenda? Our agenda is to develop a new paradigm. We reject the idea that we have got to live in austerity. We think that maybe, just maybe, when the billionaires get richer every day, when their effective tax rate in many ways is lower than a truck driver or a nurse, yes, the billionaires are going to start paying their fair share of taxes. Yes, you want a radical idea? How about joining every other major country on earth and guaranteeing health care to every man, woman, and child? Let me just tell you what a radical idea it is to join every other major nation on earth. A friend of mine’s daughter lives in Paris, France. She’s married to a French guy. She had a baby a little while ago, and the baby had some complications, was in the ICU for two weeks. Do you know what her bill was? Yeah, zero. And you know what? France spends about half as much per capita as we do on health care. All right? So if every other major country on earth… By the way, Mexico recently announced a much poorer country than us. They’re going to guarantee health care to every man, woman, and child in their country. Canada doesn’t. We’re going to stand up loud and clear, no more tinkering around the edges. Health care is a human right. No out-of-pocket expenses. Medicare for all. Millions and millions of our elderly people are struggling to survive. What we have got to do is not only raise Social Security benefits, we’ve got to make sure that every worker in America has a defined benefit pension plan. We’ve got to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, 20 bucks an hour. Instead of spending a trillion and a half dollars on the military, Trump wants to increase military spending by 500 billion dollars. How about cutting military spending and using that money to build 7 million units of low-income and affordable housing? How about, in the richest country on earth, having the best public educational system in the world, from child care to graduate school? And in a government that talks a lot about freedom, how about making sure that every woman in this country can control her own body? Now, the main point that I want to make is none of these ideas are radical. Now, my Republican colleagues are going to say, Oh, Bernie is a left-wing communist. Oh, my God. Everything that I told you has the strong support of the American people. So I don’t want you for one moment to believe what the media tells you. These are radical, oh, just impossible extremist ideas. The reason that the Democratic Party is disrespected today is precisely because the leadership is not standing up and fighting for these issues. So what we need to do, and why Peggy Flanagan’s election is so important, why Keith’s election is so important, is we need to build a strong grassroots movement, progressive movement, fighting for the working class. And Peggy is all about being part of that movement. And let me maybe conclude by saying, look, these are tough times. And anybody who tells you that where we are in now is easy, I know many of you, many of the people in Vermont, all over this country, feel overwhelmed, get depressed. These are tough times. I worry very much about our kids, the mental health of our kids, et cetera. So if you feel overwhelmed, it’s not an unnatural response to the world in which we are living. All that I ask you to consider is that this is, while it is a unique moment in American history, because things are moving so quickly, it is not radically different from other terrible moments that we’ve had to deal with in the past. And I don’t want to be ultra overly patriotic here, but I want you to think back. I want you to think back to the 1770s, when a small group of people here within the colonies had the guts to stand up to the, by far, most powerful military in the world and to come up to fight a war against that military, to win that war. And by the way, a lot of people died in that war. And to come up with documents way ahead of their time. We hold these truths, these self-evident, that all men are created equal, entitled to certain unalienable rights. That’s pretty good stuff for the 1770s. So they stood up and they fought. They won. And then people had to deal with the original sin in this country of slavery and racism. And you had the abolitionists in the North standing up against tremendous odds, not just in the South, against the people in the North. They stood up, they organized, and we went through this horrible Civil War. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died in it to finally end slavery in America. They did it, and we won. And you think about the struggles that working-class people, workers and unions, went through over the years. Workers were shot down. Their kids were killed. Trying to create a union so that workers can have a little bit of dignity on the job, can earn decent wages, have decent benefits, live decent lives. Terrible struggle. But they fought, they struggled, and they helped create the trade union movement.

RealClearPolitics Videos