Sitting in his kitchen in East Oxford, Larry Sanders, local Oxford politician and brother of Bernie Sanders, speaks with honesty and conviction. His powerful rhetorical ability is a refreshing contrast to the sound-bite politics that dominates Westminster today.
Nowhere is Sanders’ honesty and conviction more clearly appreciable than on Trump. Sanders is unequivocal: “Not that long into the future, people will look back on him as probably the most successful mass murderer, and he has good competition. He will outdo Hitler and Stalin, because the number of people who will die because climate change [action] was slowed down even further is incalculable, is in tens of millions, hundreds of millions perhaps.”
What life experiences led to the development of this view? The answer begins in the Brooklyn Jewish community into which he was born in 1935. The Sanders’ lost family in the Holocaust, and the shadow of the Nazi’s atrocities influences Larry Sanders’ politics. He describes how “even as a child I thought, ‘I don’t think the Germans are that different’”. Reflecting on the rise of the far right in Europe and America, Sanders warns that “if we don’t manage to have a decent successful political organisation in most countries, things will get viciously worse. It may turn out the Nazis were not the exception”.
The controversial use of the Nazis as a comparison for Trump reveals the unflinching principles that are the throughline of Sanders’ politics and personality. I ask Sanders where this fiery politics began. The excitement is still palpable in his voice as he recounts his sudden immersion into the politically charged student government at Brooklyn College. Yet tragedy was about to strike. The President of Brooklyn College, Harry Gideonse, planned to overhaul the student government to reduce political discussion within it. Sanders recounts: “I had seen my future, and he was taking it away!”
Gideonse planned to make the student government consist of a representative from each club at Brooklyn College; the haven of political discussion that had so excited the young Larry Sanders was disappearing. Sanders’ response was typically principled and entirely ineffective. With his friend, Arthur Steier, Sanders prepared, published, and distributed a pamphlet entitled Common Sense. 74 years later, he is clearly still proud of the quality of the opening lines, which he quotes: ‘‘Student government at Brooklyn College is undemocratic in principle, deceptive in practise, and totally inconsistent with education in a free society.” Sanders draws out the story, a sparkle in his eye as he builds the tension.
After the pamphlets were handed out, Larry and his friend Arthur were called into a “very high-powered meeting” with the dean, who had flown overnight from Chicago to Brooklyn because of the severity of the emergency. Larry remembers that also in the meeting were “a couple of very odd-looking people there who I’d never seen before. It turned out they were FBI”. The FBI investigators asked the young Larry a question: “Do you realise in New Jersey there’s a fascist group called Common Sense?” Larry cannot stop from joining my laughter at the punchline of his story.
Yet the story is tinged with sadness. Larry’s friend Arthur continued to campaign against the lack of student representation until his battle against Brooklyn College President Harry Gideonse got him expelled, and, after a series of appeals, his case was dismissed by the US Supreme Court. The story, and Larry’s attitude to it, serious and principled yet amused at the absurdity of politics, is an apt amalgam for his later career.
Sanders had always been guided by his belief in following moral principles, but the unbending nature of these principles has sometimes left him unable to enact the change he wished to see. As Sanders himself says of his time as a local Green Party politician in Oxford between 2005 and 2013, “in terms of success there’s not a lot”. Rather like Arthur Steier attempting to take on Brooklyn College, Sanders admits the limits of the principled approach to political action: “As a very minority party, you don’t succeed a lot.” However, Sanders does not reduce his experience down to a simple story of failure. He recalls his success when he worked with Conservative county councillors to expand the availability of continuing healthcare provision in Oxfordshire, bringing in millions of pounds for the elderly who were in need. Sanders is an unusually non-partisan politician – listening to him, it seems that he is explaining so that I can understand, rather than to try and convince me of the accuracy of one political viewpoint or another.
This non-partisan nature is a thread of continuity in Sanders’ story. Before Sanders was a Green councillor on Oxfordshire County Council, he was a member of the Labour Party. Active in the Party in Oxford from the 1980s, Sanders quit Labour in 2001 over Tony Blair’s shift to the right. It is hard not to see the parallels with today’s political moment.
As I probe Sanders’ take on the Labour Party’s failings, he describes how, during a campaign to stop the local Conservative Party from ending the provision of nursery places in Oxfordshire, the leader of the Labour group on the county council walked out of a council meeting to tell the protestors outside that their chanting was “making the Conservatives angry”. For Sanders, the anecdote represents a tendency within the right-wing of the 1980s Labour Party to fear annoying the Conservatives. As Sanders puts it, the right of the Labour Party were “nervous that if they spoke up too much someone would just step on them”. The U-turns of the Starmer administration over the past 18 months show that this tendency within Labour never went away.
Despite Sanders’ gloomy predictions for Britain’s and the world’s political future, he still hopes for a “decent society”. For Sanders, our best hope for getting there is if the Green Party replaces the Labour PartyGHe argues that their path to power is through the votes of the elderly. He describes how being old in Britain means pensions which are comparatively worse than those in Europe, and a social care system that forces those who need help to pay. Between 2016 and 2021, when Sanders was Health and Social Care Spokesperson for the Green Party, he raised the profile of social care as a political issue for the Green Party. This work led him to introduce a successful motion to make Green Party policy social care free at the point of use. In the context of a political discourse that loves to talk about the generational divide between voters, this idea of a coalition of young and old might be a surprising political conclusion. Yet for those, like Sanders, who grew up under the influence of left-wing leaders in the first half of the twentieth century, like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the USA and Clement Attlee in Great Britain, perhaps this political alliance makes sense.
Sanders’ insight into Britain’s political malaise is certainly sharp, as one would expect from someone with nearly five decades of experience in British politics. When I ask him how his politics has changed over the course of his life, he describes his belief that “poverty is never just poverty, it’s always psychological as well. It means it impacts your day-to-day feelings. It is bad enough to be cold, but to know that there is no particular reason to be cold, to know that your children are going to be cold, you have to either be very angry or feel worthless or both.” He reaches for the words of John Maynard Keynes in 1938: “What a country can do, it can afford.” Sanders points out that “the affording is the easy part, doing it is hard”. Over his life, his political principles have crystalised and his resolve has become firmer: “If anything I am angrier.” This anger stems from a compassion with what he terms “unnecessary” suffering.
But this does not dent his hope: “It is possible to have a decent society; you have the usual things and none of it is spectacular.” In the increasingly febrile political atmosphere of the present moment, Sanders’ calm, unspectacular focus on a “decent society” is refreshing and reassuring.
