Bernie Sanders: Gen Z Is “a Generation of Tolerance and Decency”In case you hadn&rsq

Bernie Sanders: Gen Z Is “a Generation of Tolerance and Decency”

In case you hadn’t heard, Bernie Sanders is running for president again. The independent senator from Vermont and 2016 wrench in the Democratic Party machine has been hitting the 2020 campaign trail hard, trying to hold a solid position in second place across several dozen polls, with Joe Biden out ahead of him and Elizabeth WarrenandKamala Harrishot on his heels. Sanders tells Teen Vogue his campaign intends to win the Democratic primary and defeat “the most dangerous president in American history.”

Thedemocratic socialist is pleased to see that many of his policy views deemed too “radical” in his 2016 primary run are becoming debate-stage topics. Over the last four years, he’s watched ideas he championed then (Medicare for All,tuition-free college, and more) become mainstream liberal politics even as he remains a leader on these issues and a crusader against Wall Street and the corporate health care system.

It is strange to think that Sanders, a man who has been in Congress as long as I’ve been alive, represents such vocal resistance to the very system he’s so long been a part of. But the presidential candidate’s call for a “working-class revolution” (specifically, a political revolution) feels like more than just rhetoric when proposals like eliminating all student loan debt are on the table.

Listening to Sanders, you get the sense that he feels a duty to save this country and this planet and that being a part of the system is a necessary condition for that moral obligation.

Sanders visited the Teen Vogue offices this week, where he discussed some of his 2020 competitors, how to combat an impending sense of nihilism about our shared future, and what’s so special about this moment’s political superstar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

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