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It was a small and relatively intimate event—this small conference described as a “gathering of minds to envision the world we want”—that took place over three days as last month ended and December began in Burlington, Vermont.

No, it wasn’t a “hootenanny.” The serious topics discussed in detail and with passion were poverty, inequality, human rights, the climate crisis, racism, war, peace, refugees, workers, healthcare, housing, civil rights, independent media, corporate power, criminal justice reform, international solidarity, civil rights, voting rights, the rights of women, the LGBTQ community, immigration, democracy, economics, politics, organizing, and ultimately about how all of these issues can never be adequately understood or addressed in isolation.

“What do we need to do to improve the quality of life of our citizens of the world?”
—Jane Sanders, The Sanders Institute”I think it’s important that we realize the intersectionality of the issues,” explained Jane Sanders, who along with executive director David Driscoll founded The Sanders Institute and organized the Gathering. “I mean environmental sanity has to do with income inequality and so many things. And that’s why we intentionally do things more comprehensively because we don’t want to say, ‘We’re having an environmental conference,’ or ‘We’re having a housing conference.'”

The conference, she said in an interview with Common Dreams, was one that wanted to ask: “What do we need to do to improve the quality of life of our citizens of the world?”

And while Jane’s husband, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), was at the conference—delivering the keynote and sitting on several panels—the weekend was distinctly not about him. Throughout the weekend, the senator could be found waving off reporters, sitting quietly in the back row during panel discussions, trying not to be seen, but listening intently to what was being said by the assembled speakers and the engaged attendees.

“I’m a guest here,” Bernie told The Real News Network in an interview on Saturday as he credited his wife and the Institute for putting on the event. “And what Jane understood,” he explained, “is that when we deal with climate change, when we deal with the economy, when we deal with housing, when we deal with criminal justice or immigration issues—we have got to deal with them in a holistic way. We cannot see them as silo-ized, separate issues. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that we live in a nation owned and controlled by a small number of multi-billionaires whose greed—incredible greed, insatiable greed—is having an unbelievably negative impact on our entire country.”

Despite being sandwiched between the just-concluded 2018 midterms and the hugely consequential 2020 race—which is already driving frenzied discussion and speculation—the three-day retreat was devoid of the kind of horse-race, personality-driven noise that tends to dominate the vapid political discourse seen on MSNBC, Fox News, and in the pages of America’s major newspapers.

Aside from the occasional “Bernie 2020?” outburst from an audience member—and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis’ short but forceful demand that Sanders run for president for the good of the world—the Sanders Institute Gathering was predominantly driven by and organized around the issues and crises affecting the everyday lives of ordinary people in the United States and across the globe, from grotesquely unequal healthcare systems to the climate crisis, which threatens to render the planet uninhabitable for future generations if immediate and bold action is not taken.

“Only all that we love is on the line,” declared Our Revolution president and Sanders Institute fellow Nina Turner during a panel on the moral necessity of Medicare for All, capturing both the ethos of the retreat and the urgency of the issues at hand.

Applauding nurses and others leading the charge for progressive change throughout the U.S. and the world, Turner said success will only come from working together “to soften the soil, to have the conversations, one person to another, that are necessary to ensure that our family and our friends and our play cousins understand what is at stake. You can’t win somebody’s head unless you win their heart.”

“You can’t win somebody’s head unless you win their heart.”
—Nina Turner, Our RevolutionWinning over a critical mass of hearts—as the progressive experts and organizers emphasized repeatedly across panels on human rights, the criminal justice system, labor, and the climate crisis—will require an enormous grassroots movement that is not merely single-issue focused and national, but far-reaching and international in scope.

“Capitalism isn’t working for a huge number of people on this planet,” said journalist and activist Naomi Klein during a panel on the necessity of a Green New Deal as she explained why the crisis also carries with it a political opportunity that must be recognized.

“If we can come up with a framework for responding to climate change that is actually a challenge to economic inequality, joblessness, economic precarity, the need for Medicare for All, and the rest of it,” Klein said, “then actually we’re gonna build a much broader movement, and also a movement that will fight harder, because it has so much to gain. Because not only is it not threatened by systemic change, it’s hungry for it.”

“What is required now is transformation of every aspect of society,” Klein added. “In other words, a political revolution.”

But simply winning over hearts is not sufficient, said many participants, for the kind of transformative change that is necessary for the United States and the world to confront staggering levels of poverty and inequality, lack of healthcare, and the existential threat posed by the climate crisis. In addition to a vision of justice for all, argued the diverse array of voices featured at the Gathering, any successful progressive movement must also rest on a solid intellectual foundation that demonstrates not just the moral necessity of bold progressive initiatives, but also the striking practicality of these objectives.

Discussing criminal justice and the necessity of holding power to account in the U.S., academic and social justice activist Cornel West denounced the two-tiered nature of the nation’s justice system. “Why are the criminals at the top hardly talked about?” West asked during a morning panel discussion. “All that market manipulation, insider trading, predatory lending, fraudulent activity on Wall Street. How many of them went to jail? Not at all, not at all. Massive corruption in government, Republicans and Democrats. Republicans are not the only gangsters. And greed is a difficult thing not to be seduced by when you’re not accountable.”  

“When we talk about criminality,” West added, “we have to put it in the right context. If we had all the prison reform in the world and still had high levels of poverty, still had decrepit school systems, still had inadequate housing, still had dominant images of a corporate media in which you deal with conflict by killing other people, we still have a problem.”

On the broader effort of building a viable progressive movement, West told attendees: “It’s got to be solidaristic. If we don’t have a left populist option that’s credible, we’re headed down a neo-fascist road. There’s no guarantee that we’re gonna win. So what? We’re gonna fight anyway.”

In the panel discussing why organized labor is essential to democracy, Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Good Jobs Nation, argued that in order for the broad progressive movement to be successful, workers must be marshalled in order to ensure there is political power behind its shared and visionary demands.

“There’s been an all-out attack by the corporate class to destroy worker power,” Geevarghese said. “That’s significant because the power of workers is the only thing that stands between our democracy and having a completely corporate-run government. The working class has been eviscerated and we don’t have a powerful countervailing force to take on capital.”

“The working class has been eviscerated and we don’t have a powerful countervailing force to take on capital.”
—Joseph Geevarghese, Good Jobs Nation

And so, he added, “If we are to win the vision that all of us share, I would argue that the conditions precedent for that are empowering the working class to take on the corporate class.”

RoseAnn DeMoro, former head of National Nurses United, told Common Dreams after the panel that organized labor and non-unionized citizens who support progressive solutions like Medicare for All should work alongside one another in order to call attention to “all the different sectors in this economy that are harming people” because they all tie into the shared human condition.

“If you tie your workers into the human condition,” she said, “then they can take a stand for all the people in the society. And when the labor movement connects with the public good, guess what? When you’re out on strike, the public good connects with you.”

While Republicans have shown amazing commitment to attacking organized labor, lamented Geevarghese, Democrats have failed to show their commitment to defending workers.

“The problem on our side is when we elect Democrats—or, mainstream Democrats—their goal is not to immediately grow the labor movement. But it should be,” he said to applause from the audience. “It fundamentally should be. The challenge for all of us, if we are to realize the vision that the Sanders Institute is giving us space to articulate, I think it is imperative that we do everything possible to increase the number of workers in unions.”

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Separately—sitting on a panel focused on civil rights, immigration, and human dignity—Radhika Balakrishnan of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University opened the talk with a simple question, invoking the astronomical riches of just three American billionaires who together own more wealth than the bottom half of the U.S. population—approximately 160 million people. 

“What’s the economy for?” Balakrishnan asked. “Why do we go buy stuff, make things, get paychecks, do all these things? What’s the purpose of it? Is it so those three men have half the wealth of the nation, is that what the economy is for?” While the audience responded with a resounding, “No,” she explained the imperative of world economies being judged not by the amount of wealth they generate, but by whether the people living within those economies are able to survive and thrive.  

Balakrishnan argued that whether it’s a focus on various forms of gender inequality or racial inequality, the real questions should be about the freedoms people have, what rights they have, and whether their real material needs are being met. “Are people eating?” That’s an important question, she said. “We talked about housing, we talked about mass incarceration, we talked about poverty. Now if we were to judge economic policy by the fact that it does not fulfill these rights, then we can think about a different kind of economy.”

Ben Jealous, the former NAACP president and Democratic gubernatorial candidate for Maryland, agreed with Balakrishnan’s model of putting “human need at the center of economics and not human greed.” But he added that progressives must approach economic debates without allowing conservatives and corporate Democrats to frame bold initiatives as costing too much.

“In reality, you dig into it and what we’re actually talking about is saving money, because Medicare for All will save us money,” Jealous said. “You end mass incarceration and it turns out you have enough money to lower the cost of higher education dramatically.”

“We talked about housing, we talked about mass incarceration, we talked about poverty. Now if we were to judge economic policy by the fact that it does not fulfill these rights, then we can think about a different kind of economy.”
—Prof. Radhika Balakrishnan, Rutgers University

“Our policies are not only the right thing to do from a rights perspective, they’re also the right thing to do from an economic perspective,” he added. “They’re the right thing to do from a public safety perspective. And we’ve got to be willing to stop and say, ‘Wait a second, Medicare for All will save us money.'”

Helping to prove that point, the Sanders Institute Gathering also featured the unveiling of a first-of-its-kind analysis of Medicare for All which comprehensively demonstrates that single-payer healthcare is economically feasible and beneficial in addition to morally necessary.

Authored by a team of researchers at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the new paper found that Medicare for All would save the U.S. a staggering $5.1 trillion over ten years while guaranteeing every American comprehensive coverage.

“It’s easy to pay for something that costs less,” said economist Robert Pollin, the paper’s lead author.

In remarks connecting policy solutions to the kind of politics needed to achieve them, Jealous invoked a phrase that was repeated throughout the weekend, applauding progressive victories in state houses and legislatures during the midterm elections and imploring progressives to stay engaged in fighting for progressive solutions and social justice even while Republicans still control the White House and the Senate.

“At the end of the day we root this movement in our cities, in our counties, in our states,” Jealous said. “What we’ll find is that we’ll move further, faster. It’s not that change comes from the top down. Change has always come from the bottom.”

“[Our progressive] policies are not only the right thing to do from a rights perspective, they’re also the right thing to do from an economic perspective.”
—Ben Jealous, former NAACP presidentReflecting on his time spent at the conference as an attendee, educator, and organizer Nikhil Goyal, author of Schools on Trial: How Freedom and Creativity Can Fix Our Educational Malpractice, told Common Dreams that even though he wished his area of specific focus had been given more attention at the conference, he strongly believes the progressive movement needs to hold gatherings such as this this more often.