Last night, Bernie Sanders addressed the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It was his third time speaking at the DNC, eight years after his momentous challenge to Hillary Clinton first brought him to the forefront of national politics. In 2016, Sanders spoke as the leader of a rising insurgent wing in the party; at this year’s convention, by contrast, he spoke as an ally of Joe Biden’s administration.

Sanders’s speech was mostly unsurprising. He hit his usual themes: decrying the greed of the billionaire class, yawning economic inequality, and the desperation faced by too many Americans; reiterating the need to get money out of politics; calling for guaranteeing health care as a human right, passing the PRO Act, fully funding public education, raising the minimum wage, and so on.

That unparalleled message discipline, his laser focus on class issues and raising the living standards of working people, has been key to Sander’s popularity. This consistent focus has also been a political godsend to the United States in an era when politicians too often get mired in the muddy battlefields of the culture war and most studiously avoid the topic of class warfare. When it came time to criticize Donald Trump, he didn’t call him “weird”; he called out Project 2025: “Giving more tax breaks to billionaires. Putting forth budgets to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Letting polluters destroy our planet. That is what is radical, and we won’t let it happen.”

Sanders also touted the Biden administration’s domestic policy achievements. “In the last three and a half years, working together, we have accomplished more than any government since FDR,” he declared. Sanders highlighted in particular the expansive but temporary welfare measures passed in 2021 with the American Rescue Plan (ARP). (Interestingly, he said little about the Inflation Reduction Act or other major federal investments, like the CHIPS Act or the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, that many Democratic partisans have celebrated as key to Biden’s legacy.)

In this regard, the speech veered into the kind of uncritical boosterism of Biden and the Democratic Congress that has been typical of Sanders post-2020. (Even before Biden was elected, Sanders was telling the press that he could be “the most progressive president since FDR,” and he immediately and enthusiastically endorsed Biden when he announced he was running for reelection in April 2023.) In the context of a DNC speech, of course, this sort of praise is somewhat to be expected — the convention, after all, is a glorified pep rally for Democrats.

But if we’re interested in winning the kinds of changes Sanders has long championed, we need to have an honest accounting of the administration’s successes and failures. The most ambitious version of Biden’s agenda, the Build Back Better (BBB) bill — which Sanders and other progressives like AOC helped craft, and which would have made permanent many features of the temporary welfare state created by the ARP — died in the Senate. True, the Biden administration was constrained by a razor-thin majority and the opposition of conservative Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. But rather than use the leverage they did have to put pressure on the holdouts, Biden and Democratic congressional party leaders appeared to cave.

Eventually the administration did pass climate-investment-related provisions of BBB in scaled-down form in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), mostly in the form of tax credits for private investment and eco-friendly consumer choices. But those investments fall far short of what climate experts say is required to rapidly decarbonize, and even on optimistic estimates, the bill will produce only a 6 to 10 percent reduction in emissions relative to a non-IRA scenario.

Perhaps most important, for all the celebration of the Biden administration’s progressivism by Sanders, Biden’s policies have not meaningfully raised living standards for many working Americans — especially not enough to make up for decades of stagnant wages.

But at the end of his speech, Sanders indirectly critiqued Biden’s foreign policy by calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. It was a welcome comment from Sanders on the DNC stage. Though the senator has long been one of the strongest voices for Palestinian lives in Congress, he was rightly criticized by activists for only making a cease-fire call months into Israel’s war. Sanders’s direct demand also made for a refreshing contrast with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who on Monday night assured the DNC audience that Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly to achieve a cease-fire in Gaza.” The remark was surprising, given that Harris has signaled she is not willing to do the one thing that would probably get Israel to agree to a cease-fire: stop sending them weapons.

With a tirade against the billionaires, the call for a popular economic agenda, and the demand for a more humane foreign policy, Sanders’s speech was a good reminder of why he’s one of America’s most beloved politicians. But those messages sit uneasily with a laudatory attitude toward the Biden administration and an expression of faith in Kamala Harris’s Democratic Party to enact a Sanders-style agenda.

Bernie encouraged millions to believe in far-reaching economic and social change. But as he has himself argued, the path to such change won’t be found in the DNC’s halls.

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