Ordinary People Can Remake the World:
Dream Defenders Endorse Bernie Sanders and the Movement of Everyday People with him for President
We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism...The people have to have the power: it belongs to the people.
- Fred Hampton, Chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party Deputy Chairman of the national BPP
We are not extraordinary. We don’t have wealth, fame, or royalty to inherit. We are the descendants of enslaved peoples, indigenous nations, and migrants who left familiar lands, so that we may have a chance to survive. History will not remember most of our names. But what marks us and the legacies we will leave behind is this: we made a deep, lasting, and unshakable commitment to loving the people, to fighting alongside the people, and to teaching our generation to step into our power, because ordinary people can remake the world.
We are the Dream Defenders.
Young people in the US have been raised to believe we are part of a country that offers us infinite choices and the freedom to chart our own destiny. Instead, our generation is chained to over $1 trillion in debt, the most of any generation in history. We work more hours for less pay, and we can’t help support our parents to retire in dignity. Our generation and the kids after us will see firsthand the devastating effects of the climate crisis. We’ll be forced to evacuate our neighborhoods (if we aren’t evicted first) as rents continue to skyrocket. The people we love are stolen every single day by the jail system or kidnapped by ICE. For the first time ever, we are living shorter lives than the generation before us.
For everything we are up against, the political elites blame us. They blame us for being born to the wrong mothers, at the wrong time, in the wrong zip code. They conceal our crises of addiction, suicide, and despair. They mock us for believing that we deserve better, for believing that we can build something better than this.
“We know our student loan debt isn’t 300% greater than previous generations by accident. We know that student debt being used as a recruitment tool for the U.S. military isn’t an accident. We know that trillions of dollars for wars, and hundreds of billions spent to police and lock us up but empty hands when it comes to schools, housing, or healthcare is a choice, a value judgment. ”
The United States has made all too clear the values it holds throughout its history, from its foundations in the brutality of slavery and indigenous genocide to the ongoing project of bombing and policing Black and brown people all over the world. We don’t have any romantic notions about a state that chooses to treat so many people at home and abroad with cruelty.
However, because our lives and the lives of the people we love depend on it, we have chosen to take a side in this election: to stand against a world order rooted in greed, authoritarianism, and violence.
We are endorsing Bernie Sanders for president.
But more than that: We are endorsing our commitment to organize and fight back.
Why Bernie?
Bernie is not our political savior. It is the movement behind him that will change this country: We are not electing a savior, we are electing a political opponent who we will hold accountable to meet our demands. Bernie Sanders knows he can’t change everything on his own. His campaign slogan, “Not Me, Us” is all about building a movement of millions to fight in the streets and at the ballot box to force the hands of legislators to listen. This is how change happens.
Our people believe in Bernie and his vision for building power with us. He has the most diverse, the youngest and the most working class base of any candidate. He has more donations from students, Walmart Workers, Amazon Workers and Teachers than anyone else - at an average of $18. The mainstream media is afraid of this. That’s why they’ve attempted to paint Bernie as some fringe candidate and his support base as comprised of only “white Bernie bros” and erase the millions of Black, brown and immigrant youth and women at the helm of his campaign.
Bernie has the most visionary agenda for our future: Bernie’s political agenda most aligns with our own. It includes:
Free college
100 percent elimination of all student debt and all healthcare debt
Medicare for All
Guaranteed jobs and housing for anyone who needs it
A moratorium on all deportations and reuniting of all families who have been separated
Re-shaping our current immigration system, dismantling ICE and creating a welcoming immigration system for refugees, including those displaced by climate change
Cutting the national prison population in half and ending mass incarceration by abolishing the death penalty, three strikes laws, and mandatory minimum sentences, as well as expanding the use of alternatives to detention
A “Prisoners Bill of Rights,” and a just transition for incarcerated individuals upon their release
Cutting our military budget (The US currently spends $700 billion/year)
No sanctions on Iran, no war with Iran or US intervention abroad
Withholding funding to Israel unless it changes its treatment of Palestinians
Bernie’s track record is consistent. Throughout his career, he has pushed visionary ideas long before they were politically popular:
Bernie has been an activist all his life. In 1963, a young Bernie Sanders was arrested after being chained to fellow activists (many of them Black women), while protesting segregation and despicable educational conditions for Black school children in Chicago. Sanders, like all U.S. politicians is flawed. He has not always taken stances we agree with, but no candidate has been more consistent over their lifetime in choosing unpopular political stances rooted in the needs of Black people, immigrants, LGBT communities and the working class.
Bernie has helped shift the national policy dial to the left: on mass incarceration, the environment, healthcare, war spending, housing, Israel/Palestine and US military aggression abroad.
Bernie is not offering band-aid solutions to the crises we are living in. He believes in a total transformation of our economic and political systems.
Many candidates cite “corporate corruption” as the source of the problems we are up against. This means they believe our issues aren’t so much systemic as a matter of a few bad apples. 3 billionaires own half of the wealth in this country. This is BECAUSE of capitalism itself because under capitalism, the needs of people and the planet are always secondary to the profit motive. Other candidates are offering BandAid solutions to problems that, without deep economic transformation, will only persist.
We all know this and people everywhere are demanding a total overhaul of our economic system. Bernie is the only candidate doing the same. Polls show that 55% of women under 55 say they would prefer a socialist country to a capitalist one, and 70% of millennials say they would vote for a socialist.The media’s erasure of young women, and people of color as core constituencies of the Bernie Sanders campaign reflects the establishment’s discomfort with acknowledging that the working-class is in fact multi-racial, and the growing consensus that capitalism cannot save us.
What’s next for us?
Since our founding in 2012, we have studied in living rooms, classrooms, community centers, and union halls. We have knocked on thousands of doors and held hundreds of meetings. We have sung and chanted in the streets until our throats went dry and our voices hoarse, all towards offering a bold alternative vision for a society where no one is left behind. We are part of a long, and deep lineage of freedom fighters in the South. We aren’t going anywhere.
Because of this, we know all too well: real people power does not come overnight. We know that electing Bernie Sanders for president will not be enough to win the transformative change we urgently need. We are not endorsing a charismatic savior, we are endorsing a movement. We are committing to the work ahead, the work it will take to dismantle decades of racism and exploitation. This work will require convincing people to believe in our capacities to steward deep, lasting, structural change: in healthcare, in housing, in education, in the environment, and in the ways we treat one another.
“At a recent rally for Bernie Sanders the crowd was asked, “Will you fight for someone you do not know?” There comes a time for every generation to make a choice: will we give up, and let racist rich people decide what our lives are worth? Or will we fight, for ourselves, for our families, for the people whose names history will not remember. The road ahead is not easy, but what we can win together by looking out for each other, by believing in each other, is more beautiful than what we will leave behind. ”
Will you fight with us?
Volunteer:
Our organizers will be working tirelessly to mobilize young people to the polls this primary and to get them engaged in our movement beyond the election. We need all hands on deck.
If you are interested in volunteering with us (talking to your neighborhoods, texting/calling other voters, hosting an event), click here.
Donate:
Make a donation today to support our organizers here.
About our Endorsement Process:
The Dream Defenders are a membership based organization with 10 chapters in communities and campuses across the state of Florida. We attempted to build an endorsement process rooted in our vision of true democracy and equity.
For 6 months, our chapters met monthly to look at all of the candidates platforms in relationship to our political agenda, the Freedom Papers. We spent time analyzing policies, track records and debating which candidates best aligned with our vision for the future.
We held straw polls of our members after each meeting. Bernie Sanders won every single straw poll.
In December, we held our final meetings. Each chapter voted using a rank-choice system, whoever won, became their chapter’s choice. We then tallied up each chapter’s collective vote. Bernie Sanders won 90 percent of our chapters.