Bernie Sanders appeared to sum up Donald Trump's campaign tactics in a video decades before the now-president-elect won the 2024 election. The Vermont senator, then 61, spoke to high school students about the value of public service, the political process, and his experiences as an elected official as part of a C-SPAN and Comcast project to encourage dialogue between students and national leaders. He described how Republicans would "split people up instead of working together." "You split people up, and then they end up if you're a middle-class person voting against your own interests and the rich go laughing all the way to the bank," he told the students.
Conservatives have never been reasonable, ethical individuals. Slavery, Jim Crow, against women’s suffrage, against the equal rights amendment, against social security, against gay and trans rights, the list goes on forever. The country’s fight isn’t to change a conservative’s mind, it’s to get enough of the non-conservatives to engage, protest, and vote such that they overwhelm the small but galvanized conservative base.
When you win on those issues, those conservatives don’t change their mind. They continue to support slavery, or voter suppression, or the issues of their time, but eventually they die off. Then you have new fights with the new conservatives.