Bernie Sanders appears in these excerpts not as a guest but as a recurring reference point — a name invoked by Bob Zadek and his guests to anchor arguments about bail, socialism, healthcare, populism and rent control. No episode is devoted to him, and no excerpt presents a sustained account of his career or views. What the sources offer instead is a set of characterizations, some of them in tension with one another.
Bail reform
In a July 2018 episode on bail with Scott Shackford, Sanders is mentioned only at the close. Shackford says that Sanders had introduced legislation the previous week to try to eliminate cash bail at the federal and state level over the next three years, adding that he did not think the legislation would go much of anywhere How Bail Traps the Poor in Jail with Scott Shackford (2018). The remark comes at the end of a discussion about the cost of jailing people who cannot make bail, in which Shackford argues the cost-benefit case for reform is overwhelming. Sanders’s bill is treated as one data point in a wider reform movement Shackford says he is tracking, with California as a possible next site of activity. The excerpt does not name the bill, describe its provisions beyond the three-year goal, or report any outcome.
Socialism and the Sweden comparison
Sanders figures more substantially in a July 2019 episode on socialism with Ben Powell. Zadek introduces him as one of the “poster children” of socialism in the Democratic presidential nomination contest, alongside Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and says Sanders frequently refers to himself as a socialist or democratic socialist. Zadek’s framing is that such figures use the word as a placeholder for doing nice things rather than as an economic concept Socialism… Still Not Cool (2019).
Powell’s response is a definitional one. He says Sanders, when challenged on which socialist countries he means, names Denmark, Sweden and Norway, but that none of those countries are socialist. Powell defines socialism as abolishing private property in the major factors of production and replacing it with collective ownership, in practice state ownership and control of the means of production. He says Sanders is not suggesting the government should own Walmart, but that Sanders has affinities with real socialists and a history of liking things like that. Powell also notes that Sweden ranks twenty-seventh in the world in economic freedom according to the annual report co-authored by his book’s co-author, and that the first chapter of the book is titled “Sweden: Not Socialism.”
Zadek then develops the point: Sweden funds a welfare state through high income taxes, which requires the free-market part of the economy to generate the income being taxed. His characterization is that Sanders is doing the welfare part of Sweden — the giving away, the income transfers — without focusing on where the money comes from.
Single-payer and Medicare for All
Sally Pipes, in an August 2019 episode, describes single-payer Medicare for All as envisioned by Sanders, Pramila Jayapal and Elizabeth Warren, and sometimes Kamala Harris. She says that under Sanders’s plan and Jayapal’s plan the government would be the provider of healthcare, with only the Veterans Administration and the Indian Health Services left outside a single rolled-up system Sally Pipes on the High Cost of Free Stuff (2019).
Pipes, who says she is Canadian and grew up under single-payer, states that Canada bans all private coverage for anything considered medically necessary. She says Sanders brought single-payer to the forefront in 2016 during his campaign against Hillary Clinton, released a single-payer bill in 2017 without ever saying how much it would cost or how it would be paid for, and introduced a revised single-payer healthcare system in April of that year. She reports that he then said his plan would probably cost between $30 and $40 trillion over 10 years, paid for by tremendous new taxes and higher taxes on existing taxes. She also describes Harris putting her hand up at the first debate when the host asked who supported single-payer, along with Sanders, Warren and Bill de Blasio, and later saying she had not really understood the question.
Populism and the 2020 race
Casey Mulligan, in an August 2020 episode, calls Sanders a populist and says he is not going to be president. He says the President appreciated that and paid attention to it, both defensively — the possibility that Sanders would siphon away some populist support — and as something to learn from. Mulligan says Sanders seemed like an outsider when he was in the White House and seems much less like one now You’re Hired! Chief Economic Adviser to Trump on What It’s Really Like to Work in the White House (2020).
Mulligan also recounts that the President thought about the Dukakis versus H.W. Bush election and whether Sanders would be a Dukakis type of character, retelling the story of Dukakis wearing an army helmet sitting in a tank. Zadek interjects that Dukakis looked like a chipmunk. Mulligan says the President thought that was the type of mistake Sanders would make as well in a campaign.
Rent control and the progressive experiment
In a March 2021 episode on rent control, Zadek describes rent control as a carryover in the Biden administration strongly embraced by Sanders when he was a candidate and not unembraced by Biden. He calls it one of the more obnoxious economic inventions of the progressive era and says it is contrary to private ownership and to the constitutional prohibition on government taking property without just compensation Escaping the Statrix: Trevor Burrus’s Rent Control Red Pill (2021). The episode’s guest, Trevor Burrus, is introduced as a research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. The excerpt does not record Burrus responding to the Sanders reference.
Across episodes
The excerpts show no development in the treatment of Sanders across episodes; he is mentioned in passing in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 as a marker for bail reform, socialism, single-payer, populism and rent control, with no episode revisiting or revising an earlier characterization. The closest thing to a through-line is definitional: Powell in 2019 and Judis in 2021 both address what Sanders’s socialism means, and they disagree — Powell says Sanders is not talking about socialism in its real functional definition, while Judis, in a May 2021 episode, describes Sanders’s view as something close to an advanced social democracy, with strong unions, workers on the boards of corporations, and industries that do not act in the national interest strongly regulated and if necessary nationalized, but with markets as a very important part of how any economy has to work Is Socialism Still a Dirty Word? (2021). Judis also says Sanders won more votes than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton combined among 18-to-29-year-old voters in the 2015–16 Democratic primary, and that Sanders went through a political evolution similar to his own.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not give Sanders’s title or state, the name or text of any bill he introduced, the details of his single-payer proposal beyond Pipes’s cost figure, or any response from Sanders himself. They do not report election results beyond Judis’s account of the 2015–16 primary among young voters, and they do not say whether the bail legislation Shackford mentions advanced. No excerpt presents Sanders’s own arguments in his words.