Bernie Sanders: The Dem Party Has Lost Contact with the People it Used to Represent, the Working Class

COLBERT: “In the meantime, because that might take a little while, to fix that system, and I mean this semi-not facetiously, shouldn’t the Democrats get their own billionaires to be threatening Democrats?”
Sanders: “No. No. I think the Democratic Party — the reason the Democratic Party has struggled, in my view, over the last many years, it has lost contact with the people it used to represent, which was the working class of this country.
(Cheering and Applause)
And I personally believe that if you have the guts to stand up to the oligarchs and you run a campaign representing the needs of working families, you can, a) get a lot of small donations, and b) your program and your agenda will be strong enough to take on the big money interests.
(Applause)
But we have to ask ourselves, you know, obviously, we have got to fight Trump every day because he is the most dangerous president, perhaps in American history. But we’ve got to do more than that. We have to have a vision, Stephen, of where we want this country to go. And we don’t have that discussion. Why is it that we are the only major country on earth not to guarantee health care to all people as a human right?
(Cheering and Applause)
Why is it that we have more income and wealth inequality? One guy — I mean, as a nation, do we really think it’s appropriate that one person, Mr. Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom 52% of households? Does that make sense, anybody in America?
(Audience boos)
So, kids want to go to college, they want to go to trade school. You know, they leave school 50,000 or 100,000 in debt. Do the American people understand their countries all over the world today that if you want a higher education, you don’t have to go into debt? Public colleges and universities are free. We could do it.”
(Applause)
COLBERT: “Because those countries understand it’s good for the country.”
Sanders: “Of course it is! We now desperately need more doctors, nurses, dentists, construction workers in order to deal with the infrastructure problems that we have. We don’t have those workers. And we are telling you, you want to be a doctor and you’re from a working-class family? You may leave school $500,000 in debt, when we desperately need doctors. How insane is that? So, in my view, we’ve got to rethink these things. Do we want to live in a nation in which the goal is for a handful of people to become super rich while 60% of the people live paycheck to paycheck? I think we can do better than that.”
(Cheering and Applause)