Bernie Sanders’s last moment as a little-known American citizen probably occurred in early 1981 when he was knocking on doors in Burlington, Vermont, to say he was running for mayor. That January he knocked on the door at 258 Colchester Avenue, where the grandparents of nine-year-old Dan Chiasson lived. No one answered.
Chiasson is the sort of guy who remembers everything that happened to him as a kid. What he remembers first about the unexpected knock forty-some years ago is the voice of his grandmother calling out to his grandfather, “There’s someone at the door.” His grandfather boomed out a command: “Don’t open the door—it’s Sanders!”
Chiasson is in his fifties now, writes for The New York Review and The New Yorker, is a much-published poet, likes to nail things down, and years later checked what he remembered with Linda Niedweske, the aide who was at Sanders’s side in Burlington’s Ward 1 on that day back in 1981. By then Sanders had run and lost a number of Vermont campaigns, but a friend told him he could possibly win this time with as few as 4,040 votes—a plurality in what was expected to be a three-way race. To get them he would have to knock on thousands of doors. Sanders allowed himself to hope despite all his disadvantages, among them the fact that he was a believing socialist, was no longer a member of any political party, had lost previous elections by big margins, was close to broke, and was a student of the sexual theories of the renegade thinker Wilhelm Reich, which he had unwisely defended in published articles claiming a link between sexual repression and cancer.
When the ballots were counted on March 3, 1981, a miracle emerged: he was twenty-two votes in the lead. His main opponent, the incumbent mayor, Gordon Paquette, demanded a recount from the city officials, all people he had known for years, who counted the votes by hand. It took ten days, and at the end Sanders was still in the lead—by ten votes.
All of that Chiasson learned later. What he noted in January 1981 was the voice of the man who rang the doorbell a second time and called out, “Hello? Hello?” It was the voice that took hold of the boy—pure Brooklyn, strong and insistent. Chiasson calls it “unforgettable” and says that moment “launched my curiosity about Bernie in the first place…out of which this book flows.”
“Flows” is the right word. Bernie for Burlington has a riverlike amplitude—more than five hundred dense pages about Sanders’s four two-year terms as mayor while Chiasson was attending a Catholic school in Burlington. Chiasson and friends come and go throughout. The book opens with a brisk account of Sanders’s early life and closes with a tidying up of the after-story: thirty-plus years in the House and Senate, including two campaigns for president. The second, in 2020, was the heartbreaker. He almost won the Democratic nomination. But it’s the weird accident of his election as mayor that gets Chiasson’s full attention and in my view justifies the big effort of this book. Winning gave Sanders the first serious job of his life. What he brought to the job and what he did with it help to explain two things: what matters to him and how he fits into the uncoiling turmoil of American political argument since opinions began to heat up in the 1960s. He never tires of repeating what he thinks, but when asked for the personal history of his political stances—what pushed him or held him back on this issue or that—he somehow gets out of answering. It’s not that he’s shy, it’s that it doesn’t interest him; he’s in a rush to move on.
By his own admission Sanders is a white, male, Jewish socialist born in 1941, but he is not now, and he has never been, a Vermonter. He’s a flatlander. Six years ago, when he was running for president, he fell into conversation with the photographer Danny Lyon in Chicago. Chiasson got this story in a phone interview with Lyon. It’s like other stories reported by Ari Rabin-Havt, Bernie’s deputy campaign manager in 2020, in his account of the election, The Fighting Soul: On the Road with Bernie Sanders (2022). If Bernie has a free minute, he starts to ask questions. It’s a lifelong trait. He wants to know how people cope. “Can you really make money taking pictures?” he asked Lyon. “How Brooklyn was that!” Lyon exclaimed to Chiasson.
“Very” was the right answer. Bernie’s Brooklyn home on East 26th Street in Midwood was a couple minutes’ walk from James Madison High School, from which he graduated in 1959. Brooklyn College, where he spent his freshman year, was a mile and a half in the other direction. There he was excited to read Albert Einstein’s famous essay “Why Socialism?” and to meet “real live socialists” in the Eugene V. Debs Club. Debs became something of a personal hero. But then Sanders abruptly quit Brooklyn College and transferred to the University of Chicago. Just why Chicago is unclear. He offered no explanation for the switch, but the probable reason was the blow of the death of his too-young mother in March 1960 after several years of worsening heart trouble, followed by the death of his father two years later. The political issue Sanders has talked about longest and most is health care, with an emphasis on the basic fact that the best care goes to people with money. That he will talk about, but his mother and father, how they all got along? A curt word or two.
At Chicago, Sanders began to spend time in the library, reading widely—“everything except the books I was supposed to be reading.” The issues that drew him were the civil rights movement, the labor movement, and the peace movement, in all of which he got involved “in a little way,” he told an interviewer fifty years later. One of the little ways was to print up posters of a Chicago cop twisting a young black woman’s arm, which Bernie slapped up on walls and telephone poles along local streets until a cop in a car stopped him and, as he tells it, “puts his finger in my face and says, ‘It’s outside agitators like you who’re screwing this city up. The races got along fine before you people came here!’”
Sanders’s history as an activist and radical tends to follow things that instinctively struck him as wrong and started him thinking. During the Chicago years he was shocked by obvious injustice in the treatment of African Americans who were blocked from housing and stuck in underfunded schools. In August 1963 he was arrested while working with the Congress of Racial Equality and got an instant education in how differently officials treat rebellion in the classroom and protest in the street. The street was far rougher.
After Sanders graduated from Chicago in the spring of 1964 he faced the draft, like every other American boy who wasn’t married or in law school or saved by bone spurs like Donald Trump. He wanted no part of the war and claimed he was a conscientious objector. But under the draft law a conscientious objection had to be based on religious belief. Sanders was Jewish but not religious, which made his objection questionable. Two years of back-and-forth with the FBI ended with a firm denial of his claim on September 8, 1967—the day he turned twenty-six, which at that time made him too old to be drafted.
Instead of Vietnam, Sanders moved to Vermont, where he got involved in local politics. When he was growing up in Brooklyn, he had fallen in love with basketball, and for the rest of his life he could never pass up a chance to join kids on the street taking shots at a hoop. It was the same with local politics. If he bumped into people arguing politics, he stopped to listen, asked questions, put in his two bits, and before you knew it he would say yes to something impossible, like running for the US Senate as the Liberty Union candidate in 1974. That was the year Vermont’s longtime Republican senator George Aiken was retiring. Fighting to take his place were the Democrat Patrick Leahy and the Republican Richard Mallary. Sanders was changed in two ways during that campaign, according to Chiasson: people began to call him “Bernie,” and he first began to use the word “billionaire.” When John D. Rockefeller became America’s first billionaire in 1916, activists began an on-again, off-again fight to block others from becoming that rich. In 1974, when Chiasson says Bernie began to refer to billionaires as a class, billionaires were still rare. He doesn’t give us a place and date when Bernie first said “billionaire” out loud. He just says it happened.
Nobody expected Bernie to win in 1974, but he got 5,901 votes, just over 4 percent of the total. That got him thinking. His hero Eugene V. Debs had been on the ballot for president in Vermont in 1912 and got 928 votes, just under 1.5 percent of the state’s total that year. Bernie did better than his hero the first time out in a statewide race. That persuaded him and his advisers that he might win a three-way race for mayor in Burlington.
One of the many virtues of Bernie for Burlington is the warm fullness of Chiasson’s accounts of Bernie’s friendships in Vermont. He met people who could help him, and he accepted and valued that help. Among those friends Chiasson got to know is Richard Sugarman, a Jewish scholar of religion who had known Bernie forever. He told Chiasson they had met in October 1976 on the train from New York to Burlington. “I know you,” Sugarman said to his glum seatmate. “You run for everything…. You’re the perennial candidate.”
Sugarman told Chiasson that he had found Bernie in a low mood on the train. Bernie had just turned thirty-five, was returning from a family gathering where he felt everyone was disappointed in him, and thought he was going nowhere. Sugarman sensed this and wanted to buck him up. He was open to Sanders as a fellow New York Jew but felt a deeper connection, too. In Burlington, Sugarman taught at the University of Vermont and was an authority on the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, which didn’t open many doors with the locals. Sugarman had struggled to feel at home despite the crude local antisemitism he encountered—not at all the sort of thing he had run into from down-the-nose WASPs at Yale. On the train Bernie and Sugarman got to talking about Jewish families, Jewish history, families lost in the Holocaust, and making a way in the world as a Jew. Sugarman had a sense that Bernie rarely allowed himself to say much about all that. But he listened, so Bernie talked.
Describing the beginning of this friendship to Chiasson, Sugarman recalled the remark of his roommate at Yale, Joe Lieberman—later a senator and candidate for vice-president—who had heard Bernie on the radio in the early 1970s. Lieberman had called him “this perennial candidate” and said “the guy [on the radio] was the best, the most effective speaker he’d ever heard. He just kept rattling on!”
About politics, about the injustices of life, you couldn’t turn Bernie off. But it was very rare for him to speak of his own feelings as he did with Sugarman.
When the train reached Brattleboro, they got off to pick up Bernie’s car and drive the rest of the way together. Finding the car wasn’t easy—the forgetful Bernie wondered if he had misremembered which city he’d parked it in—but they found it, spent hours talking, got where they were going, became longtime friends, and often saw each other as Bernie’s political career unfolded over the following decades. Sugarman was a born ward boss and knew Burlington street by street, even house by house, including the names of the locals in great number. He got the impression early on that Bernie didn’t know Burlington like that—where his girlfriend lived and where the local basketball courts were for the occasional pickup game, that was about it. Sugarman’s first counsel to Bernie in Burlington was basic: “Walk around in this city you live in.”
That simple instruction set Bernie’s life and career in motion. Once moving he never came to rest. When his schedule was open for an hour or an afternoon, he set out to knock on doors, stop in where people were meeting or talking, ask questions. On his walkabouts when he was mayor he never failed to ask if there was any problem that needed attention, anything he could do, anything he needed to know. The big issue of his first campaign for mayor was the city government’s strategy to develop the waterfront of Lake Champlain. The idea was to build upscale condos on the shore and “protect” them with a highway blocking easy passage to and from the North End of the city. In short, well-to-do newcomers would get the lakefront, and longtime city residents would pay for its “development” with high property taxes until they were forced to sell and leave. Getting people to see the wrongness of this was one of the three big things that won Bernie votes. The second was the organizational talent and drive of Linda Niedweske. Sugarman told Chiasson that she was “the reason Bernie won,” and Chiasson concludes it was so. The third big thing was Bernie’s campaign slogan. “I won’t take credit for it,” Sugarman added. “But I said to Bernard, let’s use ‘Burlington Is Not for Sale.’”
Bernie’s opponent, Gordon Paquette, had been mayor for ten years and was seeking a sixth term. A classic old boy, he was comfortable in the job, accustomed to easy wins, and slow to see that this time was different. His biggest asset was running against an outsider: a Brooklyn Jewish socialist. Paquette’s backers launched a whispering campaign that Bernie wasn’t just a socialist—he was a communist. Whenever the charge was made, he calmly replied that he was “not a communist, but a democratic socialist.” The Burlington citizens had never seen a democratic socialist before, didn’t know what that was, and shrugged.
Trying to explain in what ways Sanders is both Jewish and a socialist is difficult because he holds none of the traditional beliefs of either identity. The history of the erosion of these once-interconnected convictions can be found in World of Our Fathers (1976), Irving Howe’s account of the Jewish diaspora in America beginning in the 1880s. Millions of immigrants came, settling initially on the Lower East Side of New York, then moving outward to Brooklyn and beyond. In the beginning, most were traditionally observant Jews and some were Marxist socialists who believed that a just society required public ownership of the means of production. Over a fifty-year period of endless argument the first group drifted away from traditional belief—in effect, were secularized—and the second group splintered into so many factions of socialist theory that the goal of remaking society was whittled down to improving what you could.
Sanders’s father arrived in New York Harbor on the SS Lapland out of Antwerp in 1921, when the shifts in the religious beliefs and social theories of New York Jews were already well underway. When Bernie was born twenty years later, his world was thoroughly Jewish: the family all spoke Yiddish, his father was a salesman for a paint company, Bernie was mad for sports, and he prepared for a bar mitzvah. In 2019 he told a reporter, “I am very proud to be Jewish,” then added, “I would tell you that I was not much of a Talmudic scholar. I think mostly we were throwing spitballs.”
Lots of Jewish kids in Bernie’s generation suffered through long struggles with traditional parents over religious observance. Not Bernie and his older brother, Larry. Did their mother and father observe the Sabbath or keep a kosher kitchen? Did they go to synagogue? Rabin-Havt, who spent months on the road with him during his second campaign for president, in 2020, wasn’t sure about any of that. “I once asked Bernie when he had last attended synagogue,” he writes. “He brushed off the question, never answering.”
But the point came up again when Bernie arranged to meet with the rabbi of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where a mass shooting in 2018 had left eleven dead. Rabin-Havt asked Bernie if he knew the Mourner’s Kaddish, just in case the rabbi wanted them to pray together. “‘Ari,’ [Bernie] said in an annoyed tone, ‘Yitgadal veyitkadash shmay rabba,’ reciting the first line of the prayer with perfect pronunciation.” (In English: “Magnified and sanctified be His great Name.”) Then he added, “I am Jewish.”
So Sanders was Jewish in the conventional ways: the product of a Jewish home and upbringing, respectful of Jewish history and customs, ever mindful of the Jewish trauma of the Holocaust. But he was far from casual about the word “Holocaust.” He was slow to judge Israel’s war against Hamas following its horrific attack that killed some 1,200 Jewish soldiers and civilians on October 7, 2023. Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to destroy Hamas once and for all, and in the two and a half years since the Israel Defense Forces have killed more than 70,000 Gazans, nearly a third of them children. The killing was so indiscriminate, so pervasive, and so open-ended that critics around the world began to say it amounted to genocide. Bernie did not want to say it was. He held his tongue.
When he gave a speech in Dublin in February 2024 a thousand protesters attacked him for supporting genocide. He said that the word made him “a little bit queasy…. We gotta be careful about that word.” He told the Dublin crowd that he was against the war, he was trying to end the war, he opposed Israel’s military policy, but he just couldn’t bring himself to say the word “genocide.” Then a few months ago he changed his mind and became the first American senator to call the Gaza killing a genocide. In a statement posted on his website he said it clearly and simply: “The intent is clear. The conclusion is inescapable: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”
The subject of genocide is absent from Bernie for Burlington. By the time Bernie listened to his conscience and uttered the painful word, it was mid-September of last year. Chiasson’s book was already in galleys, and it was late in the day to tackle the mystery of what Bernie felt he owed to his Jewish identity. So Chiasson let it go. There are other difficulties in weighing Bernie’s identity as a socialist. When he first met “real live socialists” at Brooklyn College in 1959, the Socialist Party of America was already an endangered species—a splinter of a splinter that finally voted to dissolve in 1972. The sectarian battles are long over, remembered mainly by scholars, but the core socialist idea remains: whatever benefits the state can provide for anyone must be available to all—in a word, fairness. I don’t know if Bernie sees it roughly this way. He has no theoretical impulse, writes no guides for the perplexed, is the founder of no school of economic thinking. But there is one unexpected way to overhear him thinking about socialism: by watching a filmstrip he made for schools in the mid-1970s.
Between his failed Senate campaign in 1974 and his victory in the mayor’s race in 1981 that provided him at last with a salary, Bernie was essentially broke. “Sanders appears to have lived on almost nothing for years,” Chiasson writes. He hitchhiked most of the time. His car, when he had one, was junk; he rarely ate out; his apartment was cluttered with books, papers, and yellow legal pads but little by way of furniture. He seems never to have had an actual job, but with a Vermont friend, Nancy Barnett, he started a business, the American People’s Historical Society, that created filmstrips for schools. He wrote and provided voice-overs for one celebrating the life and dreams of Eugene V. Debs.
The filmstrip includes big chunks of Debs’s prose, all of them read aloud by Sanders in his natural voice, forceful and confident in the Brooklyn way, with the gutturals never entirely lost by Yiddish speakers. The words are Debs’s, but the voice is Bernie’s. These monologues come as close as anything he ever uttered to expressing his own summary of what the socialist struggle is about. “Why,” Debs asked aloud at a huge rally,
should working people support the Socialist Party? Because it is the only party unequivocally committed to their economic interests, to the abolition of the wage system, and the freedom of the worker from exploitation and every other species of servitude. Let no one charge [that] the socialists have arrayed class against class in this struggle. That has been done long since in the evolution of capitalist society. One class now owns the tools while another class uses them. One class is small and rich and the other large and poor. One wants more profit and the other more wages. One consists of capitalists and the other of workers. There can be no peace and goodwill between these essentially antagonistic economic classes. Nor can the class conflict be covered up or smoothed over.
No one argues large-scale economic issues in those terms now, but in Sanders’s view they pose unchanging questions of fairness and justice. When reporters in 1981 asked what he planned to do with his victory, Bernie said, “I want to see a rebirth of the human spirit in the largest city in the most beautiful state.” The entire country took notice when he assumed office.
Reporters from all over came to check out the People’s Republic of Burlington. His assets were two: his own energy and commitment and Vermont’s crowd of transplanted progressives—spiritual seekers who were going back to the land; Sixties activists burned out by a decade of trying to end the Vietnam War; weavers, carpenters, and potters who wanted to work with their hands; homeschoolers, vegetarians, and bread makers. Bernie was of two minds about the newcomers. Chiasson says he wanted no part of the “brown bread and rice image.” He allied himself with something deeper in the Vermont psyche. “He’s a flinty, New England cheapskate,” Chiasson writes. “He’s not some ’60s burnout.”
Socialism was never on the table during Bernie’s eight years as mayor. But about one thing he was never in doubt: he always chose to be on the side of the people who never get an even break. You can hear it clearly in one of Debs’s speeches that he included in his filmstrip:
Your Honor [he said to a judge in a courtroom], years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then and I say now that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Whenever Bernie ran out of words on the campaign trail in 2020, according to Rabin-Havt, he would launch into an ever-ready summary of what he believed in and would fight for: Medicare for all, college for all, a Green New Deal, Social Security for a decent old age—the basic services and protections that any decent society ought to provide for all its members. He could deliver the list in long form or short form, but the basics were always there, starting with cradle-to-grave medical care. It was hard to design medical care for all, but Bernie insisted it had to be for all—for all! Rabin-Hvat called this his “Bernifesto.” Not so long ago all of it had seemed like an impossible dream, but Bernie preached this for decades, and people who once thought it impossible began to think maybe not. Some still do.
Dan Chiasson has been thinking about Bernie Sanders since the day he heard the doorbell ring back in 1981. He cites “three or so years of daily work” needed to talk to everybody, including Bernie’s brother, Larry, many of his “oldest and closest friends,” people who worked for him or advised him, like Richard Sugarman, but not—repeat not—Bernie himself or his wife, Jane. “I made a few polite attempts,” Chiasson says, “but only early on.” His polite appeals were answered by polite admission of awareness of the book abuilding, but Bernie and Jane did not seek “to interfere with or influence the process in any way.” Having read the book and several others, my guess is that Bernie backed off because he hates to explain himself, and besides, he hasn’t got time; he’s busy.
But the two men did meet. It happened at a family picnic in Stannard, Vermont, in 2024. Joe Biden was about to drop out of the presidential race because he was too old, and Democrats were arguing about the merits of more or less plausible aspirants to take his place as candidate against Donald Trump. Of all the names he’d heard, Bernie said, “you know who is the most progressive? It’s Joe Biden.”
But Bernie was not available. He had tried twice. His moment had passed.
At Stannard, Chiasson got in the line for selfies with Bernie. When it was his turn he told Bernie that he had grown up in Burlington and that Bernie’s years as mayor had made him the man he was. “Oh boy,” said the last, or next-to-last, American socialist, and the photo on the last page of Bernie for Burlington confirms it happened. Bernie’s grin says what he means—well thanks, that’s what I hoped, but don’t ask me to talk about it.
English (US) · 