This commentary is by David Moats, who lives in Salisbury. He is editorial page editor emeritus at the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law.
The story of Bernie Sanders’s rise from couch-surfing, penniless single dad to mayor of Burlington, the U.S. Senate and presidential politics is both familiar and astonishing.
It’s astonishing for what it says about the capacity of the political system to make room for a singular, dedicated figure who makes a name for himself on the fringe, and who then brings the fringe to the center. To Vermonters who know the story of his origins in Brooklyn and the poverty that was a crucible of his radical politics, it is a familiar story, but no less astonishing.
The rise of Bernie Sanders is the subject of an insightful and entertaining new book by Burlington native Dan Chiasson, who places Sanders within a larger story that shines a light on a larger question: How does history happen?
Chiasson’s book, “Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician,” explores the circumstances of Sanders’s life, but within the context of a larger picture — the changing worlds of Burlington and Vermont in the late 20th century. His book is about more than Bernie. It is about the world where Chiasson grew up, part of a large French-Canadian family comprising numerous aunts, uncles, cousins, great-aunts, great-uncles and his Delorme grandparents, with whom he and his mother lived on Colchester Avenue.
Chiasson was a shy Catholic boy of nine when Sanders became mayor, and he tells of the day Sanders and an aide came to the door during his first mayoral campaign, and Chiasson’s grandfather hollered, “Don’t answer the door!” Young people and so-called liberals were the bane of Milford Delorme.
Chiasson was well-suited to the task of writing this book. He is a nationally recognized poet and professor at Wellesley College, and he has written something other than a historian’s history book or a traditional biography. The book is, in part, a memoir, with much detail about what it was like to be a boy in Bernie’s Burlington.
In Chiasson’s telling, history is a wide canvas. When Sanders arrived in Vermont, and before Chiasson was born, the city had suffered the devastation of what was called “urban renewal” — poor neighborhoods on Battery Street and the Old North End were cleared away with the idea that something new would be built.
That meant that whole populations of working-class people, some who had already suffered through the closing of the woolen mills in Burlington and Winooski, were forced out of their homes, sometimes into shoddy housing projects. The mills had employed thousands of workers, many of them immigrants, going back to the 19th century. Now, change seemed to be in the hands of real estate developers and their cronies in city hall. In Chiasson’s telling, the cronies were a complacent clique of Democrats, led in the 1970s by Mayor Gordon Paquette, who wanted to raze additional neighborhoods for so-called development and hand over the Burlington waterfront to wealthy commercial interests.
Sanders’s broad appeal in Vermont is instructive, and Democrats today should pay attention. Early on, he won the support of poor rural voters in the Northeast Kingdom, who would later vote for Donald Trump. When he went into the trailer parks or housing projects, people could tell he knew what poverty was and that he shared their anger at so-called elites. Chiasson describes the libertarian streak in Sanders’s politics — he, too, was wary of big government because he had seen how government often aligns itself with corporations and millionaires. It had been happening in Burlington.
People often say that Sanders is saying the same thing today that he was saying 50 years ago — about big business and billionaires, about health care and the poor. And that may be the secret of his success. Chiasson quotes author Fintan O’Toole, who wrote that Sanders’s “primary mode is repetition, not variation.”
Chiasson cites the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who famously said, “You can never step into the same river twice.” Heraclitus also said, “All things flow.”
In Vermont politics, things have flowed from Republican dominance among rural conservatives to the present moment. But even if the river has continued to flow, Sanders has plunged the same foot in, again and again. He was recently campaigning in California, urging voters there to pass a tax on the rich. It’s not a new idea. And yet as the river has flowed, Sanders’s dire prophecies in the 1970s and 1980s, warning about economic inequality and corporate dominance, are ever more germane.
If Chiasson finds himself inside the story, so too might all of us. And the story continues. As Sanders recently told an audience in Los Angeles, the top 1% of wealthy Americans possess more wealth than the bottom 93%; Elon Musk, he said, possesses more wealth than 53% of Americans. It is not an accident, and it can change.
Bernie came to Dan Chiasson’s house when Chiasson was a 9-year-old boy, and Milford Delorme wouldn’t open the door. Sanders is still knocking. His story is the same. But the times have changed, and so have we.
