Feeling the Bern

In a front-page story published on 24 June 2018, The New York Times assessed the political impact of US Senator Bernie Sanders. “If his policy agenda has caught on widely among Democratic candidates, and succeeded in moving the party to the left,” journalists Sydney Ember and Alexander Burns opined, “Mr. Sanders himself has struggled so far to expand his political base and propel his personal allies to victory in Democratic primaries.”

The Times story, Sanders insists, misses the point. Neither he nor Our Revolution, his advocacy organization, he writes, is content to endorse candidates who are ahead in the polls, have raised lots of money, and received support from the Democratic establishment: “We support candidates, sometimes major long-shot candidates, who are prepared to take on the economic and political establishment and run strong grassroots campaigns” (Where We Go 224).

A self-proclaimed “democratic socialist,” Sanders began his own career as a long-shot candidate. In 1972, he ran in a special election for a seat in the US Senate from Vermont, on the Liberty Union ticket, and got 2% of the vote. Six months later he tried again, this time in a gubernatorial race, and got 1% of the vote. “I was on the move,” he writes, “just in the wrong direction” (Our Revolution 28). He kept trying and failing throughout the 1970s. But Sanders was—and is—nothing if not persistent. In 1981 (after a brief hiatus in which he operated a small media company), he was elected mayor of Burlington by a whopping 14 votes. In 1990, Vermonters put him in the US House of Representatives; in 2006, they elevated him to the US Senate. Sanders is now the longest serving Independent in the history of the US Congress.

In 2015, although pundits and pollsters indicated that Hillary Clinton had the Democratic presidential nomination all but locked up, Sanders declared his candidacy. He wasn’t polished, he recalls. He didn’t know all that much about organization, fundraising, media relations, or advertising for a national campaign; he barely registered in the polls. But he knew what his message would be: “no consultant, no pollster had to tell me. It was the same message I had been delivering my entire life” (Our Revolution 87).

He came pretty damned close. Before conceding to Clinton, Sanders received more than 13 million votes in primaries and caucuses, winning 22 of them. In 2019, he threw his hat in the ring again.

Sanders is as consistent as he is persistent. And, critics on the left and right are wont to say, insofar as he is simplistic, unrealistic, and stubborn. As the three books he has written demonstrate, his mission, win or lose, is to speak truth to power; think big not small; and represent the interests of working families, the elderly, children, sick people, underrepresented minorities, and the disenfranchised, against corporate profiteers and the politicians who do their bidding. Sanders understands that his principal challenge is to persuade many more Americans that his class-conscious analysis is not radical or fringe: it is “mainstream, the views that millions hold” (Our Revolution 91).

Sanders’s books effectively lay out his progressive agenda. Published in 2016, after he endorsed Hillary Clinton but before Donald Trump was elected president, Our Revolution aims to build on the momentum generated by Sanders’s campaign. Devoted to policies, it is rather light on details about his personal life (including his marriages and the relationship that produced his son), political gossip, and recriminations against Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. That said, Sanders does, on occasion, try to soften his hyperserious image. Serving as a key adviser and media-and campaign-hustings surrogate, his wife, Jane, he tells us, “also showed the country that not everyone in the family is grumpy” (96). And, we learn, Sanders thinks the blueberry pancakes in Denny’s restaurant...