The New Yorker: Bernie Sanders has spent decades attacking inequality. Now the country is listening

[portlander23]

Margaret Talbot: The Populist Prophet

There’s something admirable about Sanders’s reluctance to attribute his political beliefs to autobiography: he doesn’t want voters thinking that his commitment to redistributive economics stems from anything other than a deep-seated sense of fairness. He has neither the conventional politician’s instinct for sharing relatable details nor the contemporary left’s reverence for personal testimony. Still, he’s running for President, and so he has reluctantly cracked open the door to his private life, even if his supporters are drawn to him, in part, because of that reluctance.

When I asked Sanders a question about his early years, he sighed with the air of a man who knows he can no longer put off that visit to the periodontist. “I understand,” he said. “I really do. For people to elect a President, you’ve got to know that person—you’ve got to trust them.” He insisted that he was happy to talk about his life. But he couldn’t resist sermonizing first: “When I talk about a political revolution, what I’m talking about is how we create millions of decent-paying jobs, how we reduce youth unemployment, how we join the rest of the world, major countries, in having paid family and sick leave. I know those issues are not quite as important as my personal life.” And then, unnecessarily: “I’m being facetious.”

[RiverLover]

1. I read this yesterday. Its long, but really interesting. I didn't know much about his upbringing.

The New Yorker is great exposure for Bernie.

Thanks for OP'g it!!

....“There was tension about money,” Sanders said of his family. They lived in a three-and-a-half-room rent-controlled apartment, and his mother pined for a house. “It wasn’t a question of putting food on the table. It was a question of arguing about whether you buy this or whether you buy that. You know, families do this. I remember a great argument about drapes—whether we could afford them. And I remember going with my mother when we had to buy a jacket. We went to literally fifteen different stores to buy the damned cheapest—I mean, the best deal.” He went on, “I do know what it’s like when the electric company shuts off the electricity and the phone company shuts off the phone—all that stuff. So, for me, to talk to working-class people is not very hard.”

I spoke with a few of Sanders’s contemporaries who had grown up in the same neighborhood, and their memories were rosier: they recalled kids playing stickball on safe, familiar streets until their parents called them home for dinner. But Sanders rarely communicates in the key of nostalgia. He’ll talk about how the “great American middle class” is being hollowed out, but unlike some populists he doesn’t dwell lovingly on the nineteen-fifties, when high-paying manufacturing jobs, union membership, and the G.I. Bill allowed single-earner families to prosper. That’s a political strength, because there are many people—African-Americans, above all—for whom the fifties cannot be recalled as an idyll.

Sid Ganis, a Hollywood producer who grew up in the same building as Sanders, described their neighborhood as an enclave of “ordinary secular Jews,” adding, “Some of us went to Hebrew school, but mainly it was an identity in that it got us out of school on Jewish holidays.” Sanders told me that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, his family “got a call in the middle of the night about some relative of my father’s, who was in a displaced-persons camp in Europe someplace.” Sanders learned that many of his father’s other relatives had perished. Sanders’s parents had been fundamentally apolitical, but he took away a lesson: “An election in 1932 ended up killing fifty million people around the world.”....

[DrBulldog]

2. An insane Supreme Court decision in December, 2000, to not allow counting of all the votes ...

... ended up our not taking sufficient action to prevent 9/11, starting the two longest wars of our nation that killed over a million people, and causing the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Yes, this is history's butterfly effect that has recurred countless times in human history.

[Ed Suspicious]

3. "An election in 1932 ended up killing fifty million people."

That is some heavy shit. Viewing his job in that frame it is little wonder that Bernie has little love for the cult of personality.

[sabrina 1]

10. That's one of the most admirable things about him, he focuses on other people. He has not enriched

himself as so many elected officials manage to do.

When he has written anything that he could have 'sold' and profited from, he has donated any profits to his favorite children's charity.

[merrily]

8. The date on the article is October 12. The first debate is October 13.

I swear: Bernie is getting publicity now because people are about to watch the first debate (I hope) and media outlets are afraid their readers and viewer are going to say, "How come you never mentioned this guy?"

At that, Bernie has received more coverage than the others, though little of it flattering. Wait until people find out that O'Malley, Webb and Chafee are running and no one bothered to cover them.

[Live and Learn]

4. K&R nt

[Lunabell]

5. Long read

But k&r for the Bern!

[ancianita]

6. K % R

[Babel_17]

7. K&R, bookmarked for later reading

Thanks for posting about the article!

[shireen]

9. Thanks!

That article was long but quite engaging. A good detailed intro for people who are not familiar with Sanders.

[Uncle Joe]

11. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, portlander.

[MuseRider]

12. Thank you!

I enjoyed this.

This is what I need to see in office. He is who I think we do need to start to right (is that the correct spelling? I can't for the life of me find out) this country. He is who gets my vote.

[Stevepol]

13. one thing I'm concerned about:

Bernie it seems to me has the right side of nearly all the issues he talks about. The problem is that he tends to ignore anything that seems tangential to the areas of policy he has studied and sincerely wants to change for the better.

What will happen if and when the result of the primary campaign does not reflect the exit polling or the polling in general? I suspect he will do exactly what most Democrats do these days,i.e., just accept this as part of the "democratic" process and since he loves democracy so much, he will (I'm afraid) just accept defeat. What he doesn't realize is that the counting of votes is even more corrupt than politics in general, and the fair counting of votes is even more essential to the democratic process than keeping money out of it or being ignored by the media so the issues don't get addressed. Unless the votes are counted fairly, IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO HAVE A DEMOCRACY. IMPOSSIBLE!!!!!

If you want to have the society that most people want, YOU HAVE TO VERIFY THE VOTE!!

An even better idea would be to have HAND-COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS for all elections, but since we have apparently fallen in love with shiny new, but trivially easy to rig, voting machines, absolutely the least we can do is to VERIFY THE VOTE. That means regular, adequate, required "audits" and rules that if there is a substantial statistical anomaly, the whole election must be re-counted ON PAPER BY HAND.

[Waiting For Everyman]

14. K&R