Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician, by Dan Chiasson, Alfred A. Knopf, 592 pages. $35. Credit: Courtesy Early on in Bernie for Burlington, author Dan Chiasson reveals that the subject of his nearly 600-page volume declined to be interviewed. That central absence would se em certain to weaken what amounts to a Bernie Sanders political coming-of-age story. Defensively, Chiasson spins his main character’s nonparticipation as a positive feature, suggesting that Sanders’ cooperation would actually “interfere” with the narrative. “This skein of historical fact, local lore, best-guesswork, and poetry that I’ve created and titled Bernie for Burlington depended on its subject’s remaining silent and on the sidelines. One peep from him, and my whole composition might have unraveled.” Chiasson doesn’t explain why Bernie’s participation would have “unraveled” his narrative, but if this apologia comes across as less than clear and convincing, Chiasson’s deep research and graceful writing do vindicate his at-a-distance approach. Despite the book’s unnecessary length, the author’s sprightly style keeps readers mostly interested and occasionally entertained. Bernie for Burlington will be seen years hence as the definitive origin story of a unique political career. ‘Bernie for Burlington’ will be seen years hence as the definitive origin story of a unique political career. More novelistic than journalistic, the narration is textured with the touch of a poet (Chiasson has written five books of poetry) but not with the leaden hand of an academic (he teaches English at Wellesley College). The book also benefits from the easy intimacy of a homeboy (the 54-year-old author grew up in Burlington). But in addition to being exhaustive, Bernie for Burlington could prove exhausting for some readers. Chiasson doesn’t focus on Sanders’ time as mayor until the book’s halfway point. Its first 24 chapters set forth a perceptively compiled context for the hero’s slow rise to electoral success. Much of this will already be familiar to politically sussed Vermonters. The influx of hippie back-to-the-landers and the founding of Liberty Union — Sanders’ first and still only political party allegiance — are reviewed in what may strike noninitiates as TMI. Persistence does bring rewards, however. One gem of a scene is set in the laundry room of the low-income Franklin Square housing project on a fateful Halloween night in 1980. Chiasson here demonstrates an ability to conjure a specific scene at which he was not present, subtly using sources to make readers feel as though they are real-time witnesses. That October night Sanders was persuaded to run for mayor of Burlington. The persuaders were his closest friend, Jim Rader; his sometimes-roommate and confidante Richard Sugarman; Franklin Square resident and activist Dick Sartelle; and leftist lawyer John Franco. It was Franco who described the venue not as the classic smoke-filled room but a “Downy-filled room.” The you-are-there illusion is achieved through details: “Outside, teenagers aimed Roman candles at each other. Inside, their parents fed quarters into the clothes dryers. A dog barked incessantly at the commotion.” Only an exceedingly adept narrator would think to include that dog. Sugarman, an electoral numbers nerd, convinced Sanders that the local results of his failed 1976 run for governor outlined a possible path to victory in the 1981 mayoral race. He might be able, Sugarman suggested, to assemble a coalition of poor people, leftist yuppies and disaffected Democrats. Incumbent Democratic mayor Gordon Paquette, an old-school pol, could be beaten by such an unlikely amalgam, Sugarman argued. “When the men and women of Franklin Square roused for their daybreak shifts … the laundry room conspirators packed up and left,” Chiasson continues. “Bernie stopped the men, as they wandered out: ‘One last thing,’ he said. ‘What the fuck happens if I win?’” The balance of the hefty book answers that question. Sanders’ many accomplishments, along with the means leading to those ends, are explored — once more, in considerable detail. Chiasson guides the reader as the Sanders administration creates the Burlington Community Land Trust, attracts a professional baseball team, amps up Burlington’s art scene, establishes an urban revitalization office and gooses the city’s mopey economy. It’s enough to make Chiasson wax rhapsodic: “By the end of his eight years [as mayor], many of us realized we’d played a role in a one-of-a-kind, historic inquiry into the possibilities for human happiness in an American city.” While Sanders declined to speak with Chiasson, he clearly made no effort to stop any of his friends, associates and allies from doing so. Indeed, the author cites “hundreds of hours of conversations with dozens of individuals,” including Sanders’ brother, Larry. And while the book uncovers no scandals, it’s full of telling anecdotes and presents an in-depth study of Sanders’ personality as well as his politics. Examples abound of the populist socialist’s “cantankerousness.” This “counter-charisma,” Chiasson notes, “has been very easy to sentimentalize, especially for the young.” But, he adds, “it scalded and confused many throughout his political rise.” Chiasson quotes “a confrontational memo” delivered to Sanders by a coterie of insiders in 1982. “You are not nice to people — you see people on the street and walk right past them — no hello, handshake, or acknowledgment that they exist,” declared the critique’s signers, who included Rader, Franco and Sanders’ future wife, Jane Driscoll. “Your bias against young people, women, and wealthy people shows through here — people get really insulted and complain to us.” Sanders emerges in this composite montage as irascible, of course, but also self-doubting, self-protective and vulnerable. His philosophical attachment to the 20th-century Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich is likewise shown to have had a persistent influence on his ideology and personal views on sexual and emotional fulfillment. Reich’s effort to meld Freud and Marx helped form “the basis for policy ideas about reproductive freedom, community health care, affordable day care, family leave, and other priorities that Sanders espoused,” Chiasson finds. Reich’s strong emphasis on individual autonomy may also be reflected in the libertarianism that colors Sanders’ version of democratic socialism. The Brooklyn native’s ornery Yankee streak appealed to longtime Vermont Republican senator George Aiken. The two icons got along glowingly, Chiasson notes. Cops also liked Bernie. The Burlington police officers union’s endorsement may have been decisive in the 10-vote victory that installed him in city hall. The officers regarded as genuine his empathy for their status as workers in dangerous jobs. Sanders “thought of the Burlington police the way they thought of themselves: Officer Friendlies, bighearted working stiffs.” Sanders’ disdain for alleged government overreach was on full display during his resoundingly unsuccessful 1986 campaign for Vermont governor. In Morrisville, the left-wing politician told a crowd of farmers and laborers that he was “‘opposed to gun control, period,’” Chiasson relates. In Swanton, Bernie for Burlington informs its readers, Sanders declared his opposition to mandatory seat belt laws: “‘I don’t think government should tell you what to do … in the area of individual and civil liberties,’ Sanders explained, to loud applause.” That hostility toward Washington and Montpelier also found purchase among “Reagan Democrats” in Burlington. Sanders owes his initial — and ongoing — electoral success partly to his appeal to working-class voters who might otherwise favor Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump. He projects a fighter’s aggression toward effete elites. Included in that category are liberals as well as plutocrats. Chiasson transports us to a room at the University of Chicago in 1960 where undergraduate Bernie Sanders and some friends were watching the presidential debate between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy. “The urgent issue was what to do about Soviet incursions into Cuba,” Chiasson recounts. “Bernie’s classmates, mostly fellow Jews from New Deal Democratic households, had lined up behind Kennedy.” But Bernie “‘almost got out of the room to go puke’” when he realized that both candidates agreed that the Cuban revolution should be snuffed and a pro-U.S. government installed in Havana.” His Chicago friends recalled that Sanders “targeted his indignation not at Nixon, who seemed distasteful but at least not hypocritical, but instead at Kennedy, whose ‘liberalism’ struck Sanders as a nauseating deception,” Chiasson writes. A vaguely similar scenario, in which Sanders’ ideals might be seen as conflicting with one another, played out 23 years later in Burlington at the General Electric weapons factory that employed several hundred union workers. Peace activists planned a civil disobedience action outside the plant to protest its production of what Chiasson describes as guns “designed for indiscriminate mass killing of the poor.” Burlington peace activists comprised a not insignificant part of Bernie’s electoral base, but he also drew crucial backing from the GE trade unionists to whom the peace protests were an affront. Notwithstanding presumptions that the mayor was facing an agonizing choice of allegiance, “few who knew Bernie well doubted that he would stand with the workers,” Chiasson notes. Earlier, Chiasson writes, Sanders had said of the peace protesters, “The result of what they are doing is to point the finger of guilt at working people. Not everybody has the luxury of choosing where they are going to work, or the money not to work.” Sanders’ comments and (in)actions in regard to the GE protests left lasting wounds among anti-war activists. The late anarchist philosopher and resident guru Murray Bookchin accused Sanders of “acting as a publicity man for GE, not the socialist mayor of Burlington.” Bernie for Burlington ends with Bernie’s victory in the 1990 race for Vermont’s lone U.S. House seat. That’s just as well. In Chiasson’s hands, a narrative covering the subsequent 35 years would have surpassed the dimensions of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But it’s unfortunate that he made no attempt to link the present with the past. Burlington, we are reminded, experienced an acute homelessness crisis in the mid-1980s. Mayor Sanders responded compassionately by opening a 100-bed shelter. “Word spread across the region’s homeless communities that Burlington had beds available,” Chiasson writes. But today, the author does not observe, some critics of progressive policies maintain that the availability of services and permissive attitudes account in part for the current influx of unhoused outsiders. Similarly, several pages of Bernie for Burlington are devoted to the twisty tale of the city’s waterfront development. After voters rejected a Sanders-backed plan to build condos, offices, a hotel and stores on the waterfront, the mayor reversed himself and launched the plan that ultimately kept most of the waterfront open as a public park. Chiasson could have asked whether Burlington missed an opportunity, as cities of similar size transformed undeveloped scenic parcels into tasteful tourist attractions that swell municipal coffers. As mayor, Sanders prided himself on a foreign policy that featured enthusiastic support for Fidel Castro’s Cuba and for the Sandinista revolution that overthrew a long-standing tyranny in Nicaragua. Today, the dictatorial Sandinista regime presides over one of the world’s most impoverished and repressive countries. Have Sanders and his Sanderistas condemned that devolution or the complete denial of human rights in Cuba? Chiasson doesn’t say. The failure to acknowledge misfires, or at least engage in some self-critical or self-questioning reflection, may also be part of Sanders’ makeup, and a legacy of Bernie’s Burlington. For all its strengths, Chiasson’s book suffers this weakness: It could have been less worshipful and more skeptical.  The original print version of this article was headlined “Bern After Reading | Book review: Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician, Dan Chiasson” The post Book Review: ‘Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician,’ Dan Chiasson appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less