Dan Chaisson’s new book is “Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician” (Penguin 2026). Cover art by Alison Bechdel. Photo by Lisa Abitbol The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Li sten below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts. Young Bernie Sanders arrived in Vermont in 1964 as part of a counter-cultural wave. The tall Jewish kid with the thick Brooklyn accent who spoke of socialism and revolution fit right in with the communards and hippies, though he was neither. Sanders was then, as now, his own man, raging against the establishment while simultaneously seeking to lead it, albeit in a very different direction. As author Dan Chaisson writes, the story of Bernie Sanders is also the story of Vermont. “To see how Vermont changed, simply look at how Bernie’s message, reiterated for fifty years, migrated from the fringe to the heart of Vermont’s political discourse.” In the early days, Burlingtonians knew Bernie “as a perennial political loser” who typically garnered a slim percentage of the electorate in the 1970s, Chiasson said. “But also he was just an indefatigable kind of force.” Dan Chaisson is a Burlington native and the author of five books of poetry. He is a professor of English and chair of the English department at Wellesley College. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, his new book is Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician. Chiasson weaves together his own story of growing up in hardscrabble Burlington in the 1970s with Sanders’ own, whom he observed throughout his life go from gadfly to mayor, to the most influential progressive political figure in the country. Chaisson traces Sanders’ politics to his experience growing up poor in Brooklyn “in an economy that was designed to kill” him and his family. “His mother died in her 40s of a congenital heart condition.” Sanders attended the University of Chicago where he participated in civil rights protests. “He thought that things like racial and other kinds of traumas in our country stemmed directly from economics,” said Chiasson. “Moving to Vermont was a way of thinking, could we start society over?” What explains Bernie’s appeal to conservatives in areas like the Northeast Kingdom? Chaisson said that Sanders admired and channeled George Aiken, the Republican Vermont governor and senator who famously opposed the Vietnam War, declaring that the U.S. should “say we won and get out.” Aiken “had a sort of similar kind of flintiness to him, a similar kind of orneriness or cantankerousness,” Chaisson said. Sanders, a lifelong independent, has long reserved some of his harshest criticism for Democrats. “He feels that the Democrats are the party of the educated elite and he feels much more comfortable among working people.” When he disagrees with someone, Sanders “has a talent for steering the conversation away from those differences and towards places of common interest and common ground.” Asked what he thought the legacy of Sanders would be, Chaisson said, “Just the tenacity, the temerity, the moral vision that Sanders laid out.” He quoted former Burlington Mayor Peter Clavelle, who described Sanders as “a moral visionary.” “Somebody with Bernie’s fight in him and with his sense that there are right and wrong sides of the question morally when we engage with politics, that makes me feel pretty hopeful.” Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: How Sen. Bernie Sanders went from ‘political loser’ to progressive trailblazer. ...read more read less