By Tunku Varadarajan
Dan Chiasson has an early memory of Bernie Sanders. It is 1981, Mr. Chiasson is 9, and Mr. Sanders is making his first run to become mayor of Burlington, Vt. "The doorbell rings. My grandmother yells across the house, 'Milford -- it's SANDERS!' My grandfather shouts in reply, 'Dorothy -- DON'T ANSWER THE DOOR!'"
The author is a Vermonter by birth; his mother was a divorced woman who raised him on her own. "Mom and I were not poor, because of her jobs and the generosity of my grandparents," Mr. Chiasson writes. But they weren't moneyed enough to afford an apartment of their own, so they lived for long stretches with her parents. As Mr. Chiasson recalls, his grandparents saw Mr. Sanders as "the final straw in their battle to uphold American values, a literal communist on our streets."
In "Bernie for Burlington," Mr. Chiasson, the head of the English department at Wellesley College, writes exhaustively and often beautifully -- he is a poet, after all -- of the years (1981-89) during which his countercultural hero was the socialist mayor of his hometown. The author also describes the formative decades when Mr. Sanders -- born in Brooklyn, N.Y., to unhappy blue-collar Jewish parents -- scrapped his way through high school and college before moving to rural Vermont in 1968. Mr. Sanders was 27.
Four years later, he had enough arriviste chutzpah to run for state governor as the candidate for the Liberty Union Party -- a leftist Vermont grouping. He won only 1.1% of the statewide vote but noted that his support in the working-class quarters of Burlington was much greater than in rural Vermont. Doing the political math, he abandoned his statewide aspirations and made the city his electoral prize.
Before winning the mayoral election as an independent in 1981 -- defeating the longstanding Democrat incumbent by less than two dozen votes -- Mr. Sanders worked as a carpenter and as a journalist for the Vermont Freeman, an alternative paper. He was a prolific writer, darkly eloquent. In a piece from 1969, he offers a "montage," as Mr. Chiasson puts it, of his parents: "The years come and go, suicide, nervous breakdown, cancer, sexual deadness, heart attack, alcoholism, senility at 50."
Mr. Sanders's father, Eli, had emigrated at the age of 16 from Poland, where his family had often gone without food. Eli's life story, therefore, was one of survival, and he accepted his lot as a traveling paint salesman with a 3 1/2 -room house. His Manhattan-born wife, Dorothy, by contrast, "wanted a broader life." The couple fought constantly -- the father stoic, the mother thwarted -- and their fights were "unbearable" to their two children.
There is virtually no discussion in Mr. Chiasson's book -- apart from some obvious hints and foreshadowing -- of Mr. Sanders's subsequent political innings in Washington, first at the House of Representatives (1991-2007) and then at the Senate (from which he shows no sign of quitting). Let us be thankful, for this national part of Mr. Sanders's trajectory is less interesting than his pre-Washington years, when he made himself into a sui generis socialist -- notably different from modern progressive politicians such as Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani. For all his hobnobbing with the Nicaraguan Sandinistas (including a visit to Managua as a sort of pesky up-yours to President Reagan), Mayor Sanders was a friend of small businesses and had the support of his city's police union as well as the National Rifle Association.
Mr. Chiasson sets about peeling back the layers on the palimpsest of Mr. Sanders's life. "This is a book of stories," he writes, "and a book about stories." It is more an excavation of the radical man's life than an account of it. Mr. Sanders refused to speak to the author but does not seem to have stopped others from spilling their beans to him. The poet in Mr. Chiasson chooses to see this "refusal to interfere" as "itself a kind of participation" -- even a blessing. The "skein of historical fact, local lore, best-guesswork, and poetry" that comprises his book "depended on its subject's remaining silent and on the sidelines."
There is, of course, a rich paper trail, and the author made avid use of the Sanders mayoral archives at the University of Vermont. And he compensates for Mr. Sanders's silence by having "hundreds of hours of conversation with dozens of individuals" -- including Bernie's loquacious older brother, Larry.
It was Larry, you might say, who set Mr. Sanders on his life's course. In 1954 he took the 13-year-old Bernie to the Vermont Information Center, in midtown Manhattan, where, Mr. Chiasson writes, "the air smelled of woodsmoke, cider, and maple syrup." The two teenage boys shared a bedroom in their meager little Brooklyn house, and on that day was born in Bernie's heart a lifelong dream to move to Vermont -- green, clean, wide open and far removed from the drabness of 1950s Brooklyn.
Mr. Chiasson has written an admiring, even loving, account of the life of a man he observed from "a front-row seat." It's not a hagiography -- the author is too astute for that, and he gives us too much of himself in the story for it to be a flat-out praise-song to another man. "I have left my point of view intact throughout this book," he writes, and that includes a calling out of Mr. Sanders' political stunts and character flaws.
Mr. Chiasson was 17 when Mr. Sanders left City Hall. During those eight years of Burlington politics, the author "lived in the middle of a very unusual American experiment." He calls it "cuddly socialism." Not all of us would have liked to live through it, but there's no small amount of pleasure in reading about it.
--Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School's Classical Liberal Institute.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 29, 2026 11:38 ET (16:38 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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