Thread by @Datoism

In 1989, Stephen Minot wrote a profile on @BernieSanders titled "What makes Bernie run?" in The North American Review magazine and asked free questions. How does an outspoken socialist from Brooklyn become mayor of Burlington, Vermont?

How does he manage to reelected three times, gaining support with each election? How on earth can he run for Vermont's only Congressional seat in conservative 1988 and come withing three percentage points of winning?

He calls the 1988 election an astonishing event.
"While most other candidates for national office that year struggled to find a spot in the political center like so many angles dancing on the head of a pin, Sanders was thundering from the left"

He said few personal stories I haven't read before,
Minot: "With difficulty, I got him to start at the beginning".
Bernie was involved in school politics, but not national politics. His brother was active with Young Dems but Bernie graduated school with minor exposure to politics

Bernie was a pre-med for a while(interested in the work of Wilhelm Reich and Freud) before he ended up in Political Science.

Bernie said: "The university, was not significant; the people there were important".
It was at Chicago he met all kind of politically active individuals - "socialists, anarchists, communists. I learned from them".

Minot: His own political involvement stared with Student Peace Union and continued with CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. Through this work he hammered out a political philosophy that has never left him.

We know Bernie liked country living, so why Vermont?
As adolescents, Bernie and his older brother used to take the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan just to explore the outside world. By chance, they came across a Vermont tourism display at Rockefeller Center.

They lingered, astonished that one could actually own a farmhouse and a land with streams and woods for $7,000. They barely had enough money for subway fare back to Brooklyn, but the notion of green pastures n Vermont remained with bard all during his college years.

So what jobs did Bernie do before becoming Mayor?
👉Worked with the Head Start Program
👉Ran a small moving company
👉Did carpentry
👉Worked in Tax Department under Gov.Hoff
👉Associate Editor of Vermont Freeman
👉Ran a film strips business, which made 60-70 films, successful.

Interesting: In Bernie's first win as mayor, loyal members of progressive coalition felt obliged to guard the absentee ballots all that night until they could be transported to the court house before recount.

Bernie Sanders had a lots of Mitch McConnells among his fellow aldermen. Burlington mayor had no veto power then. The blocked him in everything. Only when stopped cronyism and start saving money for city, gradually the blind hostility between mayor and aldermen began to soften.

In the next year's alderman's elections, seven seats were open. Democrats lost all but one. Progressive coalition now had a close to working majority and thus began two terms of slow and often highly competitive reform.

In subsequent election Democrats and Republicans began to work in collusion, trading off specific wards so as not to compete with each other, and the tactic continued at the time of writing the article(1989) but Progressive Coalition gained strength.

Bernie never gained majority as we already know, but he passed measures on case by case basis. Also he had veto power now.

How he handled the housing is in pretty stark contrast with another mayor running this time who's major achievement is "solving" housing issues in his city.

How Bernie saw socialism then?
How Burlington was different from other performing cities?
"What differentiated the administration of Burlington was that it acted as a protector of the poor and disadvantaged not simply for political power but also from conviction."

Also the city with foreign policy we've read a lot about. Also democrats accusing Sanders of of simplistic thinking, of dumping on the rich and supporting the poor without regard for other factors. 😅

So to the real topic of the paper, 1988 congressional campaign. According to the author, "Sanders ran a campaign in which he knowingly violated four riles most politicians consider essential for survival"

First, he continued to identify himself unequivocally as a leftist candidate.
Second, he took string, clearly stated positions on highly controversial subjects.(Vote for felons in 2020 comes to mind)

Third, he didn't bend or mute his positions to placate his contributors.
Fourth, and perhaps the most extraordinary, from the start he has rejected the support of a major political party.

The the article goes on to asks whether Bernie is an anomaly "who managed to violate the basic rules of politics and still come close to winning?" "Or are the significances here far larger than the man himself?" Then about Jesse Jackson third party system etc.

Also opinions from thinkers.
"Noam Chomsky described Sanders's achievement as extremely striking. He has predicted a slow drift toward New Deal-type liberalism and sees Sanders an an indicator to this trend."

Yeah, Chomsky predicted the policy change of 2020, but probably never thought it would be the same Bernie Sanders whom he called as an indicator then in 1989 will be the one leading it.

Also Arthur Kinoy, Rutgers university after Sanders's near victory,
"His campaign is one of the most important turning points in our history. He speaks to the fundamental basic issues that people are concerned with. And that's been one of the weaknesses of the Democratic party."

The article ends with asking what holds for Bernie's future. Milton predicted that Bernie will "become a highly visible figure on national level".
He probably never though that 30 years later Bernie will be the one reforming democratic party.
Full article: jstor.org/stable/25125110

sorry, guys, I know there are a lot of typos. Clicked "tweet" before proofreading. But checkout rest of Bernie history in this moment. twitter.com/i/moments/1130…