Bernie at the Bridge

Today, most of those old, red-brick factory buildings are empty. The mills have long been closed. The factory jobs that could once pay wages ample enough to support a family are scarce to nonexistent. There is an old, tired, and depressed feeling in the air of towns like Springfield, Vermont, and Claremont, New Hampshire. New England is no longer a vital region. The population of Maine is the oldest, per capita, in the nation. Vermont is a close second and losing population. New Hampshire, stuck between the two, is doing somewhat better but is still fertile ground for the Sanders message, which is a new kind of socialism.

The old kind of socialism was the spawn of industrialization. The state would own the means of production and ameliorate the great gaps in wealth between those who worked in the factories and those who owned them. This is a little harder to imagine when the factories have shut down and the jobs have gone away.

Hard, also, to imagine government ownership and management of, say, Apple—or even of General Motors, which the government bailed out and could have taken over but did not, even with Barack Obama in charge of things. Government ownership of the means of production is an idea whose time came and passed. No one wants the same government that runs the Veterans Administration put in charge of General Electric or Microsoft.

But the distance between the rich and everyone else is still here and, in the view of Sanders, wider and more unjust than ever. The “millionaires and billionaires” are the “malefactors of great wealth” of his political universe—the “one-tenth of one percent” that controls almost as much wealth as the 90 percent at the bottom. His form of “democratic socialism” will, he promises, close the gap by making college education free, by investing in a vast rebuilding of the country’s infrastructure, by increasing the minimum wage and Social Security benefits, by taking on global warming, and so on and so forth.

He has come a long way since he first began making noises about a possible presidential campaign. Last winter, the conventional wisdom was that if there was to be a challenge to Hillary Clinton from the left, the challenger would be Elizabeth Warren. This was, far and away, the preferred scenario among the cognoscenti. Warren had what, if she were an athlete, would be called the “intangibles.” She was good copy. And wouldn’t a fight between two formidable women for the nomination be fun?

Sanders? He was the old, grumpy, white-haired guy from Vermont, one of those candidates who live out on the borderline between kooky and conventional, feeding on scraps of media coverage and pitifully small campaign contributions.

Sanders himself began making noises about a possible campaign. He would explore the possibility, he said, but he would not run unless he could do it right. Which, to most minds, meant that he wouldn’t be doing it.

As part of this exploratory effort, he made a series of appearances in Vermont, talking mostly to college students. My wife and I drove two hours on a very cold February evening to attend one of these events at the University of Vermont in Burlington.

I couldn’t say, at the time, exactly why I wanted to attend the event. I wasn’t prescient enough to think that a Sanders campaign would (a) become a reality or (b) gain serious traction if it did. And I wasn’t, by any stretch, a fan. If he did run for president, Sanders would not be getting my vote. I’d had opportunities to vote for him as Vermont’s lone member of the House of Representatives and in his two successful campaigns for the Senate, and I’d never been tempted. The socialism business would have been reason enough for me to pass on Sanders. And I didn’t much like it that he had honeymooned in the old Soviet Union or that, when he was mayor of Burlington, he had made a “sister city” arrangement with Puerto Cabezas in Nicaragua as a way to diss the Reagan administration. There is a humorless, hard-left aspect to the man.

But he was a force and tireless, like the hard leftists of the 1930s who soldiered on through every betrayal of their ideals, convinced that they would be vindicated by History. In an age of slippery, focus-group-driven politicians, there was something admirable and even compelling about his consistency.

Also, there isn’t much to do on cold February nights in Vermont, and it would be an opportunity to spend some time in “the city.” Eat at a trendy little restaurant. Spend the night in the Hilton, looking out across a frozen Lake Champlain and watching the sun drop behind the Adirondacks. And, who knows, there might actually be a story in it.

His performance then convinced me that Sanders would run and that, when he did, he would be a force, so I wrote an account of the event saying as much (“Bernie Sanders Is No Joke,” June 1, 2015). And when I talked to people about the event and my reaction to it, I would say that I thought he might surprise people when the New Hampshire primary rolled around. Sanders might aspire to be either Eugene McCarthy in 1968, when battalions of college kids went “clean for Gene” in a campaign to run Lyndon Johnson out of the White House and get the United States out of Vietnam, or Pat Buchanan in 1992, calling for a pitchfork rebellion of the peasants against the elitist George H. W. Bush. Both insurgent campaigns helped bring down sitting presidents.

Sanders announced his candidacy in May, in Burlington, and it quickly became evident that he was no longer a marginal figure. From the beginning, his crowds were large and enthusiastic, and his poll numbers improved by the week. By the time I was driving to New Hampshire, a few days before Christmas, to watch him debate Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley (a truly marginal candidate), some polls had him winning the primary by as much as 10 percent of the vote.

He has done this without “evolving” on any of his core issues. He has raised a remarkable amount of money. And he has run what is nearly an insurgent campaign, one that appeals to an angry, populist sentiment that has been building as the economic recovery failed to materialize for people like those who had once held those good factory jobs in the Connecticut River valley. Sanders is decidedly not running for an implicit third Obama term, as Hillary Clinton is.

As he had in Burlington, on the night I went to listen to him last winter, he repeatedly pointed out that the “real” unemployment rate is more than 10 percent; that unemployment among young African Americans is close to 50 percent; that most people feel like the recession never ended, and that many have given up hope things will get better.

The one emotional chord he consistently struck was anger. He has always campaigned in anger, since the futile campaigns of his youth on the Liberty Union ticket, when he would get 1 or 2 percent of the vote running to be governor or for the U.S. Senate.

Almost half a century later, the country has caught up with him at last.

The leaders of his party are not especially happy about it. Hillary Clinton is their candidate. Some of them might have gone over to Joe Biden had he run. But Sanders is too .  .  . well, in an almost absurdly paradoxical way, too much like the other improbable candidate out there running a campaign fueled by anger: too much like Donald Trump.

The point of my drive on a bleak, snowless New England Saturday was to divine, if possible, who would be the candidate of the casualties caused by the collapse of the Connecticut River economy.

I took back roads—pretty much the only kind there are in rural New England—and looked for yard signs in favor of one candidate or another. Real scientific research. Surprisingly (to me, anyway), there were not many signs for any candidate. A few for Trump. Not quite so many for Sanders. Hardly any for Clinton.

I followed the GPS directions to Saint Anselm College outside of Manchester, where the debate would be held. The scene was the usual. Crowds of people holding up placards bearing their candidate’s name. I eyeballed the crowds, and it seemed that those for whom Bernie was the one were all young enough to be his grandchildren. And they had that college kid look. Intense and naïve at the same time.

“Bernie, Bernie,” they shouted. “Bernie, Bernie.”

It was cold and getting colder now that the pale December sun had gone down, the last Saturday before Christmas and almost the shortest day of the year. The Democrats had scheduled their debate so that the fewest people possible would watch. This was widely assumed to be a tactic designed to help Hillary Clinton, and Sanders later said so.

I drove on into town to the hotel where the Sanders campaign had rented out a very large banquet room. I wrote my name on a sign-in sheet and went in. Nobody even asked me for money.

There was a serving line and people were helping themselves to lasagna. Most of the tables were empty. I mingled for a while and found myself talking to, mostly, college kids and more college kids. People would ask where I was from, and when I told them Vermont, they reacted as though they were talking to someone who had been present at the creation. How fortunate I was to have been able to vote for Sanders even before he ran for president!

The conversations were cordial and even friendly. If Sanders was running a campaign based on anger, these kids were his happy warriors. The people left behind when the factories along the Connecticut River closed down were not here on this night.

This is, I think, one of the qualities of socialism that keeps it alive intellectually when it has failed, so often, in the real world. Socialism is equated with idealism. It seeks to correct the unfairness of the world and do so in a very big way. It just isn’t right that Bill Gates (or, in Sanders’s gallery of the guilty, the Koch brothers) should have so much money while so many others live paycheck to paycheck and must count on Social Security when they are too old to work.

Sanders connects emotionally with that sentiment when, in one of those rare moments he gets personal on the stump, he talks about his immigrant parents and the apartment in Brooklyn where he grew up, and where money was always tight. “My mother’s fondest dream,” he says, “was to one day move out of that apartment and into a home of her own. She never realized that dream.”

It isn’t quite that personal among the college kids who fill the banquet room waiting for their candidate to arrive after the debate and give them a victory speech. (They already know he will be the winner.) Their feelings are not connected, directly, to the anger of the people who are refugees, in some sense, from the collapse of the Connecticut River valley. Those are people who, a few days after the debate, President Obama identified, and patronized, when he told NPR,

I didn’t run into any of those people in Sanders HQ.

The debate was, predictably, a nonevent. By New Year’s, what most people remembered about it was that Hillary Clinton had been late returning to the podium after a break and that Donald Trump had gotten nasty about that. Of positions taken and programs proposed .  .  . nothing. This election—and the primaries in advance of it—is not about 10-point programs. It is about that anger and which candidate can stoke it most successfully.

Sanders himself seems to sense this, telling an interviewer a few days after the debate, “Trump’s supporters are working-class people and they’re angry, and they’re angry because they’re working longer hours for lower wages. They’re angry because their jobs have left this country and gone to China or other low-wage countries. They’re angry because they can’t afford to send their kids to college so they can’t retire with dignity.”

Sanders plainly has a feel for that anger. He grasps it almost without thinking. He is also an old and battle-scarred socialist who, while he has won elections, has seen the greater cause fail, time and again. One can only imagine him observing the Thatcher demolition of the socialist apparatus in Great Britain.

When he arrived at campaign headquarters after the debate, the room was packed and pumped up with the energy of a fiery introduction of “Brother Bernie” given by Cornel West, who came on like a revivalist preacher with lines like, “Justice is what love looks like when it goes out in public.” (Not sure what he meant by that, but it sounded good and got the crowd going.)

Sanders couldn’t match that, and the energy level dropped a few points when he stepped to the podium amid chants of “Bernie, Bernie” and launched into the usual stuff about the “billionaire class paying their fair share.”

Then his voice dropped a bit and he said, “We have come a long way.” It was impossible not to agree with that and it was hard not to feel respect for all that he had put into the struggle.

“We started,” he said, “at 3 or 4 percent in the polls.” Now there were polls, he went on, showing him with a 9-point lead over Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire and within single digits in Iowa.

“Brothers and sisters,” he went on, “we are on the verge .  .  . ”

But you sensed that he knew it was a long, long shot. And he said something about how if they did win Iowa and New Hampshire, then “we’ll see” where things would go from there. And there was a note of resignation in his tone, and one sensed that even though he was raising more money than he had ever hoped to, enough that he was actually chartering private jets to campaign events instead of flying coach as he had at the beginning of the campaign, even though he had risen as high as he had in the polls, even though he was regularly doing the Sunday morning talk shows .  .  . that, in spite of all this, it was not to be.

Several young people holding clipboards stopped me, politely, on the way out and asked if I would be willing to “house” a Sanders volunteer during January and the runup to the primary.

“Sorry,” I said, “but I live in Vermont.”

On the other side of the river.

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.