Bernie for Burlington is a painstakingly detailed and deeply researched account of the eight years Sanders was mayor of Burlington and the years and circumstances leading up to his political ascent. The author was the ripe age of nine when Sanders first took his seat in Burlington’s city hall and in every sense of the word came of age during what, according to his book, seems to have been a thrilling time to be a Burlingtonian. With Reaganite neoliberalism sweeping through the nation, the Vermont city took a distinctly different path in electing a democratic socialist — and was forever changed by this decision, with some progressive programs begun under Sanders still in place today.
More than a memoir, the book reads like a lyrical love letter to the Burlington that made Chiasson, Sanders, and a whole memorable cast of characters the democratic socialists they are now. It is also a much-needed account of what can happen when a city is run by people who believe, as Sanders said in one of his final speeches as mayor, “that men, women, and children can come together in relationships that are not based on greed, exploitation, and domination — but on love, cooperation, and mutual respect.”
Natasha Hakimi Zapata
An important part of the structure of the book is that we’re getting the story from a “son of Burlington.” You were born there, grew up there, lived through the Bernie mayoral years and afterward, and maintain close ties there. You even told Bernie himself that you are a product of the Burlington he helped shape. What did a socialist, or perhaps more aptly, progressive Burlington feel and look like?
Dan Chiasson
The city is small, around 38,000, then and now, and very intelligibly laid out, almost as though to indicate the main functions and tensions of an American city. In fact, it was studied in the 1930s by an anthropologist as something of a model municipality, almost a kind of diorama of a city.
There is a steep hill rising from Lake Champlain; halfway up, city hall sits on a broad pedestrian mall, where people gather to shop and eat and dance and argue and demonstrate and march. At the top of the hill, somewhat apart and supercilious, is the University of Vermont, which looks out across the lake on one side, toward the Adirondacks, and toward the Green Mountains on the other.
The areas closest to the lake had been cleared in the ’50s for urban renewal. The immigrant families and communities were scrambled, and federal dollars began to flood the city. It had been a small, old-fashioned city, almost like a Richard Scarry–type city with cops and firefighters and postmen and parades, but corruption and poverty had become endemic. Meanwhile, throughout the ’70s, hippies had begun to move in from Arcadia and found clinics and daycares and the like. This is the stage setting for Bernie’s victory in 1981.