Bernie Sanders sweeps into his state office in Burlington, Vermont, itching to get on with our interview. When I try to break the ice by asking the US senator how he is, he replies gruffly, “Good,” and motions with his outstretched hand for our conversation to begin.
It’s a Saturday, and Sanders is dressed in his casual weekend uniform of cream chinos, blue shirt and sweater, no tie. I’d been hoping the day would be so cold and crisp in Burlington, the idyllic college town which has been his home since 1968, that he’d be wearing the mittens captured in a cult photo of Sanders huddled against biting winds at Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration. The ones that launched a quadrillion memes and sent the US senator hurtling into the cyber stratosphere. “I couldn’t believe it, all I was doing was trying to keep warm!” he says, before breaking the bad news. Not only is he not wearing the mittens, “I don’t even know where they are.”
Sanders always seems to be in a hurry. Like Alice’s white rabbit, he’s forever racing against the clock in his battle with the billionaires and corporate interests. He is the most unlikely harbinger of change: a politician who drove young voters wild with “Berniemania” in 2016, when he was already 74; a man with none of the usual TV good looks and smooth talking attached to presidential candidates, but one who, by being absolutely himself, still turned out to be hugely charismatic.
In the past decade, he’s done more than almost anyone to change the political lens in the US, bringing income inequality, poverty and what he calls “uber-capitalism” into focus. And yet before that he was a virtual unknown.
In his 20s and 30s, Sanders worked lean years as a carpenter and freelance writer, alongside campaigning for the local socialist party, Liberty Union. It took him 10 years to learn how to win an election, which he did in 1981, aged 39, by all of 10 votes, to become Burlington’s mayor, before taking Vermont’s only congressional seat a decade later.
He remained for the next quarter of a century largely in the shadows, a rare overtly leftwing voice in Congress, diligently ploughing his self-styled democratic socialist furrow. And then in 2016, he suddenly burst on to the national stage in his challenge against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, attracting an army of young voters chanting: “Feel the Bern”.
Eight years on, he’s still in a rush, but he comes across as more sombre now, more edgily reflective. He imbues that mood in an afterword to the new paperback edition of his book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, in which he writes that though he would like to be optimistic about the future, he cannot. He invokes his seven grandchildren, and laments that they will inherit a world that faces “more urgent and undeniable crises than at any time in modern history”.
I ask him to spell that out. “We’re looking at a series of extraordinary crises. Climate: it’s up in the air whether the world community will make the cuts in carbon emissions to provide a habitable planet for our grandchildren. The growth of oligarchy: a small number of extremely wealthy people control the economic and political life of billions. Democracy: under severe threat from those capitalising on people’s fears.”
Not long ago, Sanders used to be ridiculed for such disquieting rhetoric; he was denounced as a firebrand, a rabble-rouser. No one’s laughing at him now. Two wars, a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza, vast swathes of North America literally burning, inequality between rich and poor at mind-sizzling levels. As the New Yorker memorably noted, “reality has endorsed Bernie Sanders”.
Is that how it seems to him, that all his fears are coming home to roost? “It’s not a great feeling,” he says. “I’m extremely nervous about what is coming.”
Ah yes. Donald Trump.
Sanders has long had the measure of Trump. In 2016, when Trump said, “I alone can fix it,” as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination, Sanders commented: “Is this guy running for president or dictator?” Two months before the 2020 election, he predicted that a defeated Trump might not go peaceably – another portent that was dramatically fulfilled.
Now, as the Iowa caucus kicks off the 2024 primary season on Monday, Sanders is at it again. Except this time, he says, the stakes are much higher.
Even for a politician who doesn’t mince his words, his assessment of a Trump victory in November is sobering. “It will be the end of democracy, functional democracy.”
It may not happen on day one, he says. Trump wouldn’t be as obvious as to abolish elections. But he would steadily weaken democracy, making it harder for young people and people of colour to vote, enervating political opposition, whipping up anger against minorities and immigrants.
A second Trump presidency would be much more extreme than the first. “He’s made that clear,” says Sanders. “There’s a lot of personal bitterness, he’s a bitter man, having gone through four indictments, humiliated, he’s going to take it out on his enemies. We’ve got to explain to the American people what that means to them – what the collapse of American democracy will mean to all of us.”
He doesn’t ascribe the rise of Trump solely to a lumpen mass of redneck working-class Americans, deplorables to borrow a phrase. “I do not believe that all of Trump’s supporters are racist or sexist or homophobes. I think what’s going on in this country is a belief that the government is failing ordinary Americans.”
* * *
Sanders’ office sits in the main street of Burlington and is, like the man, minimalist and spare. There are posters from different stages in his political life, including an inevitable “Feel the Bern” placard and a photograph from Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, which mayor Sanders twinned Burlington with during Ronald Reagan’s Contra war against the leftwing Sandinistas. A third wall-hanging says: “In recognition of your support for fish hatcheries in the Lake Champlain Basin”.
He lives in a modest house a little way from the centre of town, with Jane O’Meara Sanders, whom he married in 1988 and to whom he dedicates It’s OK to Be Angry, calling her his “wife, co-worker and best buddy”. He also dedicates the book to his brother, Larry Sanders, who lives in Oxford, England, and is a former Green party councillor, and to his four children – one by his first wife, Deborah Shiling Messing, and three stepchildren, who are Jane’s but whom he considers his own – as well as to those seven grandchildren.
He has built his political persona around reciting startling and infuriating statistics, and my encounter with him is no exception. With his index finger jabbing as though pointing to an invisible crowd, he tells me that before the pandemic three multibillionaires (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett) owned more between them than the combined wealth of the 160 million Americans who make up the bottom half of society. “Three people! That’s unbelievable! Incredible! Wages, accounting for inflation, are lower today for working people than they were 50 years ago. Think about that! My grandchildren will have a lower standard of living than my generation.”
In this scheme of things, Trump is merely doing what demagogues are doing the world over – capitalising on the anxieties and struggles of the people. “Trump comes along and says, ‘I’ll be your strong guy, I’ll deal with all your anxieties – immigration, transgender issues, race – I’ll be there for you.’”
Uncomfortably for his colleagues in Congress, Sanders reserves much of his sharpest criticism for the Democratic party. Officially, he has sat as an independent since entering the House of Representatives in 1991, but he votes as a Democrat in Congress and ran both his presidential campaigns as one. Yet he denounces the party establishment as a “consultant-driven, ad-producing election machine”.
It is “beyond pathetic”, he writes in the book, that a phoney corporate hack like Trump should be able to present himself as the “champion of the working classes”, while the Democratic party stands back and cedes territory to him. He caricatures the Democratic promise to voters as, “We’re pretty bad, but Republicans are worse”, and warns that is simply not good enough.
Which brings us to Biden.
Sanders describes Biden, whom he has known since he was elected to the Senate in 2007, as a likable and decent man. But he has a clear message for the sitting president: step up to the plate or the future of the United States, of the world, is in peril. “The challenge we face is to be able to show people that government in a democratic society can address their very serious needs. If we do that, we defeat Trump. If we do not, then we are the Weimar republic of the early 1930s.”
Sanders says he’s in touch with the White House, exhorting them to be more vocal in their appeals to working Americans. “He has got to say, in my view, that if he is re-elected, within two months he will bring about the sweeping changes the working class of this country desperately need.”
So are they listening? “As is always the case, not as strongly as I would like.”
* * *
You can see why Sanders was enticed to move to Burlington as a 27-year-old, having been brought up in a Brooklyn tenement. The town, which is famous as the birthplace of Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream, is flanked by Lake Champlain on one side and the Green mountains on the other, its steeples and cobbled streets dusted with snow. It feels like an oasis of peace in a very disturbed world.
Until it doesn’t.
On 25 November, three 20-year-old Palestinian-American students, best friends from Ramallah in the West Bank who had come to the US to pursue a safe university education, were shot in a Burlington street by a hate-filled stranger. One of the men, Hisham Awartani, is paralysed from the chest down.
The incident has left Sanders shaken. In a speech to the Senate five days after the shooting, he stepped out of the limited emotional range he usually displays in public – anger, outrage, disgust – and sounded palpably upset.
He sounds upset now. “Less than a mile away from where we are right now, three really bright young people were walking down the street, talking some Arabic. Words fail to describe the ugliness and the horror of this, in this city.”
The Israel-Hamas war that erupted on 7 October with the Hamas massacre has troubled Sanders like few other events in his 40 years in politics. “It’s on my mind all of the time,” he says. “This is something I literally dream about.”
That’s not surprising, given that he is both one of the most prominent Jews in the United States and a politician who puts human rights front and centre. And this is profoundly personal for him.
During his 2020 presidential campaign he told a CNN town hall that there were two main factors behind his worldview. One was growing up in a cash-strapped Brooklyn family supported by his father’s job as a paint salesman. The other was being Jewish.
Sanders recalls the visceral way he learned as a young child about the Holocaust. He lifts up the sleeve of his left arm and rubs his skin as he tells me: “I remember going down a few blocks to the shopping area, and there were people working in the markets, and they had their concentration camp numbers tattooed on their arms.”
His father, Elias Ben Yehuda Sanders, emigrated from Poland to the US in 1921. He was 17 and penniless, and fleeing antisemitic pogroms. Most of that side of Sanders’ family remained in Poland and were almost entirely wiped out by the Nazis.
A few years ago, Sanders went with his brother, Larry, to Słopnice, the Polish village where their father had been raised. “There was a mound, and it was a mass grave of people slaughtered in the town,” he says. “So racism, wiping out people because of a different religion, that’s stayed with me my whole life.”
His deep personal understanding of the horrors human beings can inflict on each other helps explain the tightrope Sanders has been walking over the war. He has always stood firmly beside Israel as a safe haven for Jews, and has also spoken up over many years for the right of the Palestinians to live in peace. It’s a classic two-state position.
That has translated in the current crisis as Sanders steadfastly defending the right of Israel to go after Hamas, which he calls a “disgusting terrorist organisation”. At the same time, he has become steadily more damning of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli military’s “mass atrocity” in Gaza.
He has also grown increasingly disapproving of Biden’s staunch support for the Israeli war effort, condemning what he calls US complicity in “destroying the lives of innocent men, women and children in Gaza”. He is trying to block billions of dollars of extra US military aid to Israel, and is demanding a Senate investigation into how US arms are used in Gaza.
I ask him whether he feels a special distress watching a country he has always supported as a post-Holocaust shelter for Jews inflict such indiscriminate bombing on others. “The answer is yes. If there are any people that have suffered, it’s Jewish people. And they should not be imposing that type of suffering on Palestinian children – killing children is not the solution.”
To say the dual position Sanders is attempting to hold is uncomfortable would be a gross understatement. He has come under fire from pro-Israeli Democrats and Republicans who accuse him of betraying America’s great ally by failing to offer Netanyahu unconditional support.
On his own progressive side, his refusal to countenance a permanent ceasefire, which he fears would merely embolden Hamas to renew its attacks with the aim of destroying Israel, has also landed him in hot water. More than 400 of his former staffers signed an open letter imploring him to shift his position; one of them, his 2020 campaign spokesperson, Briahna Joy Gray, tweeted “biggest political disappointment of our generation” in response to an interview in which Sanders explained his view.
There has also been fallout among young Americans, whom Sanders has long cultivated as the sweet spot of his base. Young voters, drawn towards his no-nonsense takedown of the ultra-rich, are at the core of his 15.2 million following on X, formerly known as Twitter. Yet amid the Gaza crisis, polls show a stark generational divide, with young, progressive Americans coalescing around demands for a permanent ceasefire. I ask him, does he fear that his movement of youthful supporters could be starting to splinter?
He clearly doesn’t want to go there. “I think, at the end of the day, we’ll be all right,” is all he’ll say.
Is Sanders swimming against the tide of an increasingly polarised and social-media-driven world?
“I’m trying to do my best,” he concedes, a little mournfully, “within the complexities.”
* * *
When Sanders went up against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary, those who were paying attention could feel the tectonic plates of US politics shifting. An insurgent campaign focused around inequality and corporate greed was giving a figurehead of the Democratic establishment a run for her money.
Not that there were many paying attention. Sanders clearly still feels riled by how marginalised he was in the 2016 race. While his gargantuan crowds chanted, “Feel the Bern”, pundits derided the “free stuff” he promoted, such as decent housing and healthcare for all, with the New York Times chiding that it would add $3tn a year to government spending.
Many media outlets largely ignored him. Even those dismissive of him had to recognise that he had become a phenomenon. By the end of the primaries he had won 22 states and more than 13m votes. Though he lost, he gained a universe: an army of young, progressive, impassioned Americans fluent in Bernie-ese.
Oh, and he also acquired a picture-perfect impersonation of himself on Saturday Night Live, courtesy of Larry David. The Curb Your Enthusiasm star was not only the spitting image of his subject, but he got Bernie’s arms-flailing stump speech and legendary crotchetiness to a T, and as a fellow Brooklyn Jew spoke his language (“yuuuge”). The two men appeared together on SNL just before the 2016 New Hampshire primary, and a few months later were revealed by genealogists to be distant cousins.
The shorthand often used for the uprising Sanders catalysed is the Squad, the team of progressive Congress members around Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that emerged in the wake of 2016. Sanders writes in his book that the Squad were a “breath of fresh air”, but to me he insists the sea change went even deeper. “When I was elected to the House in 1990, there were five members of the progressive caucus. Today, there are well over 100. It is far more powerful and progressive than back then.”
Could there one day soon be a President AOC, not just a female president, but a progressive one?
Sanders squirms a little, saying he doesn’t want to play the name game. But then he says: “Absolutely. Absolutely. The possibility exists, of course.”
* * *
For all his talk of revolution, for all his tax-the-rich bills and declarations of radical populism, a large part of the Sanders creed is nothing more nor less than an appeal for the basic fundamentals of life – health, housing, a living wage, education – that are taken for granted by all other developed nations. He devotes an entire section of It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism to Finland, which is hardly a hotbed of revolution.
Look at it that way, and it’s not Bernie who is the extreme radical, it’s the far-right march of the Republican party. Which brings us back to Biden, the threat of Trump, and the ominous 10 months ahead.
Sanders has plenty of nice things to say about Biden. In the book he praises the president’s 2020 campaign platform, saying that if it had all been put into effect, he would have been the most progressive president since Franklin D Roosevelt. (The compliment is in part self-serving – Sanders credits himself with having pushed Biden further to the left in the run-up to the election.) He also applauds Biden’s decision to join a picket line during the recent auto workers strike, the first sitting president in history to do so.
But as we enter election year, he warns that there is much more to be done. “Look, the president has put a historic amount of money into transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels, but the fossil fuel industry keeps on its merry way, and we’re not stopping them. The president is making efforts to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry, but it’s nowhere near enough. He tried to lower student debt; it was reversed by the supreme court.”
Sanders suddenly leans towards me and gives me a blast of rhetoric that is almost overpowering.
“The president has got to acknowledge the enormous crises facing people’s lives. You can’t fool them. If I say to you all the great things I’ve done for you, you will come back and say, ‘Well, I can’t afford healthcare, I can’t send my kid to college.’ Americans are feeling anxious right now, and we’ve got to address that.”
Is there a danger many young Americans and voters of colour who formed a critical part of the coalition that elected Biden – and defeated Trump – in 2020 will look at the rematch of the same two candidates in November, decide they aren’t inspired by either, and stay at home?
“There’s no question. The polling is clear. Given the choice between Biden and Trump, there are a lot of people saying, ‘Thank you, but no thank you.’”
It’s a strikingly different analysis from that offered by much of the commentariat, which has lasered in on Biden’s age. Which is interesting, because Sanders, at 82, is a year older than the president yet rarely gets labelled as old. If anything, he comes across as ageless – as crotchety and energetic as he’s ever been.
I ask what he thinks of the focus on Biden’s age, remarking that it’s not just Biden. Mitch McConnell, Republican leader in the Senate, is the same age as Biden at 81, and has caused some alarm by freezing mid-speech. Is it time to drop to a younger cadre of political leaders?
“It’s a nice phrase, a new generation of leadership, and yes most of the strongest progressives are young people. But you’ve got young Republicans who are among the most rightwing people in the country. So it’s not age, it’s what the individual stands for.”
And what about him? On one level, with the world going up in smoke, his brand of urgent analysis is needed more than ever today. But he’s been at it a long time, he had a heart attack during the 2020 campaign, and must be feeling the weight of it all.
He’s surprisingly candid. “I am tired. I’ve been doing this since I was elected mayor of this city in 1981. What I see in Washington is so dishonest. There’s no debate on the crumbling healthcare system, no debate on climate, no debate on wealth inequality. None! That’s distressing, and what we’re seeing in the world is distressing, and being 82 … this is painful stuff.”
Just when I think Sanders might be about to announce his retirement, he sits back, rallies himself, and says: “Let’s get back to my grandchildren and the future generation. It’s in my DNA, it’s the way I look at the world. You’ve got to stand up and do the best you can. We don’t have the moral right to simply walk away.”
“You keep going,” I suggest.
“You gotta keep going.”
• It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism by Bernie Sanders (Penguin Books Ltd, £10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
