Bernie for Burlington

The early days and inexorable rise of the young Bernie Sanders, the one-of-a-kind visionary who changed American politics forever, told by a son of the People’s Republic of Burlington, Vermont

In this symphonic origin story of an era-defining politician, Dan Chiasson, a Burlington native who had a ringside seat to Bernie Sanders’s development, reconstructs the rise of this American icon. With in-depth reporting and remarkable remembered scenes, he tracks a faint political signal that traveled from the Vermont communes, hard-luck neighborhoods, traditional businesses, and county fairs to the Town Meetings and ballot boxes of his home state, and finally to Washington D.C., to transform our national political landscape.

Sanders, insisting on a socialist platform that hasn’t changed to this day, managed to build a coalition in a world of disparate types: the conservative French-Canadian Catholics whose great grandparents had worked in the mills (Dan’s own); the puppeteers and hippies and NYC transplants looking for land and “authenticity” in Vermont; the developers involved in the era’s urban-renewal schemes; the corrupt old-school Dems at their table in the local dive; and even Ben and Jerry who became Ben and Jerry’s right there in town. Bernie captivated them all, running on the slogan “Burlington is not for sale,” to become the modern era’s first socialist mayor, one who got the streets paved but also boasted a foreign policy and a bullhorn to speak directly to Ronald Reagan.

In the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground and the documentary films of Frederick Wiseman, this people’s epic shows us an American city transformed one diner coffee, one neighborhood door-knock at a time, even as the analog era wanes and a new digital politics appears on the horizon. Full of Sanders himself, reflecting and raging, hitting his themes, forging alliances with all comers, Bernie for Burlington is a mesmerizing portrait of a politician, a place, and a movement that would change America.

Author Biography

DAN CHIASSON is the author of five books of poetry, including Bicentennial (2014) and The Math Campers (2020), and a book of literary criticism. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Chiasson is the Lorraine Chao Wang Professor of English and chair of the English Department at Wellesley College.