6 The New York Review
great American trope, self- invention.
His primary mode is repetition, not
variation. Weaver recalls being on the
road with Sanders in 1986 and hearing
the same speech again and again, word
for word: “By the end of the campaign,
I’d tease him by reciting the speech by
heart as we drove down the road to
the next stop.” His former rival for the
Democratic nomination Pete Buttigieg
stuck the label “inflexible” on San -
ders’s forehead, and it astutely re inforces
a reasonable perception of dogmatic
fixity. Yet if we think about how Ber-
nard Sanders (as he called himself
when he started to run for office in
Vermont) became the more relatable
and commonplace Bernie, we can see
that Bernie is in fact quite a complex
creation. Sanders has managed to
slough off or downplay two previous
identities.
The first of these is the Brooklyn
Jew. Brooklyn remains embedded in
his accent, and he does not deny his
Jewishness. But neither does he em-
phasize either background. It is strik-
ing how little he says in his memoir
about his family, his childhood, his
youth, or his Jewishness. His birth-
place is mentioned by way of con-
trast to rural Vermont: “I was born in
Brooklyn, and did not know one end of
a cow from the other when I arrived in
Vermont twenty- seven years later.” In
his more recent book, Where We Go
from Here: Two Years in the Resistance
(2018), Sanders does briefly evoke
his parents, Eli Sanders and Dorothy
Glassberg, but in an oddly distanced
manner. He quotes his brother, Larry,
nominating him on behalf of Demo-
crats Abroad, at the Democratic Na-
tional Convention in July 2016: “They
did not have easy lives and they died
young.... They loved the New Deal
of Franklin Roosevelt and would be
especially proud that Bernard is re-
newing that vision.” That ellipsis is in
the text of the book. It elides two sen-
tences in Larry’s speech: “They would
be immensely proud of their son and
his accomplishments. They loved him.”
Sanders, in his recounting of Larry’s
words, plays down the emotional and
personal weight of the moment, and
all the familial and ethnic history be-
hind it, and makes it almost purely
ideological—the parents’ pride in and
love for their son is folded directly
into a conjuring of Roosevelt and the
New Deal.Later in the same book, San ders
quotes one of his own Senate speeches
on immigration: “I am a first- generation
American, the son of an immigrant who
came to this country at the age of sev-
enteen without a nickel in his pocket,
a high school dropout who knew no
En glish and had no particular trade.”
Here too there is a kind of elision. In
that speech, Sanders also spoke of “my
wife’s family who came from Ireland.”
Thus Jane O’Meara Sanders’s family
came from, but his came to. What’s
unsaid is where his own father, then
called Eliasz Gitman, actually came
from in 1921: the small Jewish commu-
nity in the village of Słopnice in what
is now southern Poland. (His mother
was born in New York to Jewish immi-
grants from Russia and Poland.) This
community was later wiped out by the
Nazis.At a conference of the liberal Jew-
ish organization J Street, in April 2018,
Sanders referred to himself as “some-
one who as a young man lived in Israel
for a number of months and is very
proud of his Jewish heritage.” Yet his
books say nothing about his Yiddish-
speaking childhood, his Hebrew
schooling, or why he went to Israel.
His experience working on a kibbutz is
framed as a lesson in socialism, not in
ethnic solidarity. It is only in the past
few years that Sanders has spoken pub-
licly of his family’s relationship to the
Holocaust. He visited Słopnice for the
first time in 2013. Weaver, in his cam-
paign memoir, recounts an event at
George Mason University in Fairfax,
Virginia, in October 2015: a Muslim
student asked Sandersabout growing Islamophobia in the
United States. Bernie was moved
by her question. He brought her on
stage and embraced her. And then
he described his commitment to
fighting racism, invoking the kill-
ing of his own family members at
the hands of the Nazi regime. That
kind of personal response was
rare from Bernie. He hates to talk
about himself. It’s only about the
issues.What’s striking here is that Weaver,
who had been at Sanders’s side in
many campaigns over a period of al-
most thirty years, was clearly taken
aback by this eruption of the memory
of the Holocaust into his boss’s public
persona. In an interview with Yahoo
News in September 2019, Sanders said,
“I think the thing that impacted me
most was the Holocaust and... what it
did to my father’s family and to 6 mil-
lion people.”
But this is not something voters
would have known about him for most
of his long political career. Becoming,
in the public eye, Mr. Vermont allowed
Sanders to partake in the great Ameri-
can feast of self- invention. As Weaver
puts it, “Despite his public persona,
Bernie is in many ways private and re-
served. Born in Brooklyn, he has none-
theless internalized a Yankee ethos.”
His distinctive accent meant that San-
ders could never entirely pass as a Yan-
kee, but he chose not to be identified
with his own heritage. That is of course
an entirely valid choice, and it chimes
with Sanders’s insistence on social
class, rather than ethnicity, as the es-
sential point of difference in America.
But it surely took a great effort of will
to carry it off for so long—and it points
to the deeply self- conscious creation of
a public character that belies any no-
tion of Sanders as “inflexible.”Nor is Jewishness the only identity
that Sanders managed to muffle. After
he spent four years at the University of
Chicago, from which he graduated with
a BA in political science in 1964, San-
ders joined the influx of hippies to Ver-
mont, seeking an alternative lifestyle.
He wasn’t all that much of a hippie. He
didn’t live in a commune. He didn’t do
drugs, except for marijuana. During his
second campaign, in the gubernatorial
election of 1972, he recorded an en-
counter with a delegate to the Vermont
Labor Council: “‘Where is your beard?
I thought you had a beard.’ I’ve never
had a beard in my life but I guess radi-
cals are supposed to.”He may have lacked the beard, but
intellectually Sanders was very much
a child of the 1960s counterculture,
marked above all by the belief that
psycho sexual repression is the root of
all evil. In the runup to the 2016 prima-
ries, there was an awkward moment for
Sanders when Mother Jones uncovered
an essay he had written in the Ver mont
Freeman in February 1972 that begins:A man goes home and mastur-
bates his typical fantasy. A woman
on her knees, a woman tied up, a
woman abused. A woman enjoys
intercourse with her man—as she
fantasizes being raped by 3 men
simultaneously. The man and
woman get dressed up on Sun-
day—and go to Church, or maybe
to their “revolutionary” political
meeting.The essay is in fact an awkward but
well- meant attempt to dramatize the
psychologically distorting effects of
gender stereotypes. Much more out-
rageous—because less knowingly pro-
vocative—is another essay from the
same source. Writing in the Ver mont
Freeman in December 1969, San ders
tried to show that women who got breast
and cervical cancer did so because they
were sexually repressed. He quoted ex-
tensively from Wilhelm Reich’s 1948
book, The Cancer Biopathy, which was,
he wrote, “very definite about the link
between emotional and sexual health,
and cancer.” Sanders wrote approv-
ingly of Reich’s bogus link between
the disease and “disturbances in the
discharge of sexual energy.... Experi-
enced gynecologists are well aware that
such a connection exists.”
In his own voice, Sanders then went
on to warn his readers:It means, very bluntly, that the
manner in which you bring up your
daughter with regard to sexual at-
titudes may very well determine
whether or not she will develop
breast cancer, among other things.In the same article, and for the same
reasons, Sanders implied that com-
pulsory education should be abolished
because it represses children’s natural
urges. (The pioneer of nonrepressive
child- rearing, Dr. Benjamin Spock,
who was then running for president,
campaigned with Sanders in Vermont
in 1972.)
One reason to regret how unlikely
a contest between Trump and San-
ders now seems is that we will not get
to savor the irony that it would be the
Republican candidate, enthusiasti-
cally supported by white evangelical
Christians, who still embodies this
let- it- all- hang- out doctrine of the need
to discharge sexual energy without re-
straint. Trump’s rampaging id is the
grotesque zombie afterlife of the coun-
tercultural creed that Sanders once
believed in so passionately. But the
point is that Sanders stopped believing
in it, or at least Bernie the aspirant of-
ficeholder did. He created, indeed, its
precise opposite: a political persona
that eschewed the personal altogether
and that made a virtue of disciplined
Yankee tightfistedness. The enemy of
repression in all its forms successfully
repressed himself.
This is crucial to the creation of
Bernie the politician. In the extracts
from his campaign diary, published inRecycling is a defeat
Certainly, you can dismantle your
steel/aluminium/wood shelving
system into its component parts
for recycling. But why would you,
when you can repair it, rearrange it –
and just keep reusing it?