26 Time June 17, 2019
his great achievement. No rival for the
Democratic nomination has anything
quite like it. Even Steve Bannon, the right-
wing populist who ran Donald Trump’s
presidential campaign in 2016, admires
it. Sanders’ agenda is “a hodgepodge of
these half-baked socialist ideas that we’ve
seen haven’t worked,” Bannon told me in
his office on the Upper East Side of Man-
hattan, sitting in front of a painting on
which the words follow your dreams
were written above a monkey sitting on a
Coca-Cola box. But, he said, “Bernie has
done a tremendous job of galvanizing a
segment that hasn’t gone away. I mean,
he has a real movement.”
Building a following fueled by pain and
personal hardship is an especially big ac-
complishment for a candidate who is him-
self so emotionally inaccessible, reluctant
to share more than the barest glimpses of
his own history and inner life. “Not me.
Us.” is his 2020 campaign slogan, and he
means it. “Almost to a tee, what defines a
politician is they love to tell their story,”
Shakir told me. “He has absolutely zero
inclination to do that. He abhors it.”
Sanders seems to believe the public
doesn’t have a right to know him more
intimately— even though there is abun-
dant evidence that the essential char-
acter traits of our Presidents eventually
shape all our lives: Bill Clinton’s appe-
tites; George W. Bush’s certitude; Barack
Obama’s instinct to hire bankers; Donald
Trump’s narcissism. In our first interview,
on a bench in the Des Moines airport, I
asked Sanders a simple question: How did
he first experience the idea that people
blame themselves for systemic problems?
“Well, before we get to me,” he said, “what
the political revolution is about is the mil-
lions of people beginning to stand up.. .”
Many of Sanders’ advisers are eager for
the Senator to get more personal. They
know they have a good story to tell. Sand-
ers is, after all, the son of an immigrant, a
first-generation college student who grew
up in a paycheck-to-paycheck family. He
is a Jew whose relatives were murdered in
the Holocaust, campaigning in an era when
the President of the United States has said
a group of neo-Nazis contained “very
fine people.” He was at the 1963 March
on Washington when Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. confessed his dream. His aversion
to personalizing can be self-defeating.
These days, Sanders is trying to go
there. “As I return here to the area that
I was born, let me say a few personal
words,” he said at the March 2 kickoff of
his campaign in Brooklyn. “As we launch
this campaign for President, you deserve
to know where I came from—because fam-
ily history, obviously, heavily influences
the values that we develop as adults.” He
talked for a few moments about his child-
hood and his parents, looking even graver
than he usually does, staring at his notes
constantly. “I know where I came from!”
he screamed, out of nowhere and with
great feeling. “And that is something I
will never forget.”Bernard sanders grew up in a
cramped, rent-controlled apartment,
No. 2C, in a six-story brick building on
East 26th Street in the Midwood neigh-
borhood of Brooklyn. He was the son of a
paint salesman dad who immigrated from
Poland and a homemaker mom born in
New York. He grew up playing punchball
in the street, attending Hebrew school on
weekends, poking around Chinese and
Jewish eateries on Kings Highway, and
running cross-country at James Madison
High. The family wasn’t poor, but there
wasn’t enough not to worry.
In one of our interviews, Sanders told
me he and his brother Larry slept on liv-
ing-room sofas for much of their youths.
“The first time I had my own room
was, I think, my second or third year at
the University of Chicago,” he said. In
school, young Bernie felt inferior: “Base-
ball gloves other kids got were the bet-
ter gloves, and the sneakers were better
sneakers, and the clothing was better.”
When Sanders thunders, “I know what
it does to a family to live paycheck to
paycheck,” he seems to be excavating his
own pain. I tried to understand what that
looked like.
“It looked like a lot of arguments be-
tween my mom and my dad,” he told me.
“Virtually always over money. And, you
know, my mother wanted more than we
had, and there was always pressure on my
father, and it led to a lot of stress.” He has
written that “almost every major house-
hold purchase—a bed, a couch, drapes—
would be accompanied by a fight be-
tween my parents over whether or not
we could afford it.” In Sanders’ telling,
his father was more content with what
they had because, born into poverty inPoland, he knew worse. It was differ-
ent for Sanders’ mother: “She was an
American. And she said, ‘Let’s do this.
I want a home of our own.’ ” She longed
to leave the rent-controlled apartment
where her children slept on a sofa. She
died at 46, her dreams unrealized.
Jane Sanders was more willing than
Bernie to talk about that death. “He was
19 when his mother died,” she told me.
“And his father died right after that, a
year later, and his brother moved to Eng-
land.” (Given her husband’s lack of en-
thusiasm for discussing his past, Jane
can be forgiven for these details being just
slightly off: he lost his father two years
after his mother. His brother moved to
England after Bernie finished college.)
“He was alone in the world, you know?