25
mudgeon. “I think everybody thinks I’m
very somber and very angry and very, very
serious,” Sanders told me in Ohio, “which
is half true.” Faced with these testimonies
of struggle, Sanders doesn’t usually do
what other leaders do in our therapeutic
culture: doesn’t hug people, tell them he
feels their pain, ask follow-up questions
about how the family is doing. What he
does with their pain is analyze it; contex-
tualize it; connect it to laws and agencies
and instances of greed they may not know
about; and offer it back to them as steam-
ing, righteous, evidence-based anger. Peo-
ple tell him of the bill they can’t pay that
keeps them awake, and he tells them that
the chief executive of the local insurance
company makes however-many million.
Throwing percentages at them like little
darts, he gives them the statistics that
might explain their pain, gives them a
thesis to connect the dots of their lives.
He teaches them to look at themselves in
a new way—systemically.
“There’s a lot of individual credit and
blame in a capitalist society,” Jane Sanders
told me. She described Bernie’s message
in the town halls as: “You know, this is
not an individual failure that you’re hav-
ing trouble meeting your bills, or that your
health has suffered because you can’t af-
ford health care. He tries to give them a
context that says, ‘Hey, stop blaming your-
self. Start thinking about how you, in a de-
mocracy, can help change the system.’”
After a few of these town halls, Sand-
ers’ own stoicism makes more sense. He
begins to seem almost a secular priest:
People come to him with stories of de-
spair, and he lifts their pain up into the air,
to a place where it is no longer personal
but something civic. He gives them the
language and information to know it isn’t
their fault. His speeches are like that hug
in Good Will Hunting. It’s not your fault;
it’s not your fault. The system did this. Big
corporations did this. A bought-and-paid-
for government did this. He connects their
pain to the pain of others, and in the pro-
cess that pain is remade, almost transub-
stantiated, into a sweeping case against a
corrupt system. The priest, in this meta-
phor, doesn’t reveal himself because his
job is to float above his own feelings, own
needs, own desire to be liked. His job is to
make space for, make sense of and make
use of your pain.
This covenant with his supporters is
married for 26 years and had three great
kids,” she said. “We have had a good life.
We have made lots of memories.” Then
she told the story of her son. Trevor was
into music and politics, and in 2016 he
canvassed for Sanders. He also had a pill
addiction. He struggled and then he got
help and got sober and was seven months
clean with his own job and apartment
and was proud of himself. Then he felt a
surge of anxiety, the old demons return-
ing, and went to a clinic and got 140 pills
and instructions to go see a counselor
when a vacancy came up. But he didn’t
get in before an accidental overdose killed
him. “We have never been the same,”
French said. Sanders, turning bright
red and somber with emotion, reached
out and gave her a few comforting pats.
The audience began to give their tes-
timonies. A woman spoke of the dearth
of mental health care resources and how
she had lost two of her friends to suicide
and seen others struggle to get help—
“including myself, who I have almost lost
many times.” A man who works at Mc-
Donald’s spoke of scraping by on nine
bucks an hour. A man from the local steel
plant spoke of jobs vanishing to India and
the Czech Republic. And a woman who
grew up on a family farm spoke of crop
prices falling and bankruptcies climbing.
As these stories and emotions poured
in, they landed on the shoulders of a man
who is, depending on whom you ask, a
person of great empathy or a gruff cur-
LIFE AND LOSS
Clockwise from top left:
with his mother and older
brother; his arrest at a pro-
test in Chicago in 1963;
with Jane and their newly
blended family in 1988; at
the University of Chicago
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS; CHICAGO SUN-TIMES © 1963 USED UNDER LICENSE; COURTESY SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS (2)
