We’re tracking the Bernie Sanders story from a Brooklyn boyhood to the Green Mountain socialism that he implanted in Vermont, and then to his two offbeat campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination: in 2016, and again in 2020. Our guest, Dan Chiasson, is the poet who braided the several stories here of a man—and his city, and his state, and his nation—into a big book called Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician.

Dan Chiasson with Chris.

It’s a masterpiece, full of surprises—the best I’ve read on the power game in our country since Theodore White’s Making of the President 1960, a long time ago. 60 years later, Chiasson has written the Bernie journey in Burlington as his own story. Dan Chiasson’s life is an outcome, he writes, of the Bernie years. But what are we going to call Bernie’s own story—a romance that failed, or arguably a tragedy? Maybe it’s a lesson that we were never encouraged to learn about the expansive promise lurking in our own American democracy

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