“FREE-RANGE HAIR AND SANDALS ....” –
SANDERS PERSONALLY (WARTS AND ALL) MOTHER JONES 2015
COMPILATION AND COMMENTARY BY LUCY WARNER
JULY 12, 2017


THIS MOTHER JONES ARTICLE ON SANDERS IS FUNNY, EXCITING, AND SHOWS SANDERS’ BEST PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS – HIS FEARLESSNESS, HIS IDEALISM, HIS IRREPRESSIBLE ENTHUSIASM AND HUMOR, AND THAT LITTLE TOUCH OF HUMILITY THAT SEPARATES HIM FROM DONALD TRUMP. LIKE TRUMP, HE HAS A STRONG AND SOMETIMES FIERY SPEAKING STYLE, BUT HE NEVER INCITES VIOLENCE. HIS POWER IS FROM THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE PERSONALITY POLES. HE IS BENIGN AND CARES ABOUT THE NEEDS OF PEOPLE, IS QUITE ELOQUENT AND AN ACTIVIST. I CAN TELL THAT THIS WRITER, TIM MURPHY, LIKES HIM QUITE A BIT, BECAUSE EVEN AFTER SAYING SOME LESS THAN SLAVISHLY ADMIRING THINGS ABOUT HIM, HE PAYS HOMAGE TO HIS POTENTIAL FOR “CHANGING POLITICS FOR GOOD.” I CAN ONLY HOPE THAT THE PREDICTION WILL BECOME TRUTH.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/09/bernie-sanders-president-change-politics/
Here’s How Bernie Sanders May Be Changing Politics for Good
Inside the wild-haired socialist’s unlikely rise.
TIM MURPHY SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015 ISSUE

Sometime in the late 1970s, after he’d divorced his college sweetheart, had a kid with another woman, lost four statewide elections, and been evicted from his home on Maple Street in Burlington, Vermont, Bernie Sanders moved in with a friend named Richard Sugarman. Sanders, a restless political activist and armchair psychologist with a penchant for arguing his theories late into the night, found a sounding board in the young scholar, who taught philosophy at the nearby University of Vermont. At the time, Sanders was struggling to square his revolutionary zeal with his overwhelming rejection at the polls—and this was reflected in a regular ritual. Many mornings, Sanders greeted his roommate with a simple statement: “We’re not crazy.”

“I’d say, ‘Bernard, maybe the first thing you should say is “Good morning” or something,'” Sugarman recalls. “But he’d say, ‘We’re. Not. Crazy.'”

Life under Bernie

What Would Life Under President Sanders Actually Look Like?

Sanders eventually got a place of his own, found his way, and in 1981 was elected mayor of Burlington, the state’s largest city—the start of an improbable political career that led him to Congress, and soon, he hopes, the White House. In May, after more than three decades as an independent socialist, the septuagenarian senator launched his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in the Vermont city where this long, strange trip began.

The 2016 election is a homecoming for Sanders in another sense. He’s returning to the role he embraced during his early years in politics—that of the long shot. In Hillary Clinton, with her lengthy CV, vast donor network, and unmatched name recognition, he could hardly have picked a tougher target. But those same qualities also position Sanders, a lifelong critic of war hawks, Wall Street, and the ruling class, to exploit the angst among progressives who spent much of the last year pining for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to run instead.

Sanders wants to break up the biggest banks, double the minimum wage, and put the entire country on Medicare.

And his message has been resonating. He’s drawn massive crowds nearly everywhere he’s traveled. In August, 28,000 people showed up to see him speak at an arena in Madison, Wisconsin. Two recent polls have put him ahead of Clinton in New Hampshire. Bernie-mentum—as the pundit class has dubbed the candidate’s surging appeal—has the Clinton camp worried that Sanders defeat her in Iowa, according to the New York Times. Indeed, a September poll showed Sanders edging out Clinton by 10 points there.

Bernie's campaign manager

Meet the Comic Book King Running Bernie Sanders’ Campaign

Much of the enthusiasm for his candidacy is coming from college students and true believers who think the party establishment has been compromised. That was true of Barack Obama. It was also true of Ron Paul. Sanders’ success will hinge on how much he can broaden his base beyond that comfort zone. Already he’s become a frequent target of Black Lives Matter activists, who have argued that his ambitious platform for taking on economic inequality does not do enough to address the structural racism—in criminal justice, housing, and beyond—that perpetuates the prosperity gap. (Not long after a Seattle event was shut down by protestors, Sanders did unveil a racial justice platform.) If Sanders continues to perform as well as the polls suggest and he maintains his momentum through the upcoming debates, he might just inch the entire party, if not the country, just a few steps closer to Norway.

Which, if you think about it, does sound kind of crazy. But if Sanders had the audacity to think he might stay in the ring long enough to pull together a genuine movement, it might be because he’s done it before. Sanders’ early years offer a blueprint for how a self-described socialist can, with the right breaks and enough persistence, make it in electoral politics. He didn’t emerge into a national political force overnight. He almost never made it at all. In Vermont he discovered it wasn’t enough to hold lofty ideas and wait for the revolution; he had to learn how to play the political game.

Born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, Bernie Sanders grew up in a working-class family. His father, a Polish immigrant whose family largely perished in the Holocaust, sold paint; his mother died when he was 18. When Sanders was a teen, his older brother, Larry—now an aspiring progressive politician in the United Kingdom—introduced him to Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. By the time Sanders graduated from high school, where he ran for class president (and lost) on the promise of granting scholarships to Korean refugees, his political course was set.

Bernie and protest

Sanders was fined $25 for “resisting arrest” during a demonstration against segregation in Chicago’s public schools. Chicago Tribune

The University of Chicago campus Sanders arrived on in the fall of 1961, after one year at Brooklyn College, would never be confused with Berkeley circa 1969, but in spite of its stodgy reputation it was fertile ground for liberal activists. Future Weather Underground cofounder Bernardine Dohrn was a year ahead of Sanders; Malcolm X came to campus to speak during his sophomore year.

Sanders’ roommate in Chamberlin House, a Gothic building that evokes comparisons to Hogwarts, was a student named David Reiter, a disciple of the conservative economics professor Milton Friedman. They entered into fierce debates over socialism, but Sanders could never let the argument rest. “I went to bed, but I have a vivid memory of him just sitting there, shaking his head sadly,” Reiter says. “He was so sad that I just couldn’t understand what was wrong with the free market. It was more in sorrow than in anger.”

During Sanders’ first year in Chicago, a campus scandal erupted when an interracial group of students uncovered systematic housing discrimination in university-owned apartment buildings. Apartments that were open to white students mysteriously went off the market when black students came to inquire, and then just as quickly opened up again. Sanders, a chapter leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, the civil rights group that organized the Freedom Rides, helped to launch a sit-in at the office of the university’s president, aimed at ending the practice. After 15 days, CORE worked out a compromise with the administration—it would vacate the premises if the university included representatives from CORE in a new commission to study the housing issue. It was the first of many begrudging deals with the establishment he was fighting against. (When the journalist Rick Perlstein brought up the subject of CORE’s compromise on the housing issue in a recent interview, the senator issued “a weary sigh.”) Off campus, Sanders led a picket of a segregated restaurant, attended the 1963 March on Washington, and was arrested for protesting outside a segregated school.

Bernie's manifesto

Read 21-Year-Old Bernie Sanders’ Manifesto on Sexual Freedom

He was, by his own admission, “not a good student.” Instead of studying for his political science classes, he preferred spending long hours pursuing his own interests—the Spanish Civil War, political philosophers including Marx and John Stuart Mill, and psychologists such as Freud and his disciple, Wilhelm Reich—and generally raising hell. A 2,000-word manifesto he penned for the student newspaper, attacking the administration’s strict sex-segregated housing guidelines as “fornication of the Bible and Ann Landers,” triggered a campus debate on free love that made national news. That crusade was classic Sanders: firm in his beliefs, fiery in his rhetoric, and unafraid of confrontation. It also failed. In that sense, it was an appropriate lesson for a young activist who would go on to spend most of his life as an outsider: Change takes time.

He attacked the administration’s strict sex-segregated housing guidelines as “fornication of the Bible and Ann Landers,” triggering a campus debate on free love that made national news.

Sanders’ independent streak was evident in his choice of student groups. He joined the Young People’s Socialist League (“Yipsel”), an organization that advocated the “social ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution” but was explicitly anti-communist. This put the group in an awkward position—too far left for the Democrats, too far right for the true radicals. Sanders, like many Yipsel members, also became involved in the pro-disarmament Student Peace Union, which shared the organization’s alienation from Cold War politics. “They had a kind of stern independence,” says Todd Gitlin, a Columbia University sociologist who was an early leader in Students for a Democratic Society, another Yipsel-influenced group. “They regarded themselves as ‘third campers’—they didn’t want to be identified with either the West or the Soviet bloc, and in that way they were at odds with the remnants of the Communist Party and fellow travelers.” And unlike many contemporary groups, activists of Sanders’ ilk believed the path to revolution passed through traditional institutions. “There was a feeling about them that they were sort of pros, they took politics seriously,” Gitlin says. “They were the anti-utopians. They were impatient about fancy as-if thinking and sort of hard-headed about who to reach.”

Sanders and his fellow 1960s radicals did have one thing in common, though. They all seemed to want to move to Vermont.

Fresh from a stint on an Israeli kibbutz, Sanders arrived in Vermont in 1964 on the crest of a wave. The state’s population jumped 31 percent between 1960 and 1980, due largely to an infusion of more than 30,000 hippies. It was a retreat, in the most literal sense, from the clashes over the Vietnam War and civil rights that had defined their college years. But there was a political subtext to the move as well. A seminal essay authored by two Yale Law School students called the “Jamestown Seventy” called for the “migration of large numbers of people to a single state for the express purpose of effecting a peaceful political takeover of that state through the elective process.” Sanders and his first wife bought 85 acres outside of Montpelier for $2,500. The only building on the property was an old maple-sugar shack without electricity or running water that Sanders converted into a cabin.

Free-range hair and sandals notwithstanding, Sanders never quite fit the mold of the back-to-the-landers he joined. “I don’t think Bernie was particularly into growing vegetables,” one friend put it. Nor was he much into smoking them. “He described himself once in my hearing as ‘the only person who did not get high in the ’60s,'” recalls Greg Guma, a writer and activist who moved in the same circles as Sanders. “He didn’t even like rock music. He likes country music.” (Sanders recently revealed that he has smoked marijuana twice.) “He’s not a hippie, never was a hippie,” Sugarman says. “But he was always a little bit on the suburbs of society.”

What Sanders shared with the young radicals and hippies flocking to Vermont was a smoldering idealism, but only a fuzzy sense of how to act on it. Sanders bounced between Vermont and New York City, where he worked at a psychiatric hospital and studied at the New School for Social Research. After his marriage broke up in the late 1960s, he moved to an A-frame farmhouse outside Stannard, a tiny Vermont hamlet with no paved roads in the buckle of the commune belt. He dabbled in carpentry and tried to get by as a freelance journalist for alternative newspapers and regional publications, contributing interviews, political screeds, and, one time, a stream-of-consciousness essay on the nature of male-female sexual dynamics. “A woman enjoys intercourse with her man—as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously,” Sanders wrote in one eyebrow-raising passage that recently caused controversy for his presidential campaign after Mother Jones reported on the essay.

Bernie Vermont Freeman

This 1972 Sanders essay, published in an alternative newspaper called the Vermont Freeman, reflected his affinity for Sigmund Freud. Vermont Freeman

Sanders’ politics were deeply influenced by what he learned about human psychology. Leaning heavily on the work of Reich*, he wrote an essay arguing that cancer was caused by sexual frustration—which in turn was a product of bad parenting and a suffocating public school system. He criticized water fluoridation as a government intrusion on individual freedom. And, citing Freud, he elaborated on a theory of a worldwide “death instinct,” in which “the human spirit has been so crushed by the society in which it exists, that the general will toward life is not very strong.”

Read the full essay, “Reflections on a Dying Society.” Vermont State Library

The way out, he believed, required a dramatic upheaval of cultural norms. “The Revolution is coming and it is a very beautiful revolution,” he wrote in 1969. “It is beautiful because, in its deepest sense, it is quiet, gentle, and all pervasive. It KNOWS. What is most important in this revolution will require no guns, no commandants, no screaming ‘leaders,’ and no vicious publications accusing everyone else of being counter-revolutionary. The revolution comes when two strangers smile at each other, when a father refuses to send his child to school because schools destroy children, when a commune is started and people begin to trust each other, when a young man refuses to go to war, and when a girl pushes aside all that her mother has ‘taught’ her and accepts her boyfriend’s love.”

Sanders had been adrift in his own ideas, until he discovered the Liberty Union Party, which had been conceived in 1970 to uproot the two-party system and end the Vietnam War. In Vermont, its leaders hoped to find a receptive audience amid the hippie newcomers. Its cofounder, a gruff, bushy-bearded man named Peter Diamondstone, had predated Sanders at the University of Chicago by a year; Diamondstone likes to joke that they “knew all the same Communists” on the South Side.

By the fall of 1971, Liberty Union was floundering. “We were lost as a political party,” Diamondstone says. That October, Sanders, who had done some speechwriting for one of the party’s candidates a year earlier, showed up with a friend at the Goddard College library for a Liberty Union meeting. It was a large crowd by the group’s standards—maybe 30 people. The party was struggling to field a candidate for the upcoming Senate special election. Sanders, with dark hair, thick black glasses, and his two-year-old son in his arms, stood up impulsively in a room full of strangers. “He said, ‘I’ll do it—what do I have to do?'” Diamondstone recalls.

Bernie Liberty Union

Before there was the 1 percent, there was the 2 percent. This lo-fi 1972 ad pitted the young Senate candidate against the elite few who control the nation’s wealth.

Bennington Banner

Sanders lost that race, the first of four losing campaigns over the next five years (two for Senate, two for governor). In addition to opposing the war, the party pushed for a guaranteed minimum wage and tougher corporate regulations. Sanders floated hippie-friendly proposals, such as legalizing all drugs, an end to compulsory education, and widening the entrance ramps of interstate highways to allow cars to more easily pull over to pick up hitchhikers.

He emerged as one of the organization’s leading voices and within a few years was named Liberty Union’s chairman. “He was a mouthpiece, he was an orator—we called him ‘Silvertongue,'” Diamondstone says. During his 1972 campaign for governor, Sanders crisscrossed the state with the party’s choice for president—the child-rearing guru Dr. Benjamin Spock.

In those early years, Sanders was a true believer in what might be called small-s socialism, and he had little patience for lukewarm allies. He believed in the need for a united front of anti-capitalist activists marching in step against the corrupt establishment. Greg Guma recalled meeting Sanders for the first time and asking why he should get his vote. Sanders, in effect, told Guma that if he even needed to ask, Liberty Union wasn’t for him. “Do you know what the movement is? Have you read the books?” he recalled Sanders responding. “If you didn’t come to work for the movement, you came for the wrong reasons—I don’t care who you are, I don’t need you.”

“He’s not a hippie, never was a hippie. But he was always a little bit on the suburbs of society.”
In interviews at the time, Sanders suggested that dwelling on local issues was counterproductive, because it distracted activists from the real root of the problem—Washington. “I once asked him what he meant by calling himself a ‘socialist,’ and he referred to an article that was already a touchstone of mine, which was Albert Einstein’s ‘Why Socialism?’” says Sanders’ friend Jim Rader. “I think that Bernie’s basic idea of socialism was just about as simple as Einstein’s formulation.” (In short, according to Einstein, capitalism is a soul-sucking construct that corrodes society.)

Sanders started a small monthly zine called Movement to promote Liberty Union’s agenda and the countercultural lifestyles of its supporters. He devoted one lengthy article to an interview with a friend who had recently given birth at home. (“Don’t all mammals eat the afterbirth?” Sanders asked in one leading question.)

Bernie 1974
Sanders’ campaign platform, from a 1974 Liberty Union pamphlet Amherst College library special collections
Sanders built his campaigns around a theme that would sound familiar to his supporters today: American society had been hijacked by plutocrats, prudes, and imperialists, and wholesale reform was needed to restore it to its rightful course. “I have the very frightened feeling that if fundamental and radical change does not come about in the very near future, that our nation, and, in fact, our entire civilization, could soon be entering an economic dark age,” he said in announcing his 1974 Senate bid. Later that year, he sent an open letter to President Gerald Ford, warning of a “virtual Rockefeller family dictatorship over the nation” if Nelson Rockefeller were named vice president. He also called for the CIA to be disbanded immediately, in the wake of eye-popping revelations about the agency’s misdeeds.

But Sanders began to question whether Liberty Union had a future. Although the party had, at his direction, attempted to broaden its base by aligning itself with organized labor and the working poor, he drew just 6 percent of the vote when he ran for governor in 1976 (his previous three campaigns hadn’t fared any better). He was drifting from the utopian ambitions of Diamondstone, who was now advocating “a worldwide socialist revolution.” After the last American troops left Saigon in 1975, the anti-war party faced an existential crisis. And Sanders faced one of his own. Liberty Union could claim a few victories—it had helped to defeat a telephone rate increase, among other things. But he believed that, absent a serious change, the party would be nothing more than symbolic.

“That’s what distinguished [Sanders] from leftists who were more invested in the symbolism than in the outcome,” Sugarman says. “He read Marx, he understood Marx’s critique of capitalism—but he also understood Marx doesn’t give you too many prescriptions of how society should go forward.”

Sanders had reason for introspection. Once again single and helping to raise a young son, he was struggling financially—a newspaper article during his 1974 race noted that he was running for office while on unemployment. Increasingly, Sanders’ political gaze focused on his own backyard.

Meanwhile, Sanders and Diamondstone clashed about the direction of Liberty Union—and pretty much everything else. “When I was on the road, I would stop at his house and I’d sleep downstairs, and we’d yell at each other all night long, and sometime around three o’clock in the morning, we’d say, ‘We gotta stop this,’ so we could get some sleep,” Diamondstone recalls. “Five minutes later we’d be yelling at each other again.”

Sanders quit the party in 1977, and his relationship with Diamondstone continued to deteriorate; when Sanders campaigned for Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale in 1984, Diamondstone followed him to every campaign stop, handing out leaflets calling the then-mayor a “quisling.”

After cutting his ties with Liberty Union, Sanders remained as confident as ever of the need for radical change in the nation’s power structure, if less sure of how to get there. First, he had to get his life in order. “He was living in the back of an old brick building, and when he couldn’t pay the [electric bill], he would take extension cords and run down to the basement and plug them into the landlord’s outlet,” says Nancy Barnett, an artist who lived next door to Sanders in Burlington. The fridge was often empty, but the apartment was littered with legal pads filled with Sanders’ writings. When he was eventually evicted, Sanders moved in with his friend Sugarman.

“The fact that neither of us could afford to live in the city where we worked was a source of great consternation to us and I think the beginning of a [mayoral] platform, honestly,” Sugarman says of their roommate days.

Sanders kept busy building a company he had started with Barnett called the American People’s Historical Society, which produced filmstrips for elementary school classrooms on topics including women in American history and New England heroes. It was a DIY operation—Sanders did the male voices, Barnett the female ones. The work took them up and down New England’s back roads, as they sold copies of the filmstrips to school administrators. “His cars were always breaking down,” Barnett says. “He was extremely frugal.” In one of his jalopies, Sanders (or one of his passengers) had to clear the windshield manually using the wiper blade he kept in the glove compartment.

Sanders channeled his earnings from the educational films into his pièce de résistance: a documentary on the life of union leader Eugene Debs, who won nearly a million votes running for president from prison on the Socialist ticket in 1920.

“We had gone to New York and lined up Howard Da Silva, who was a big Broadway booming voice actor, to play Eugene Debs’ voice,” Barnett explains. “But that didn’t quite work out, so Bernie ended up doing the narration of Debs’ voice.” Bernie Sanders is from Brooklyn; Debs was not. The movie also suffered from the filmmaker’s reverence for his subject. Sanders, one reviewer opined, seemed “determined to administer Debs to the viewer as if it were an unpleasant, but necessary, medicine.”

When Sanders tried to get the documentary aired on public television in 1978, he was rebuffed. Fearful perhaps that even humble Vermont Public Broadcasting had fallen under the dominion of corporate media, Sanders cried censorship and fought back. Eventually, the Debs documentary was broadcast. “That was a breakthrough of sorts,” Sugarman says. “That was actually our first successful fight.”

Not long after making the Debs documentary, Sanders got back in the political game. He ran for mayor of Burlington in 1981 as an independent, and he crafted a hyperlocal platform that cut across party lines—he opposed a waterfront condominium project, supported preserving a local hill for sledding, and pushed to bring a minor league baseball team to town. Sanders was still, at heart, the same neurotic activist who picked fights with Diamondstone over socialism, but he recognized that voters in Burlington wanted to hear what he thought about Burlington.

Bernie in Burlington
Sanders in 1981, a few months after being sworn in as mayor of Burlington, Vermont Donna Light/AP

At first, no one gave Sanders a shot. He focused on building support in Burlington’s poor and working-class neighborhoods, where voters felt forsaken by the longtime Democratic incumbent, Gordon Paquette. From there, he assembled a surprisingly broad coalition, even winning the endorsement of the local police union. To everyone’s surprise, he knocked off Paquette by 10 votes out of 8,650 cast. After a decade on the outside, Sanders finally had a foot in the door—and a steady job. “It’s so strange, just having money,” he told the Associated Press at the time.

As Burlington’s mayor, and later as a US representative and senator, Sanders has followed a similar formula. He’s unafraid to raise hell about the corporate forces he fears are driving America into the ground—replace “Rockefeller” with “Koch” and his Liberty Union speeches don’t sound dated—but always careful to keep Vermont in his sights. The days of meandering psychoanalytic cultural critiques are mostly over. And while he’s running on a platform that includes some pretty radical ideas for Washington—single-payer health care; free college; 50-percent-plus income tax rates for America’s top earners—at times, Sanders has shown a willingness to compromise that’s disappointed longtime ideological allies. He has supported the F-35, Lockheed Martin’s problem-plagued fighter jet that has led to hundreds of billions of dollars in cost overruns; Burlington’s international airport was chosen as one of the homes for the planes. “He became what we call up here a ‘Vermont Exceptionalist,'” Guma says of the candidate’s pragmatic streak. Sanders has also drawn heat from the left over his libertarian-tinged position on gun control, which has at times allied him with his Republican colleagues, including in 2005 when he voted for a bill that shielded gun manufacturers from legal liability when their firearms are used by criminals.

When he won the Burlington mayoral race, Sanders finally had a foot in the door—and a steady job. “It’s so strange, just having money,” he told the Associated Press at the time.

Unlike his idol Debs, whose third-party campaigns earned him roughly the same percentage of the vote as *Liberty Union’s first electoral forays, Sanders is now running within the Democratic Party. He has chosen, as he did many years ago, relevance over purity, to engage the system rather than escape it. He could hardly have picked a better time. On many of the issues he’s spent his career championing, Sanders no longer sounds so fringe. The party’s progressive wing rebelled in May over President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the most polarizing free-trade deal since NAFTA (which, naturally, Sanders voted against). The $15 minimum wage is the hottest new trend in municipal governance. Billionaire donors are forming their own de facto shadow parties. Income inequality has become so pronounced even Republicans are talking about it.

Despite his impressive momentum, the national polls of the presidential race still give Clinton a sizable lead over Sanders. But they also put him squarely in second place, well ahead of former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley. Sanders has signaled that Clinton’s early support for the Iraq War—which first created an opening for Obama in 2007—will be fair game during the race. He’s jabbed the former secretary of state for her ambiguous stance on the TPP. And in a nod to the Clintons’ deep pockets (and even deeper-pocketed donors), Sanders has warned that his rival is not “prepared to take on the billionaire class” that he believes is a driver and beneficiary of income inequality.

Madison rally

Wow, That’s a Yooge Crowd to See Bernie Sanders Sanders for President/Twitter

He’s also learned the risks of being taken seriously. The Clinton campaign has already showed its willingness to take the gloves off. In June, Hillary-backer Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) suggested that reporters were “giving Bernie a pass” on his socialist roots and argued that he’d fall back to Earth once people started to treat him “like a serious candidate.” Even as Sanders bounced from one overflow crowd to the next (3,000 in Minneapolis; 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa), he spent much of the first week of his campaign explaining away that 1972 essay on gender norms. It was, he ultimately told NBC’s Meet the Press, a piece of “fiction,” along the lines of Fifty Shades of Grey. It wasn’t the splash the campaign hoped to make, but the real news was that the story was news at all; cable news never went into overdrive over Dennis Kucinich’s early years.

Sanders is now standing on the biggest platform of his political career. Win or lose, his ideas will influence the national debate as never before. In some ways they already have. In August, the Democratic National Committee adopted a $15 minimum wage as part of its official platform, bringing the senator’s once-radical proposal firmly into the mainstream. Sanders always seemed to know that he’d get his chance to effect big change, even if others dismissed him as a radical or derided him as a socialist. Perhaps this was what he meant when he repeated those self-affirming words—”We’re not crazy”—to Richard Sugarman all those years ago. And if Sanders were to somehow defy the odds, he and Sugarman could be reunited in Washington. Sanders has promised his old friend, who still teaches at the University of Vermont, the same position he held during the mayoral years in Burlington—”Secretary of Reality.”

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TIM MURPHY
Tim Murphy is a senior reporter at Mother Jones. Reach him at tmurphy@motherjones.com.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich
Wilhelm Reich
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wilhelm Reich (24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud.[1] The author of several influential books, most notably Character Analysis (1933), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and The Sexual Revolution (1936), Reich became known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry.[2][n 1]

Reich's work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), and his idea of muscular armour – the expression of the personality in the way the body moves – shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy.[6] His writing influenced generations of intellectuals; he coined the phrase "the sexual revolution" and according to one historian acted as its midwife.[7] During the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism* at police.[8]

After graduating in medicine from the University of Vienna in 1922, Reich became deputy director of Freud's outpatient clinic, the Vienna Ambulatorium.[9] Described by Elizabeth Danto as a large man with a cantankerous style who managed to look scruffy and elegant at the same time, he tried to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism, arguing that neurosis is rooted in sexual and socio-economic conditions, and in particular in a lack of what he called "orgastic potency." He visited patients in their homes to see how they lived, and took to the streets in a mobile clinic, promoting adolescent sexuality and the availability of contraceptives, abortion and divorce, a provocative message in Catholic Austria.[10] He said he wanted to "attack the neurosis by its prevention rather than treatment."[11]

. . . .



“THE MASS PSYCHOLOGY OF FASCISM,”* BY WILHELM REICH.

AS IN ALL OF THE FREUDIAN THEORIES I’VE HEARD ABOUT, THE CAUSE OF ALL MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES IS THOUGHT TO BE SEXUAL IN SOME WAY, USUALLY AS A PRODUCT OF REPRESSION. WE HAVEN’T PROGRESSED FAR FROM THE PILGRIMS IN MANY WAYS. LUCKILY IN THE 1960S AND 70’S SOME OTHER PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACHES APPEARED, BUT APPARENTLY SANDERS WAS INFLUENCED BY THIS ONE. THIS DESCRIPTION, IN REICH’S WORDS, OF HOW THE REPRESSIVE FAMILY STRUCTURE (AND RELIGIOUS STRUCTURE) SERVE AS THE MODEL OF THE FASCIST SOCIAL SYSTEM IS INDEED CONVINCING TO ME.

READ REICH’S WORDS BELOW ON THAT CONNECTION. WE ARE TAUGHT TO FLINCH BACK IN FEAR OVER THINKING THE WRONG THOUGHT. THAT IS SOMETHING THAT I DO HATE, FOR ITS’ UNFAIRNESS AND EMOTIONAL CRUELTY ALONE, BUT ESPECIALLY FOR ITS EFFECT ON HUMAN SOCIETY. PERSONAL RIGIDITY IS THE RESULT, FROM WHICH FASCIST THINKING AND CRIMINALITY EMERGES. IT’S AN EASY STEP FROM THERE TO LYNCHING A PERSON FOR “WHISTLING AT A WHITE WOMAN,” AND INDIVIDUALS MAY FEEL NOT ONLY FREE TO PARTICIPATE IN THE KILLING, BUT EVEN COMPELLED TO DO SO. THAT’S FASCISM.

IT DOES MAKE SENSE TO ME, BECAUSE MOST “CONSERVATIVE” PEOPLE I’VE EVER KNOWN ARE ALSO UNLIKELY TO “THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX” IN VERY MANY WAYS. THEY HAVE BEEN SO CONTROLLED, BOTH BY THEIR PARENTS AND THE COMMUNITY, THAT THEY ARE AFRAID TO CONSIDER MUCH AT ALL IN THE WAY OF REALLY NEW IDEAS. THAT MAKES IT HARD FOR ME TO HAVE A CLOSE BOND WITH THEM EXCEPT ON THE BASIS OF FAMILY TIES OR OLD FRIENDSHIPS. I’M RUNNING INTO A BIT OF THAT NOW THAT I AM ON FACEBOOK AND A NUMBER OF MY OLD NORTH CAROLINA FRIENDS HAVE MADE CONTACT WITH ME. THEY AREN’T ALL “CONSERVATIVE,” LUCKILY, IN FACT SEVERAL ARE IN FULL AGREEMENT WITH ME; BUT QUITE A FEW ARE, SO I DON’T EXCHANGE THOUGHTS WITH THEM.

I WILL ALSO POINT OUT THE FACT THAT THE EVANGELICAL BRANCH OF PROTESTANT FUNDAMENTALISM, WHICH HAS ALWAYS SQUELCHED SUCH THINGS AS THE TEACHING OF EVOLUTION IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS, A FAIR SOCIETAL ACCEPTANCE OF RACIAL, CULTURAL DIFFERENCES AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, OF SEXUAL FREEDOM OF CHOICE, IS IN FULL PLAY AGAIN TODAY. THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT AND THE ALT-RIGHT AREN’T QUITE THE SAME THING, BECAUSE THE ALT-RIGHT SEEM TO ME TO HAVE NO REAL MORAL CONVICTIONS AT ALL; BUT THEY ARE VERY SIMILAR, AND I MISS THE RELATIVELY FREE AND OPEN DAYS OF MY TWENTIES AND THIRTIES. IN A SOCIETY LIKE WE HAD IN 1970, LIFE CAN BE FULLY LIVED, AND YES, MISTAKES AND DIFFERENCES OF OPINION WERE NOT VIEWED AS HORRIBLE SIN, BUT RATHER AS A LEARNING EXPERIENCE. OF COURSE, I WAS IN CHAPEL HILL, NC AND WASHINGTON DC. A SMALLER PLACE MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN SO FRIENDLY TO FREE-THINKERS. THERE ARE ALSO STILL THE REFUGES OF VARIOUS KINDS TODAY, COLLEGE CAMPUSES, “THE BIG CITY,” AND INTELLECTUAL SUBGROUPS SUCH AS MY UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST GROUP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mass_Psychology_of_Fascism
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Mass Psychology of Fascism[4] (German: Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus) is a 1933 book by Wilhelm Reich, in which Reich explores how fascists come into power, and explains their rise as a symptom of sexual repression.

Background[edit]

Main articles: Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany

Reich—originally from Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and practicing psychoanalysis and psychiatry in Vienna—joined the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) in 1928. He joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) upon moving his psychoanalytic practice to Berlin in 1930. However, The Mass Psychology of Fascism was seen as being so critical of the Nazi regime (as well as the Communist regime in the Soviet Union) that Reich was considered to be a liability to the KPD and was kicked out of the party upon the book's publication in 1933.

Summary[edit]

The question at the heart of Reich's book was this: why did the masses turn to authoritarianism even though it is clearly against their interests?[5] Reich set out to analyze "the economic and ideological structure of German society between 1928 and 1933" in this book.[6] In it, he calls Bolshevism "red fascism", and groups it in the same category as Nazism.

Reich argued that the reason Nazism was chosen over communism was sexual repression. As children, members of the proletariat had learned from their parents to suppress sexual desire. Hence, in adults, rebellious and sexual impulses caused anxiety. Fear of revolt, as well as fear of sexuality, were thus "anchored" in the character of the masses. This influenced the irrationality of the people, Reich would argue:[5]

“Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, good and adjusted in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation. At first the child has to submit to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and anxiety.[5]”

Reich noted that the symbolism of the swastika, evoking the fantasy of the primal scene, showed in spectacular fashion how Nazism systematically manipulated the unconscious. A repressive family, a baneful religion, a sadistic educational system, the terrorism of the party, and economic violence all operated in and through individuals' unconscious psychology of emotions, traumatic experiences, fantasies, libidinal economies, and so on, and Nazi political ideology and practice exacerbated and exploited these tendencies.[6]

For Reich, fighting fascism meant first of all studying it scientifically, which was to say, using the methods of psychoanalysis. He believed that reason—alone able to check the forces of irrationality and loosen the grip of mysticism—is also capable of playing its own part in developing original modes of political action, building on a deep respect for life, and promoting a harmonious channeling of libido and orgastic potency. Reich proposed "work democracy", a self-managing form of social organization that would preserve the individual's freedom, independence, and responsibility and base itself on them.[6]

Banning[edit]

As a result of writing the book, Reich was kicked out of the Communist Party of Germany. The book was banned by the Nazis when they came to power. He realized he was in danger and hurriedly left Germany disguised as a tourist on a ski trip to Austria.[citation needed] Reich was expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1934 for political militancy.[7] The book was ordered to be burned on request of the FDA by a judge in Maine, United States in 1956, amongst other works by Reich.[8]

The authoritarian family as the first cell of the fascist society[edit]

Chapter V contains the famous statement that the family is the first cell of the fascist society:[9]

“From the standpoint of social development, the family cannot be considered the basis of the authoritarian state, only as one of the most important institutions which support it. It is, however, its central reactionary germ cell, the most important place of reproduction of the reactionary and conservative individual. Being itself caused by the authoritarian system, the family becomes the most important institution for its conservation. In this connection, the findings of Morgan and of Engels are still entirely correct.”

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari reprised Reich arguments in their joint work Anti-Oedipus (1972), in which they discuss the formation of fascism at the molecular level of society.[10]




LIBERTY UNION*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Union_Party
Liberty Union Party
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Liberty Union Party (LUP) of Vermont is a radical left political party founded in 1970 by former Congressman William H. Meyer, Peter Diamondstone, Bernie Sanders, Dennis Morrisseau and others.[4][5] The LUP has had minor successes in local elections in Vermont.

History[edit]

The Liberty Union party (LUP) was formed to contest the Vermont elections of 1970.[6] In 1971, People's Party was formed as a national umbrella party for various Socialist-oriented state parties including the LUP.[7]

Bernie Sanders, who would go on to become the longest-serving Independent Senator and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, joined Liberty Union in 1971. Sanders was a candidate for several offices on their ticket before deciding to run as an independent. At the first Party meeting he attended, in 1971, Sanders was nominated to be the Party's Senate candidate in the January 1972 special election; he placed third with 2% of the vote.[8] Sanders was the party's candidate for Vermont governor in 1976 where he received 6.1% of the vote. At the time of his resignation from the party in October 1977, he was party chairman. Sanders quit due to the inactivity of the party between elections.[9]

. . . .



BOOK SIGNING JULY 12, 2017

http://www.wcpo.com/news/government/local-politics/bernie-sanders-coming-to-walnut-hills-high-school-next-month-for-book-discussion
Bernie Sanders coming to Walnut Hills High School next month for book discussion
WCPO Staff
3:13 PM, Jul 12, 2017

CINCINNATI -- Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders will make another stop in the Tri-State next month while touring the nation to present his latest book.

The former presidential candidate is set to appear for a 7 p.m. discussion at Walnut Hills High School on Tuesday, Aug. 29. Tickets for the event currently cost $18.18 and include a copy of his book, "Bernie Sanders: Guide to Political Revolution." Children can attend for free.

Tickets can be purchased here.

The event, presented by Joseph-Beth Booksellers, will discuss the "fight against the imbalances in the nation's status quo," and will show attendees "how to make a difference to effect the changes America -- and the world -- need to create a better tomorrow," according to an official listing.

Joseph-Beth organizers say they will have copies of Sen. Sanders’ other books available for purchase at the event, but the senator will not be participating in a book signing, a Q&A or a meet and greet after his presentation.

Organizers said 200 ticket holders' books will be autographed in advance, but the distribution of those signed books will be completely random.

Sanders made a stop in Covington on Sunday, July 9 to rally against the Republican health care plan currently under debate in the Senate.

At the event, Sanders said he would introduce a “Medicare for all” program after the Republicans’ current health care bill failed.

“As soon as we defeat this disastrous bill, I will be introducing a Medicare for all, single-payer program,” Sanders said.

Sanders also called on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to rescind his support of the plan.