Dan Chiasson on Bernie Sanders and Narrative Politics

Dan Chiasson is a poet, teacher, critic, and now, with his new book Bernie For Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician (Knopf, 2026), a historian of the politics and people that transformed his hometown of Burlington, Vermont. Bernie For Burlington is, in many ways, a break with the lyric poetry and critical writing that has characterized Chiasson’s literary output since his first published collection The Afterlife of Objects (University of Chicago Press, 2002), though it retains much of the warmth and focus of attention on both individual people and the essential problems of personhood that has since become the hallmark of his poetry and criticism. Chiasson has written on Louise Glück, Henri Cole, Bernadette Mayer, James Tate, Fanny Howe, and many other writers for The New Yorker. He also contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books, most recently on the dynamic, personable socialism of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. Formerly the poetry editor for The Paris Review, he currently teaches as the Lorraine Chao Wang Professor of English Literature at Wellesley College, where he is the Chair of the English Department. Chiasson met me on a frigid late-January afternoon in Cambridge for an interview about his then-upcoming book Bernie For Burlington; we discussed Bernie Sanders’ narrative politics, the political problem of pleasure, mysteries both personal and poetic, the economics of literary study, basketball, and much more. 

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

LUCAS FRIEDMAN-SPRING: Why did you, Dan Chiasson, poet and poetry critic, decide to write this very stylish and readable but ultimately historical, historically rigorous book about Bernie Sanders? Why the genre shift?

DAN CHIASSON: Oh wow, a few answers. One, I have been obsessed to the point of barely being able to read anything else for years at a time with Henry Adams, the 19th-century historian. Adams wrote history from the inside, at the right hand of power. I am fascinated by the idea that a stylish prose could capture the complexities of a political story: style carries so much information. 

I learned how to write sentences from reading Adams, from the talent that he has for loading sentences up with information and yet having them carry the reader forward on some kind of a narrative sweep. So that's one answer for you, an honest answer. I wanted to write a work of literature. Why else write anything at all?

Another answer is, I wanted to account for my life in terms of class, material conditions, as well as what Raymond Williams calls “the structure of feeling” of my childhood milieu. The biggest single factor in that place and time was Mayor Bernie Sanders and the progressives in City Hall. So, I had my subject. 

I also couldn’t resist the temporal loop-de-loop. I was made by that place, I made these sentences about it.

LFS: You’re writing about Burlington and as Burlington?

DC: Exactly. Having been there in Burlington at that time is sort of my epistemic base—it's my purchase and my standing in the story. I'm not a historian or political theorist or political scientist, and I would imagine that somebody coming at my book from those points of view will find holes or unanswered or unasked questions. I just felt that, having seen it and been in it, was going to be an interesting knowledge base for writing about it.

LFS: Absolutely, it is so personal and so personally voiced. The voice is so compelling that it starts to rub off on the reader—you start to take it on a bit. 

DC: Thank you! Maybe it will inspire others to write similar kinds of books. Too many memoirs are set in the home, the most claustrophobic of all imaginable social spaces, without asking the question of how those spaces link up with other collective and community spaces. Sanders himself knew, growing up in a precarious household in lower-middle-class Flatbush, that he was watching a little model economy. It was set up to kill his parents from work and discouragement. 

LFS: You say in the book “much about me, including the way I write sentences” was shaped by the Bernie years of Burlington politics. I was wondering if you could maybe speak a little bit more about this—how you think the political circumstances of this period manifest in your writing specifically?

DC: You know, my output is sentences and lines of poetry and I was intentionally looking for a story about how those verbal and narrative shapes were the products, not just of my reading and personal or psychological or familial formation, but also of a cultural and political formation. City Hall had an interest in reaching out to young teenagers, and teenagers were really stimulated by that. I carried Burlington around with me as a memento to write this book—the thought, okay, I can write about a pizza place or a teenage band or my friends and I am writing the political story of that moment.

LFS: There’s a passage I was thinking about where you talk about how Bernie had “given the people of the city of Burlington waking up and reading the paper, a thrilling narrative to follow from day to day. The theme of the story is our city's transformations. We could locate ourselves inside the story… Even as we followed the story, we [Burlingtonians] were the story.” Is what we’re seeing at this moment a politics of narrative?

DC: That passage is the truest thing in the book. I felt that we were swept up—that's what novelists always want from the reader, to be swept up. The wind at your back. 

I felt it at the time: We were in a story. Bernie was the narrator, we were the protagonists, the setting was constructed with great imagination and passion by artists, writers, dancers, puppeteers, activists. There was also just this question of suspense. This was the biggest thing that had ever happened to Burlington—backwards, conservative Burlington, Vermont—to have this fire-breathing radical socialist take City Hall. It was wild, and we loved it, and it became a meta story. The national press was interested, Phil Donahue interviewed Bernie; we were now caught up in a story. It's what you call it in the news: a story. We were a story in the nation's eyes. You also had all kinds of grassroots production happening in a wild variety of media. Puppets helped tell the story, enormous ones. One of the recurring presences, they're almost like a chorus in my book, is the anti-capitalist theater troupe Bread and Puppet. Did you see that when you were in Vermont?

LFS: No, I never did. I never did. But I'm familiar with it. I was visiting a friend at Middlebury about a year ago and I saw all of these Bread and Puppet posters and memorabilia and things. Strange place though, it was the only time I've ever seen beer pong played with an IPA. 

You saw Bernie offering Burlingtonians a way of understanding the struggles of their life within some larger narrative?

DC: Absolutely. There were these disenfranchised communities that had no narrative access to why they were generation after generation in poverty. They would have had extremely reactionary politics. And yet they become Bernie voters because he gave them a narrative: this is why you've been disenfranchised, these are the concrete steps that we can take to lift you up. 

LFS: There’s this very interesting moment where you talk about the struggle of some of these leftist groups that Bernie was involved with to articulate a positive political vision after the end of the Vietnam War—what happens to an anti-Vietnam party after the war ends, right? What this made me think of is Trump, who doesn’t really show up in the book when he does —you refuse to even say his name. I was wondering if what you’re doing with the decision to sideline Trump rhymes with what Bernie was trying to do post-Vietnam—a kind of narrative enactment of the imperative to have a political vision that goes beyond saying all of the things that are bad about Trump and offers something beyond the kind of Biden-Harris or Harris-Walz position of just not being Trump.

DC: Yes. Again, we’re looking at “structures of feeling”—not their manifestations as grotesque boldface realities, but their hidden capillaries or roots. Sanders felt that American childhoods under capitalism created bloodthirst and a kind of death drive, which meant war, war, more war.

LFS: You talk a lot in the book about Bernie’s ideological debts to psychoanalysis and particularly Wilhelm Reich. So much of what seems to happen with him as a political figure is his harnessing the idea that politics can be about pleasure. Are Bernie’s a politics of pleasure? Is there something really unique offered by this? What—if any—are the limitations of this way of doing things?

DC: I do think there is something really unique in this, and I think of Zohran Mamdani’s enormous I’m so game, all-in displays of pleasure in ordinary interaction. There’s been some work by Corey Robin on this idea of “socialist joy.” I would call it instead happiness—joy is cancelled after Kamala—or perhaps access to happiness. 

I think you’re quite right though. In biographical terms, he saw the dreariness of his parents’ lives, just clinging to the lowest rung of middle-class existence, fighting constantly about their desires and wishes and aspirations and needs. It killed them. He thought it killed them, and I think it killed them. It wore them down and it killed them. 

There’s this almost comical moment in the book where Bernie, as an undergrad, publishes this “pro-sex” article in the Chicago Maroon, arguing against dorm parietals. It went national, picked up by the AP: the 1962 equivalent of viral. Now, “Bernard Sanders” was taken up all around the country as the spokesman for the new sexual mores of his generation. I had a version of the chapter that was poking more fun at it—this horny guy wants his girlfriend to stay over—but I thought no, this isn’t right. 

So I went and read a lot of Reich and what I found was a trenchant materialist account of the costs to health and well-being of being working class in Vienna—and quite specifically, not having enough rooms in your apartment to have sex. I thought ah, that’s the connection to Bernie’s home life. It’s a 3.5 room apartment in Flatbush and his parents didn’t have the opportunity to have a full emotional, full intimate, full sexual life. He and his brother were teenagers in that apartment and it was this completely claustrophobic environment.

I think he sees that access to happiness, access to sexual fulfillment, access to artistic expression, are absolutely crucial to human survival, and these beliefs motivated a lot of the policy decisions he made in Burlington. 

LFS: In the book but also in a lot of your poetry—particularly in your collection Bicentennial (Knopf, 2014)—there’s this idea that playing basketball, or games in general, offers these ways of being together outside of the more reductive ways of seeing each other that our place under capitalism encourages. The book is also full of all these scenes of literal spatial togetherness, parties, campaign events…

DC: I started writing poetry when I was cut from the basketball team in ninth grade. So the two pursuits are versions of one another for me. You can see in sonnets, the rectangle of the sonnet feels to me like the bounded environment of a basketball court. Some of the moves you make are the same kinds of moves that you would make with the intuitive spatial understanding of a bounded environment of a court. There’s this almost pick-and-roll type element, I think, to line breaks. 

LFS: We talked about that recording of Eliot reciting The Waste Land that we both obsessively listened to in our late teens and there's this moment where he switches from this choppier rhyming tercet into the Alexandrine and he starts almost singing those lines that he’s taking from Verlaine—it’s a bit like the way you’ll see some people almost float when they go up for a layup.

DC: That’s amazing and lovely. When I started to research the book, I realized how important basketball was to his life and upbringing in Flatbush. His cramped home life was compensated for by a wild street life with all kinds of different games. There's the world of the home, where economic reality is crushing, and then there's the world of the street, which is sort of like Shakespeare's green world. It's the world where conflicts and tensions and rivalries can be worked out symbolically. They don't have to be worked out by fighting or by arguing or by, you know, all the horrific ways that people work out their differences. They can be worked out in symbolic terms, and there's an element of play in that, and there's an element of invention.

It has to do with a kind of cooperative or collective intelligence. What is nominally a competition is, in fact, a collaboration. Basketball is a really rich topic. He often mixed it up on the schoolyard courts in Burlington as mayor. Often against his political opponents, members of the press, ordinary people.

As for the scenes of what you call spatial togetherness, I needed models for getting an ensemble scene right: an election night scene allows you to bring a whole bunch of characters from the big cast of the book together, and they've been distributed individually throughout the maybe throughout the chapter, but at the end of the chapter, you get to the actual election night, and everybody's in front of their TV or listen to their radio. The way to do those ensemble scenes, I found, was to look at party scenes in novels. In Tolstoy, for example. Why does he have so many of these balls? One thing is to bring a large number and variety of personnel into the same space. That was a thing I thought a lot about—how to get those ensemble night scenes right, but also do the kind of technological work of bringing all these characters together.

LFS: In an email to me you referred to the book as the “Bernie beast”—it’s certainly a beast! It clocks in at around 600 pages which is a real break length-wise with a lot of your other writing. I’m curious why you chose the level of focus and detail on events and characters that you did?

DC: I call it the beast, I call it XXL Bernie, all different things. But I feel that the argument of the book is implicit in the length, and I don't want to reduce anything down. I wanted to liberate politics from meme culture and place it in narrative culture. I wanted time to run in some sections, in other sections to thicken and settle. The embodied intricacy of daily change was what I wanted to represent. I was going to have to work to make it narratively interesting. If the book has an ethics or a vision of politics, it is implicit in the length and in the amount of granular attention I pay to ordinary people and little communities as they coalesce and form and drift. 

LFS: There is definitely a lot of attention to the person, especially people and kinds of people who usually don’t have books written about them. Your epigraph to the book reads “this book of people.”

DC: It’s the dedication to [Robert] Frost’s book, North of Boston.

LFS: There are all of these incredible people who show up in Burlington and in Vermont at the time, Bernie introduces Foucault at his last public appearance before his death, Burlington is one of two American cities that Jamaica’s reggae ambassador visits, Louise Glück, Cyndi Lauper, Solzhenitsyn, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Griffey Jr. all show up. I’m curious what it means to have a book full of attention to names like these alongside this focus we get on someone like, for example, Molly Wakowski, who’s this non-famous working-class elderly Burlingtonian Jew whose politics we hear a bit about in the book?

DC: Right, there are those people who came as unformed, untested artists or politicians—this corps of folks that came and found it possible to make an unorthodox life in Vermont, partly because it was so cheap, but mainly because there was a community. Louise Glück became Louise Glück in Vermont. Later, waves of folks came specifically to Burlington to see socialism in practice. Foucault was one, Ginsberg said he was one. Everybody wanted to see what was up in this place and it was because there hadn't been as long, as durable, and as imaginative a socialism in an American city, maybe ever and certainly in a long time. 

There was also the idea that if you get the economics right, then suddenly people are in a position to make new choices, choices that aren’t driven by fear. If you look at the kinds of choices that people of your generation, your age, make, very few make a choice to be a poet. Very few make a choice to be a poetry scholar. All the talented people are making the same kinds of choices, and that is a reflection of the unbelievably dwindled economic prospects that you all face. 

Burlington got a few things right, it got affordability right, and got people into houses they could afford, and the government did a few things around the margins. It allowed people to imagine a life. I was raised by a non-college-educated single mother and I'm not sure that I would have made the choice to risk my expensive education on becoming a poet and a scholar of poetry—if I hadn't had that seedbed that Sanders and his people created.

But Molly Wakowski, Sadie White–those Burlington names belong right beside the A-listers, because my subject is making a life. Whatever that means. Making poems, essays, ice cream, puppets, performances, zoning changes, a political career. Foucault, by the way, liked to write in our little fake-Paris bistro on Church Street, Leunig’s.

LFS: You talk about memoir as a genre being trapped in the home. This reminds me of something I’ve been really wanting to talk with you about and was really curious about throughout the book. There’s so much about childhood in it and so many of Bernie’s political concerns seem to be about what we’re offering and not offering young people. You say in the book that you “began writing poetry partly to put [your] childhood to bed.” I’m curious about the relation or non-relation between the interest you have in childhood and your childhood and the way that the problem of the rights of the child figures politically for Bernie. 

DC: Well, I was given a great gift as a writer, which is that I had a mystery to solve in my childhood, which I still am working on: I did not even know who my father was. Far from knowing him personally. I didn't even know who he was, and it was very difficult, and remains so, for my mother to talk about him and what happened. 

Childhood is a good subject for a lot of writers but, for me, there was an intriguing mystery that I wanted to work out. I didn't want to solve it. Even though I was given the opportunity a couple of times, I didn't really want to reunite with this stranger. It was not the narrative arc and resolution I believed in or wanted.

Once I got into this project I just started thinking more about the material and economic conditions that resulted from my mom being left with a child and the particular circumstances of our family. She was a single mother who couldn't afford to get an apartment for herself, and so we moved back into her childhood home with my grandparents. I felt, when I was starting this book, that my proximity to these dynamics gave me a really unique purchase on the political and social and cultural history of the time. My grandparents were Conservative Catholics. It was, in a sense, a kind of dark and somewhat frightening place to grow up. Some of the generational conflicts were intense.

LFS: There’s this scene in the book where you’re watching TV with your aunts after the Reagan assassination attempt and you’re all essentially rooting for him to die and when grandfather walks in everyone sobers up very quickly. It’s a very clearly comic moment…

DC: It was fun to write! But these dynamics gave me a particular vantage point on Sanders' arrival to town. Many of the ideological and cultural clashes that played out in the city were playing out in my own home. Three generations, sometimes four when my great-grandfather came by: you could see the continuities and the ruptures.

LFS: Hearing you talk about what it did for your writing about your childhood to have the abiding mystery of your father is making me think of this thing you say rather early in the book. You never interview Bernie (you did interview his brother) and you actually say that “the book depended on the subject’s remaining silent.” I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit on what you mean by this? Is part of it about preserving some of the mystery of Bernie to motivate the book in the same way your writing about your childhood was motivated by the mystery of your father?

DC: The simplest thing to say is that if Bernie had wanted to end this project, he could have called his brother up and said, don't talk to this guy. Or he could have said to his oldest friends— don’t talk to Dan Chiasson, or no more Monday walks. He could have shut it down. In that way the project relied upon his silence.

But also, if you engage a subject in a book the subject then has a level of control over the contents and the arguments and the details that I just didn't want to give up. Bernie is known as a micro-manager. I didn't want his authoritative vantage point or focal point. I really wanted the presentation of the information to be sort of choral and centrifugal, so that in any given paragraph, you might have six or seven different perspectives on the same issue or episode. If you drop Sanders himself into that story, then I think it would vastly change the book I was writing. 

What you're suggesting is really true: it's nice to have a mystery to work out. The challenge of reconstructing this using salvaged cultural bits that go from newspaper clippings to recorded performances to archival video footage of Burlington, to interviews, all of it catalyzed by my own memories, meant that it was going to be a project for the imagination, not transcription or stenography. I didn't want it to be that.

LFS: Well you talk about Bernie’s political tactics being latching onto something and the direct quote is, “escalat[ing] the conflict from the specific instance to a general principle.” Which is also not dissimilar from the action of poetry. Does the absence of Bernie allow for this to be a book about general principles rather than a specific instance?

DC: I want it to work as a book for people interested solely in politics and not at all interested in any kind of larger poetic questions or poetics questions. However, you are quite right: I feel that I'm most proud of it as an exploration of what it feels like to be a person in space and time. 

Emily Dickinson reminds us to look for “internal difference, where the meetings are.” The way you gauge or register meaning in reading a poem is to look at these fractional or incremental differences. So if I asked: if I look at a social system like a city with that same eye to internal difference, fractional change, what can I see?

LFS: There’s this idea of Bernie today as this uniquely materialist figure on the American left, more concerned about labor rights or housing policy—what we'd broadly call economic issues—than the cultural politics that's become so huge for the Democratic Party. There's a very different kind of vision of him in this book, where he's really concerned about things like natural childbirth and sex and television. You paraphrase him saying that, “capitalism hooked kids on television, alcohol and drugs so they would be satisfied in an endless depletion loop.”

DC: When he comes back from visiting the leftist government in Nicaragua he says this hilarious thing. He says “they’re just like us, they watch the same stupid TV shows.”

LFS: There’s that other amazing line where he says at a speech he’s giving for the bicentennial that “200 years after the American Revolution we should be doing better than having people watch 50 hours a week of hysterical murder shows.”

DC: It’s the bloodthirst. He sees it everywhere in American society. I think he sees it as integral to capitalism. Sanders wasn’t alone in Burlington thinking about how a city could be set up to counter those death drives: his progressivism was one vision. Murray Bookchin, who lived and worked in Burlington, offered another that he called variously “social ecology” and “municipalism.” There were decentralists, libertarians, anarchists, Marxists, and hybridizations of all of those groups. It was all about offering more satisfying ways of being—intellectually, culturally, sexually, politically—so people didn’t have to be trapped in that “endless depletion loop” and could have access to these more resilient, more robust kinds of satisfaction. 

The conversation, the scene itself, was a draw away from those murder shows. Burlington itself was the best show.