The New Yorker: Bernie Sanders has spent decades attacking inequality. Now the country is listening

[RiverLover]

1. I read this yesterday. Its long, but really interesting. I didn't know much about his upbringing.

The New Yorker is great exposure for Bernie.

Thanks for OP'g it!!

....“There was tension about money,” Sanders said of his family. They lived in a three-and-a-half-room rent-controlled apartment, and his mother pined for a house. “It wasn’t a question of putting food on the table. It was a question of arguing about whether you buy this or whether you buy that. You know, families do this. I remember a great argument about drapes—whether we could afford them. And I remember going with my mother when we had to buy a jacket. We went to literally fifteen different stores to buy the damned cheapest—I mean, the best deal.” He went on, “I do know what it’s like when the electric company shuts off the electricity and the phone company shuts off the phone—all that stuff. So, for me, to talk to working-class people is not very hard.”

I spoke with a few of Sanders’s contemporaries who had grown up in the same neighborhood, and their memories were rosier: they recalled kids playing stickball on safe, familiar streets until their parents called them home for dinner. But Sanders rarely communicates in the key of nostalgia. He’ll talk about how the “great American middle class” is being hollowed out, but unlike some populists he doesn’t dwell lovingly on the nineteen-fifties, when high-paying manufacturing jobs, union membership, and the G.I. Bill allowed single-earner families to prosper. That’s a political strength, because there are many people—African-Americans, above all—for whom the fifties cannot be recalled as an idyll.

Sid Ganis, a Hollywood producer who grew up in the same building as Sanders, described their neighborhood as an enclave of “ordinary secular Jews,” adding, “Some of us went to Hebrew school, but mainly it was an identity in that it got us out of school on Jewish holidays.” Sanders told me that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, his family “got a call in the middle of the night about some relative of my father’s, who was in a displaced-persons camp in Europe someplace.” Sanders learned that many of his father’s other relatives had perished. Sanders’s parents had been fundamentally apolitical, but he took away a lesson: “An election in 1932 ended up killing fifty million people around the world.”....