Bernie Sanders [archival]: Today with your support and the support of millions of people throughout our country, we begin a political revolution to transform our country economically, politically, socially and environmentally.

Annabelle Quince: Bernie Sanders, the 74-year-old Democratic contender who has surprised everyone by mounting a real challenge to the favourite, Hillary Clinton. He is an unlikely candidate, a self-confessed socialist who after 25 years in Washington DC has not connected with the political elite and has few friends in the big end of town. Yet he has connected with voters, especially young and white working-class voters.

Hello, this is Rear Vision on RN and via your ABC Radio app. I'm Annabelle Quince and today we're going to take a look at Bernie Sanders, where he came from, what he believes and can he win?

The thing to keep in mind when looking at the race between Hillary and Bernie is that they have very different approaches to politics. Steven Rosenfeld is the national political reporter for Alternet.eu, and the author of Making History in Vermont: The Election of a Socialist to Congress.

Steven Rosenfeld: Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton really have different views of the world and how it works and what their theories of change in politics are. Bernie Sanders has always rejected the world as it is. He thinks it's completely insane, and his language absolutely reflect that; this is nuts, that's nuts, we can't do this, who would think this way. And he believes basically in pressing the reset button and starting all over again, getting rid of these corrupt institutions and putting back in place things that actually came out of American history around World War II, New Deal type programs.

But Hillary Clinton, in contrast, doesn't believe in that kind of revolution, that wholesale dismissal. She is the ultimate pragmatist and therefore she believes that you've got to deal with the world as it is and you've got to make incremental focused improvements as best you can given all the things that can go wrong and all the people who will fight you along the way. So Hillary is for evolution, Bernie is for revolution. Hillary is the quintessential insider. She really knows how the gears of government turn. Bernie is the outsider. He believes that deep principles and a clear vision and sticking to that internal compass is what matters more, so there you have the difference.

Annabelle Quince: So where does Bernie's clear vision and moral compass come from? DD Guttenplan is the editor at large for The Nation magazine.

DD Guttenplan: I think it's three different things have made Bernie Sanders. One is he comes from the Jewish working class in Brooklyn, so this was…in New York City in the '20s, '30s, '40s and '50s there was a very large, very self-conscious organised Jewish working class. These are people who built enormous amounts of cooperative housing on the lower east side and in Brooklyn. These are people who belong to unions. These are people who built workers mutual aid associations. So there was a kind of sense of both class consciousness and a sense that if people struggled together you could achieve things.

Harry Jaffe: He grew up in this tightly knit Jewish neighbourhood that was at the same time politically very, very liberal.

Annabelle Quince: Harry Jaffe, the author of Why Bernie Sanders Matters, and the editor at large at Washingtonian magazine.

Harry Jaffe: There were many Jews who were first-generation, coming over from Russia, from Germany, from Poland, and they brought with them the socialist teachings, the Marxist teachings. They were Trotskyites, they were Leninists. I'm not saying that in his household, in Bernie Sanders' household that socialist politics was discussed at the dinner table, but I can tell you for certain that it was part of the stew of the neighbourhood sensibility.

Otherwise, his family was not poor but money was always an issue. His father came to the United States at the age of 17 from Poland, didn't speak a word of English. I'm sure his name was not Sanders. The family never had enough money to really do anything like take a vacation. Going to the movies was a special event. Buying a new couch was something that was discussed and argued about quite a bit. So that I think made a mark on him.

And the way it really came home to Bernie Sanders was that he was very much attached to his mother Dorothy. And Dorothy was a second-generation immigrant, and they lived in a tenement with two bedrooms, and his mother had one dream, she wanted her own house. She wanted to move out of the tenement and have a house with a backyard. And that never happened for her, she never realised that dream. She died relatively young when Sanders was 19 years old, and I think that marked him for life.

DD Guttenplan: Then the other thing I suppose is he went to the University of Chicago, so he got a very good liberal education and a sense of history. If you have a sense of history you realise that America has always had competing populisms. It's always had a tension between the wealthy and most people, and it has always had political expressions of that tension, both on the left and on the right. In this current campaign you see a right-wing populace in the Trump candidacy. So, blame immigrants, have a kind of paramilitary response to social problems.

But in the 1890s and 1900s, the Democratic Party, they fought against the gold standard, which they felt was choking farmers in the Midwest. They actually fought against racism, they fought for integrated unions in the south. That populist tendency was undermined and soured and turned rancid essentially by racist politicians who made exclusive appeals to the white working class in the south. But it was a tendency in American life and of course also America had a vigorous socialist movement. Long before there were Bolsheviks there were socialists in the United States who were getting elected to office, controlling cities. They had what was called sewer socialism, so you would have a city government that was run by socialists. And the socialists had a very good record of doing things like building public sanitation, building schools, building libraries, building parks. And the apotheosis of that movement, if you like, was the New Deal where Franklin Delano Roosevelt essentially took the sewer socialism that he had instituted as governor of New York State and made it a national thing in order to combat the Great Depression. So that's the second strand.

Harry Jaffe: Whatever Bernie Sanders absorbed in Brooklyn, whatever he read in the library at the University of Chicago about Marx and about socialism came to flower on the streets of Chicago. He says quite unabashedly, 'I didn't get an education so much in the classroom as it was in the streets.' He was an activist, protesting bad schooling for African Americans. He was an activist protesting police brutality. He led one of the very first sit-ins certainly in Chicago, perhaps in the country, in 1961 and 1962 against housing discrimination against African American students. So that was a time for him to express himself as an activist leader and see results, because the results of their protest and their sit-ins about housing discrimination resulted in changing the university's policies towards housing. That must have been very, very seductive for a 20-year-old kid.

DD Guttenplan: The third strand though is in a way to me the most interesting and the least well scrutinised, and that's the Bernie Sanders…after he finished Chicago he went up to Vermont and he essentially bought a shack in the woods, a sugar house, so a kind of unheated wooden building that you use to turn the sap of maple trees into maple syrup. And he lived there with his new wife for a couple of years. And although the marriage ended he stayed up in Vermont. Vermont is a very odd state because on the one hand they used to say in the '40s and '50s for example when Roosevelt was running they would say 'as Maine goes, so goes Vermont', meaning that these were the two most staunchly Republican states in the country and they were completely resistant to the New Deal.

But what happened in the 1960s is a whole movement of young people went back to the land in Vermont and they went to Vermont not because it was particularly congenial politically to them but because it was incredibly cheap to buy land there. And although the winters are very hard, the summers are warm and the growing season is short but lush and intense, and you had all these people going back to the land and trying to make a living off the land, and essentially rejecting the kind of materialist culture that the '60s was becoming in the rest of the country through the '70s and '80s.

Harry Jaffe: When he first went to Vermont he had a child. He was divorced. He had a child with a woman that he didn't marry. This is his son named Levi. So he became a father, and he is now in his mid to late 20s. He is raising a child, he is attempting to be a carpenter, he's not a very good one. He lives in a small town called Stannard. He tries to live there and it doesn't work for him. So he moved to the closest big city which is Burlington. Now, when I say 'big city', I mean small town, 40,000 people. And he settles in and he is living with other people. One afternoon a friend of his named Jim Rader who he had met in Chicago says to him, 'Hey, what are you doing, are you free this afternoon?' Bernie Sanders says, 'Why?' And Rader says, 'Well, there's a new political party in Vermont called the Liberty Union Party and they're having an organisational meeting at Goddard College.' Rader says, 'Do you want to come along? I'm going.' Sanders says, 'Sure,' and he hops in the back with his son.

Bernie Sanders [archival]: Now we are in the year 1970. There are about 30 or 40 people in this room, this was the Liberty Union convention upon which they are going to be selecting their candidates for the Senate and for the Congress. The only people in the room that I knew were Jim Rader and my son, I had my son with me who was then two years of age. So this convention is going on, they say, 'Okay, nominations are now open for the Liberty Union candidate for the United States Senate.' Being the modest, shy, reserved human being, conservative type person…they say, 'Well, who's interested in running?' So I said, well, why not? Why not run for the United States Senate in this party which I have just been a member of for eight minutes and knew nobody in the room, why not, it sounds like an interesting thing to do. So I stood up. I was now in politics.

Harry Jaffe: He loses the first race and he loses three more, running as a Liberty Union candidate. So in those four campaigns, Sanders gained something that one must have in politics wherever you are, that is name recognition. People became used to hearing Bernie Sanders talk on the radio, seeing Bernie Sanders on TV, seeing his name in the newspaper, but nevertheless in 1977 his friends who live in Burlington with him pop the question; why don't you run for Mayor of Burlington? Sanders has no great interest in Burlington. He lives there but he's not very connected to the people or the government or the politics. But his friends who have analysed his voting patterns in his state-wide elections realise that he was very popular in the poor parts of Burlington.

So he decides in 1980 to run for Mayor of Burlington. He runs against an entrenched Democratic machine. The Democrat had been in office for five terms, a decade, and figured that he would be a shoo-in for another term. He was not at all worried about this kid from Brooklyn who talked all the time about the Third World and Vietnam and imperialism, that was the least of his worries. But Bernie Sanders winds up organising the low income voters, organising disaffected Democrats, organising seniors and city workers who haven't had a raised in many years. Low and behold he winds up winning the election for Mayor in 1981 by 10 votes. He won by 14 votes. There was a recount, he won by 10 votes. He really doesn't know what to do. The one who is mostly in shock, besides the entrenched democratic machine that lost, was Bernie Sanders because he had never run anything in his life, and all of a sudden he is the Mayor of the largest city in the state of Vermont. So he was shocked.

Annabelle Quince: So how good was he at that?

Harry Jaffe: Well, it turns out that starting off he wasn't very good because the Democratic establishment still ran the city council and tried to thwart him at every stage. But it turns out that he hired very good people, and they balanced the budget, they didn't raise taxes, and he was a very, very good Mayor. He ran the city efficiently.

Annabelle Quince: You're listening to Rear Vision on RN and via your ABC Radio app. I'm Annabelle Quince and today we're taking a look at US presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders.

DD Guttenplan: Essentially what he was able to do was he was able to work with all kinds of people. Burlington is on the shores of Lake Champlain, and he was able to work with local civic organisations but also property developers to keep the waterfront on Lake Champlain as public land. He was able to build public housing, he was able to put in lots of high-quality municipal services in the city, and yet to balance the budget and to keep taxes low. And on the basis of that record he ran for Congress. I think he lost the first time but then he won, and he won again in 1992, and he won again after that. And then from being congressmen he ran for Senate. And all this time he was not a member of the Democratic Party, he was running as an independent, and he described himself as a socialist. So when he was elected to the Congress he was the first socialist to be elected to Congress since the 1930s.

And the interesting thing about Bernie Sanders' Vermont hinterland is first of all it grows out of this rejection of consumerist capitalism and the idea that there has to be more to life than collecting lots of expensive stuff, and the second is that when he ran the last time for re-election to the Senate, he got 70% of the vote. You have to realise that although there are a certain number of hippies in Vermont and there are a certain number of progressives, this is also still a state where almost everybody hunts, where lots of people drive pickup trucks. If it was in the south, you'd call these people rednecks, and yet they vote for Bernie Sanders in very large numbers, not because they agree with all his programs and certainly not because they consider themselves sympathetic to socialism but because they have learned that if Sanders says he'll do something, he'll do it, that he's honest and that they can trust him to tell them the truth about what he's going to do and then to stick to what he says.

Annabelle Quince: So when you look…I mean, he's been in Washington now for about 25 years, and I wonder if you look at the legislation he has supported and the things he's done, both in the House and in the Senate, can you see that he has really lived up to those kind of principles he brought to Washington?

DD Guttenplan: I think he has lived up to them but of course that means that you don't get a whole lot done. If you are going against the current you don't make as much ground as if you are riding the current. So when Bernie Sanders spoke out against the Iraq war he was one of a handful of congressmen to speak out against it. When President Obama decided to continue George W Bush's tax cuts, Bernie filibustered for eight hours.

Bernie Sanders [archival]: I think it is grossly unfair to ask my kids and grandchildren and the children all over this country to be paying higher taxes in order to provide tax breaks for billionaires because we have driven up the national debt. That is just plain wrong. And Mr President, I think the vast majority of the American people perceive that that concept of giving tax breaks to billionaires when we have such a high national debt makes no sense at all.

DD Guttenplan: And in a sense that speech, the filibuster on the floor of the Senate where he spoke basically to an empty Senate for eight hours saying we have to stop this, we have to stop giving away money to the rich, that's probably what launched his campaign because that speech went viral, and suddenly all these young people were looking at it and thinking, wow, here's a guy who actually tells it like it is.

So he has certainly stuck to his principles in terms of not making lots of compromises, not becoming part of the Washington establishment. He has gotten a few things done. He was known as the amendment king because he has the best record of anybody in the Senate of proposing amendments to bills that then become law. In order to get a bill passed you have to have allies, it helps to be part of the establishment, in fact you might say it's essential, so he hasn't had a whole lot of bills.

The main bill that he actually got passed, interestingly he got passed in partnership with John McCain, and that was a bill to reform the Veterans Administration Hospital system. In America we don't have national health, we don't have public hospitals, except if you serve in the military, then we have this system of VA hospitals. And Sanders, partly because Vermont has per capita at the highest rate of military participation of any State, so it's a small state but a larger percentage of its young people join the military than any other state. Sanders was appointed to the armed services committee in the Senate and he eventually became chair of the armed services committee. That's pretty unusual for somebody who wasn't even a member of the Democratic Party, but he was by all accounts an incredibly effective chair, very good at working across the aisle with Republicans. And as I said, forged this partnership with John McCain who of course was a prisoner of war in Vietnam and very active on veterans issues, to improve healthcare for veterans. They got that bill passed, they got it passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, and it certainly didn't hurt Sanders in his home state where there are, as I said, a lot of veterans.

Bernie Sanders [archival]: Brothers and sisters, now is not the time for thinking small, now is not the time for the same old same old establishment politics and stale inside-the-beltway ideas. Now is the time for millions of working families to come together to revitalise American democracy, to end the collapse of our middle class, and that once again makes the United States the leader in the world in the fight for economic and social justice, for environmental sanity, and for a world of peace.

DD Guttenplan: In the beginning, Bernie Sanders' candidacy was greeted with kind of laughter and a pat on the head. And even recently, if you read the media arm of Hillary Clinton supporters, so the commentary and columnists who support her, there's a kind of, well, we all think Bernie Sanders was a great thing but of course you shouldn't actually vote for him because he has no chance of winning. You wonder how many times he has to beat Hillary Clinton for that tune to change, because in Iowa he came from very far behind to basically a dead heat. I think you have to go to the third decimal place to find the difference between their totals in Iowa.

And in New Hampshire he came from 40 points behind to beating her by 20 points, and she spent more time in New Hampshire than in any other state except Iowa. So this was not one where she said oh, he's from Vermont, he's from next door, he's going to win, I'm not even going to try. No, she tried very hard in New Hampshire.

If you look at the kind of crowds that Bernie has been able to attract and you look at Hillary who…there's just such an obvious enthusiasm gap. So yes, I think they continue to underestimate not just Bernie…because the thing is, you have to realise, if he wins the nomination, by the time he is inaugurated he will be 75 years old, so he'd be the oldest person ever inaugurated as president. So he has always said it's not about me, it's about us, meaning he is trying to build a movement, to build what he calls a political revolution. We've heard this tune in American politics before. Jesse Jackson said something similar when he was running in the '80s. But it seems more like the case, first of all, that Bernie means it because he knows that he is not going to be able to lead this movement for very much longer.

And secondly, the big change between now and the 1980s is that there is social media. So as one of Bernie's people said to me the other day in Florida, I said, 'Well, what happens after the election?' And he said, 'After the election is the most important part. Whoever wins the election, we have to keep at it.' And I said, 'That's what the rainbow coalition, that's what Jesse Jackson's people used to say.' And they said, 'Yes, but now we've got social media so there's really no excuse.' It's so easy for people to stay in touch with each other, to stay in contact, stay involved. That's what his people at least seem to be hoping will happen.

Interviewer [archival]: What does it mean to be a socialist?

Bernie Sanders [archival]: It means a lot of things. I think for a start and most important it means that you have a vision that this world can be radically different from what it is right now and that what's going on in front of your eyes is crazy, it's not real, it's a phase of history that needn't exist and that some day will pass, and you really can't almost take it seriously that you live in a world where it is considered normal that people go around killing each other. You turn on the television, and there you have people who are living out on the streets or in some places on this planet starving to death while at the same time you have other people who have billions and billions of dollars, more wealth than they are going to be able to use in a million lifetimes. The basic insanity of that, the immorality of that to me is so abhorrent.

Steven Rosenfeld: What it really is is no more than what happened to America during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency, which was called the New Deal. And Roosevelt was elected at the height of the Great Depression and he instituted a series of government programs to basically take control of the economy, put in a floor so that people wouldn't fall below it into just horrible poverty. After Roosevelt, the next person who really did a lot in the same way was Lyndon Johnson who was the President in the 1960s and his domestic program was called the Great Society, and he expanded that safety net. So it's not so radical against the context of American history.

But what has happened in the last 30 years in the States is that there has been a great push by the Republican Party and libertarian elements in the Republican Party to basically say the private sector knows best with everything, so just get governments out of the way and let us do what we need to do. And what it has generally meant is that incomes have stagnated, the people at the very top keep getting wealthier because they put more of their money into investments which are not taxed the same as income, and all of that fast-forwards to today where the same economic analysis that Bernie was giving in the late 1980s is still relevant, and for some reason people really are hearing it.

Bernie Sanders [archival]: Today we live in a nation which is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. But that reality means very little for most of us because almost all of that wealth is owned and controlled by a tiny handful of individuals.

Harry Jaffe: I am flabbergasted. I think that Bernie Sanders himself is flabbergasted. And I think that everyone in his campaign might tell you otherwise, but everybody is in shock. The Democratic Party at large is in shock. Hillary Clinton is totally, totally shocked. And nobody knows quite how to deal with it because it has been a surprise to everyone. And as I live and breathe, Sanders is as surprised as anybody else.

It really boils down to this; no one in this political establishment in the United States had any idea that the level of unrest among the voting populace was as intense as it is for Republicans and for Democrats. And I think that a lot of Americans are very angry at the campaign contribution system that we now have where very rich people can control candidates and elections. I think that a lot of Americans are angry at the level of wealth that has been amassed by a very few people. It really is capitalism gone awry.

Bernie Sanders [archival]: In America we now have more income and wealth inequality than any other major country on Earth, and the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider and wider.

Harry Jaffe: And you have a socialist, because Bernie Sanders is a socialist, who comes up and gets on a microphone and speaks the truth. And Bernie Sanders may be a lot of things and he may not be a lot of things. He is an improbable candidate. He is 74 years old, he is white-haired, kind of funny looking, and he talks like a Brooklyn guy, like a deli guy, but by god he speaks truth. And that has hit home with a lot of Americans. I think that the political establishment in the United States is just flabbergasted.

Steven Rosenfeld: I think he's going to fight super hard and will go to the Democratic convention with a…if he doesn't have enough delegates to win he will go there with hundreds and hundreds of delegates to try to make a symbolic statement. I think Hillary is still the favourite, but I think that the energy and the passion is with him, and he has made a career out of having people underestimate him, and I think we are seeing that again now.

DD Guttenplan: People who assume that Bernie Sanders has no chance all assume that Hillary Clinton is somehow magically electable, and I think people really need to take a close look at all of the incredible baggage that Hillary Clinton brings along with her, not just people's long-standing dislike of the Clintons, but also things like whether she is going to be indicted by the FBI for having classified material in her home server. What's going to happen with various investigations? What's going to happen with the Clinton Foundation when the Republicans start making hay about the foreign oligarchs who gave money to the Clinton Foundation and perhaps got favourable treatment from the State Department while she was Secretary of State. In other words, there's a whole lot of stuff there, there's a whole lot of pigeons that might come home to roost. And I don't think there is anybody, even Hillary Clinton's biggest partisan, who thinks that if she wins the nomination it's going to be an easy ride or you're not going to keep biting your nails right up until the election. Is Sanders still a long shot? Yes, definitely. Do I think it's possible? Well, we'll see.

Annabelle Quince: DD Guttenplan, editor at large for The Nation magazine. My other guests were Steven Rosenfeld, author of Making History in Vermont, and Harry Jaffe, the author of Why Bernie Sanders Matters.

Today's sound engineer is Jennifer Parsonage. I'm Annabelle Quince and this is Rear Vision on RN.

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