Opinion David Moats: Bernie Sanders and the long river of history

[Uncle Joe]

Dan Chiasson’s portrait of Bernie Sanders places the senator’s rise within the turbulent history of Burlington and Vermont.

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Sanders’s broad appeal in Vermont is instructive, and Democrats today should pay attention. Early on, he won the support of poor rural voters in the Northeast Kingdom, who would later vote for Donald Trump. When he went into the trailer parks or housing projects, people could tell he knew what poverty was and that he shared their anger at so-called elites. Chiasson describes the libertarian streak in Sanders’s politics — he, too, was wary of big government because he had seen how government often aligns itself with corporations and millionaires. It had been happening in Burlington.

People often say that Sanders is saying the same thing today that he was saying 50 years ago — about big business and billionaires, about health care and the poor. And that may be the secret of his success. Chiasson quotes author Fintan O’Toole, who wrote that Sanders’s “primary mode is repetition, not variation.”

Chiasson cites the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who famously said, “You can never step into the same river twice.” Heraclitus also said, “All things flow.”

In Vermont politics, things have flowed from Republican dominance among rural conservatives to the present moment. But even if the river has continued to flow, Sanders has plunged the same foot in, again and again. He was recently campaigning in California, urging voters there to pass a tax on the rich. It’s not a new idea. And yet as the river has flowed, Sanders’s dire prophecies in the 1970s and 1980s, warning about economic inequality and corporate dominance, are ever more germane.

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https://vtdigger.org/2026/03/09/david-moats-bernie-sanders-and-the-long-river-of-history/