US senator Bernie Sanders on socialism and Donald Trump
Over cakes in Dublin, he talks about the GOP, the left, and why Trump is ‘actually quite smart’
A Sunday quiet reigns at the Irish president’s vast white mansion in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. Outside the pad, where British viceroys once lived, a couple of presidential aides, beautifully dressed soldiers and I stand waiting for US Senator Bernie Sanders to arrive. There is gentle Irish banter. Cows watch from the meadow opposite. It’s relaxing. Since my taxi motored through the presidential gates, nobody has asked me for ID or put me through a scanner or even patted me down.
Sanders’ car pulls up (brilliantly, his Irish driver is called Bernie Saunders) and the senator clambers out, his shoulders hunched, his suit crumpled, his strands of white hair unkempt, not the standard American politician with Botox and a hair transplant. Today he is tieless, too: he has been assured that Irish president Michael D Higgins won’t mind. The tiny Higgins appears, dispensing handshakes and hugs.
Sanders is the most popular current politician in the US, according to a Harvard-Harris survey in April for American political website The Hill. Many polls suggest that the 75-year-old independent leftwing Senator from Vermont would have beaten Donald Trump in last year’s US election, if only he had got past Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries. For all the talk about rightwing populism, “Bernie” has become the cult hero of an equally surprising new-old international movement: socialism. Dublin, where he will kick off the Dalkey Book Festival, is the last leg of a European tour where he has been speaking to (or yelling at) packed crowds.
Inside Higgins’ mansion, Sanders settles into a sofa from Versailles (a gift from some French president), and listens to a group of locals lecture him on Ireland’s oligarchy, income divides and corporate-controlled media. “These issues, they are in all countries,” he observes.
Afterwards Higgins comes out to wave us off like a kindly grandfather. But traffic into central Dublin is terrible. It is decided that our two cars need an official escort. A chatty policeman shows up on a motorbike, turns on his sirens, and zigzags us through traffic jams, imperiously waving away stray cars. It’s magic. I sit alone on the back seat of my car, watching Dubliners at bus stops, British stag and hen parties, and a priest in a dog collar scrutinise me, wondering who this superstar might be. It’s a taste of Sanders’ new life.
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On arrival at the Westbury Hotel, though, a packed lobby ignores Sanders. Chinese tourists have clearly not yet “felt the Bern”, and I see only one local turn in half-recognition. Sanders drops his bags in his room, then joins me in the hotel restaurant, Wilde, where we have a table at the back shielded by curtains. A log fire is burning — a bit much for June, even in a country without a summer.
“Tea would be wonderful,” Sanders tells the waiter. He means the drink, not the meal. Eating doesn’t seem to have occurred to him so, to jolly things along, I order us plates of cakes and fruit. I have been warned that Sanders hates anything so trivial as talking about himself, or looking back, or discussing whether he will run for president in 2020, aged 79. What he likes is talking policy. So I plunge in.
He said after last year’s election that if Trump was sincere about his campaign promises to help the working class, Sanders was willing to work with him. Is it now clear that Trump wasn’t — ?
“Yes, I think it is very clear,” interrupts that famous throwback Brooklyn accent, product of cramped, rent-controlled apartment 2C on East 26th Street. “During his campaign, Trump said some very interesting things. Unfortunately his policies have been diametrically in opposition to what he said. I think essentially he lied on almost every major issue. And the clearest examples are the two major proposals in the last month, the healthcare proposal and, even worse, the budget.”
Staring into the middle distance, he recites the litany: the Republican healthcare plan, already passed by the US House of Representatives, would throw 23m people off health insurance. Trump’s proposed budget, says Sanders, “is the most outrageous transfer of wealth from working people to the top 1 per cent that we have ever seen. It’s a budget that’s not going to go anyplace.”
Sanders considers the Republican party the creature of billionaire donors such as the industrialist Koch brothers. Does he think Trump is an ignoramus who simply wandered into that set-up?
“No, I think Trump is actually quite smart — in his own way and for his own reasons. He may not know a lot about foreign policy or healthcare, but he is not a dumb man by any means. I think what Trump is doing is filling the agenda of people like the Koch brothers: essentially doing away with every major programme passed since Franklin D Roosevelt that would help working people, the elderly, children, the sick and the poor, and at the same time providing massive tax breaks to the rich and large corporations. In this budget, Trump did not propose cuts to social security [the American retirement programme], but I have zero doubt that will be coming down the pike.”
Sanders considers today’s Republicans an “extreme right” party. In the past, he says, “centre-right” Republicans such as Dwight D Eisenhower competed with conservative Republicans. “What you have now are, in a sense, rightwing Republicans competing with extreme rightwing Republicans.” Still, he adds: “A lot of Republicans in the House and Senate are not indecent human beings.”
Such as who?
“I don’t want to get into names. I’ll get them into trouble. You see people like John McCain speaking out on this or that issue.”
When I mention that many Europeans see Trump’s US as a rogue state, Sanders gets so excited that he spills his tea. Mopping distractedly, he cautions: “What I would say to our European friends is not to confuse Donald Trump with the people of the United States.” And here Sanders gets to the essence of his self-understanding: that he himself, far from being a radical leftist, speaks for the American silent majority. He believes his socialism is mainstream.
“Here’s what I think is going on. If you were to tell Americans that if you are 70 and the doctor diagnoses you with cancer, that there should not be a healthcare programme to protect you, 90 per cent of people say, ‘You’re out of your mind, you want to get rid of Medicare? What are you talking about? You want to get rid of federal aid to education? That’s nonsense.’ ” He thinks Republicans can win elections only through massive spending on campaigns that highlight personality rather than issues.
His own campaign was different: “We started off with no political organisation. None. I don’t believe I knew one person in the state of Iowa.” When I remark that the notion of a self-described socialist winning the White House initially seemed insane, he cuts me off: “It was not insane.”
Was there a moment when he thought he might actually win? “Well, you go and you speak to 25,000, 30,000 people and you think it’s real. One of the beautiful things is we would literally read in the newspapers about rallies and events and activities taking place in the state that we had zero to do with. I wish I could tell you it was a brilliant campaign organising all this. It wasn’t. It was a lot of spontaneous activities, which was, in retrospect, quite extraordinary.”
Sanders gets to Europe regularly. His 82-year-old brother Larry has lived in Oxford since the 1960s and this week stood, with Sanders’ endorsement, as a Green candidate in the UK’s parliamentary elections. When I suggest that Europe has done better than the US at providing his desired welfare state, Sanders agrees: “One of the reasons I’m here is, America has an extraordinary history and there’s a whole lot that we do that is very good. I’m proud of that. But in essence . . . ”
Just then two waiters arrive laden with cakes and fruit. “Oh my God, you think that’s enough food?” marvels Sanders. “As long as the Financial Times is paying! Simon, do you want some of this? Jam and butter and . . . ”
I say the presidential campaign was disgusting, tawdry and stupid. Sanders is delighted: ‘Take what you said, give it to me and put quotes around it’
Then he almost instantly forgets the food, and resumes talking nonstop. “Many Americans simply do not know that the social welfare system in America is so much weaker than in Europe. It has to do a lot with corporate media, has a lot to do with a two-party system which doesn’t really ask hard questions. Do you know how much it costs to go to university here, where we sit right now? It’s free. Do you think people in the US know that? People will be going, ‘Oh, Bernie, you’re radical.’ No. Much of what I propose is already in existence in many countries.”
So Europe helped shape his beliefs? “Yes. Europe and my belief that every person is entitled to basic human rights.”
I place the cake platter in front of him, in vain: the revolution doesn’t stop for tea. Despite Trump, Sanders describes the US moving his way: the millions on the streets protesting against the president, the California state senate voting last week for a single-payer universal healthcare system, New York’s decision to scrap tuition fees for less well-off students at state universities, and the overwhelming support he got from America’s under-40s in the Democratic primaries. “The younger generation in America is the least prejudiced in terms of race, gender, homophobia. It is a very open generation, a bright generation, a generation that I believe is prepared to think big and not just nibble around the edges.” It feels trivial to interrupt by asking him to pass the jam, so I pick off bits of plain scone with my left hand while fixing my gaze on him.
Sanders wants the “clearly failing” Democratic party to move left in response to the popular mood. The trend is international, he adds. He sees the British and French socialists Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (not to mention Pope Francis) as soulmates.
He is aching to run off but before I release him, I ask him why — as someone who’s been running for office for 40 years and must have a healthy ego — he’s so reluctant to talk about himself. “Year after year after year, there is more discussion about what I call political gossip, or personality. You know, ‘Let’s talk about Donald Trump and his life, about Hillary Clinton and her life’, rather than, ‘Gee, why are we the only major country not to have healthcare for all?’ I’m not running for dictator. I have ideas and I want to disseminate those ideas.”
I say the presidential campaign was mostly disgusting, tawdry and stupid. Sanders is delighted: “Take what you said, give it to me and put quotes around it.” He continues: “This is not a personality contest. Give you an example. George W Bush, who I did not know well, bumped into him now and then in the nature of things, happens to be a very nice guy. He’s funny, I don’t think he’s mean-spirited. His wife is I think a very decent person. Very nice daughters. He was one of the worst presidents in the history of America.
“Sometimes nice people do terrible, terrible things. And sometimes people who are not so nice — LBJ [President Lyndon B Johnson], my God, he was brutish in many ways, right? Yet he was one of the most progressive presidents in history.”
The waiters remove our delicious food almost untouched. Then Sanders and I cross the lobby to a room where two Irish genealogists are waiting with his ancestral chart, something the festival organisers used to lure his wife Jane (and thus Sanders himself) to Ireland. I tease him: “This is when you find out you’re not Jewish.” He guffaws: “This could be the moment of a lifetime.” His father was a Polish-Jewish paint salesman, his mother a Jewish New Yorker, their marriage often tense over lack of money. We walk in as a genealogist hands Jane (born O’Meara) an ancient donkey’s shoe unearthed on her ancestral Irish farmstead. Sanders beams: he knows what this means to her. Now it’s his turn. He sits down at the table where the mammoth chart is spread out. Instantly he points to the photograph identified as his mother and objects: “This is my mother’s sister.”
Jane intervenes: “No, it’s your mom.”
Sanders compromises: “She is very beautiful. I have not seen that photograph. This may be something I didn’t see.”
He scans the other pictures: “Uncle Sol — Uncle Willie we called him — lived in the same house that I did. Max — the only one in the family who actually made some money.”
He studies a photo of the large ancestral house in Slopnice, Poland, and a picture of the SS Lapland, the ship in which his father Eli sailed from Belgium to the US in 1921. The genealogist recites the fate of the relatives who stayed in Slopnice: “The Nazis came and your father’s half-brother was shot in the town square, in 1941.”
“Yep,” says Sanders.
The genealogist continues: “And his 11-year-old daughter Elena was killed as well.” He trails off awkwardly: “So every family has its story to tell.”
Sanders tells us that he and his brother went to meet the mayor of Slopnice, whose father remembered being at school with Elena. “The father said, ‘She was a beautiful little girl and she didn’t look Jewish. But they took her anyway.’ ”
Sanders rejects the American tradition in which every candidate must recount (or make up) some mawkish autobiographical creation myth, but here is his, unbidden. Born the year his father’s family was murdered, he grew up knowing that government mattered. Mentally, he never inhabited the consumerist postwar US in which Trump grew up. By 1963, Sanders was being dragged off by police after demonstrating against school segregation in Chicago. (Despite this, during the Democratic primaries some Clinton supporters accused him of not caring enough about black rights.)
His sense of purpose can make him exhausting company, Jane tells me later. “During the campaign, every three weeks he took a day off. Possibly. Or at least half a day. He’ll walk in after a long day and the grandkids will say, ‘Grandpa, can we play baseball?’ He’ll say, ‘Give me a minute’, and it will be literally a minute and he will be out playing baseball for over an hour.”
That evening Sanders speaks at a Dublin theatre. Here is a reversal of history: a wealthy Irish crowd, many of whose forebears emigrated to the US to escape poverty, has come to hear about poor Americans without health insurance. The 2,200 tickets sold out online in two minutes. For two hours, Sanders bellows facts about rich and poor. The standing ovations keep coming. Afterwards, at a late dinner, he interrogates his hosts about the Irish university funding system.
Simon Kuper is an FT columnist.
