10 December 2015

Ice-Cream and Revolution

by J R Thomas

North of Waterbury, Vermont, on the road to Stowe is an American shrine.  Not the Von Trapp Family Lodge and Von Trapp Timeshare Homes (and Von Trapp Brewery and Von Trapp Austrian Restaurant and and and…).  If you get there you have gone too far north.  But there is not much danger of that; for this shrine will draw you in and hold you.  And later you will emerge, converted, a believer, a devotee, and an addict.  And overweight.   For this is a shrine to one of life’s greatest pleasures; ice-cream.  Ben and Jerry’s Ice-Cream, now taking over the world, but Waterbury, Vermont is its spiritual home, in the factory that lies at the heart of the sweet cold dream.

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield came here in the 1970’s, a couple of hippy music fans with no money.  They set up a mobile bagel business.  It failed.  They started again at a disused gas station, making and selling ice-cream.  The rest you probably know.  They are the American dream.  They are also that more complex vision, the Vermont dream.  Vermont has a great spirit of enterprise, but it also has a sense of rebellion, of social action, of going down the highway in the opposite direction to most Americans.  They do things differently in the mountains and great forests of Vermont.  And now Bernie Sanders, unlikely second in the polls for the Democratic Presidential nomination, is making Vermontian non-conformity even more notable.

Like a lot of Vermonters, including Ben and Jerry, Bernie came there from elsewhere.  He was born in New York in 1941 and brought up there in a Jewish family, not in poverty, but certainly in reduced circumstances.  He went to the University of Chicago, where in the 1960’s he became a political activist and campaigner.  In the late 1960’s he moved to Vermont, an odd move, you might think, for an urban leftie, but Vermont was a centre of left wing thinking and he found himself among sympathetic thinkers.  (In the same way that the wilder parts of the Rocky Mountain states attract free thinkers of the right, Vermont is the unlikely magnet for those on the left.)

Bernie did not sit around smoking and chatting, as many attracted to the Green Mountain State tend to.  He lived very modestly (getting married and later divorced and having a son with a girlfriend), travelled, spent time on a kibbutz, worked on short term jobs, mostly in education, and built political connections in Vermont.  In the 1970’s he ran twice for Governor of the state and twice for the US Senate for Liberty Union Party (not to be confused, very much not to be confused, with the Libertarian Party).

He resigned from that and in 1981 ran as an independent (quietly a “socialist independent”) candidate for Mayor of Burlington (an executive role).  He won, and went on to win three more times.  He was a very popular mayor, and his success there built his reputation and foundations for his subsequent political career.  Burlington was a run-down city with big unemployment problems; the previous mayor was trying to make tie-ups with big developers to build office districts and a new freeway on the Lake Champlain waterfront.  Bernie stopped all that, attracted lots of smaller-start up businesses, ran the city with great efficiency, and rebuilt the waterfront with parks and walkways to integrate it into the urban centre.  Burlington boomed, and Sander’s reputation, at least locally, was made.

In 1990, at the second attempt, he was elected to Congress as a representative for Vermont, as an Independent, the only one in Congress; and he held the seat, mostly with large majorities until he was elected Senator for the state in 2006, being re-elected in 2012 with a remarkable 71% of the vote – in Vermont he has a truly cross-party appeal.

Both as a Representative and as Senator, Sanders was able to reach agreement with the national Democrat party that they would endorse him, which apart from the direct advantage of Democrat approval, had the extra benefit that no local Democrat running against him would receive national funding.  In return, although Sanders wears his Independent label proudly, and even an Independent Socialist one sometimes, he has been as loyal a Democrat supporter in both Houses as many a lifelong fully signed up member.  Indeed, he rarely votes against the party caucus at all, and when he does he is often reflecting Vermont sensitivities.

The most surprising of these is on gun control.  Sanders has always been pro gun, though subject to improved enquiries on fitness to own.  He has confirmed this in the past few days after the California shootings, calling for improved mental health support and treatment but underscoring the right to bear arms.  It is difficult to imagine his ostensibly UK equivalent, Jeremy Corbyn, taking quite the same approach to the public holding guns.

Which brings us to the “compare and contrast” section of this piece.  Corbyn and Sanders do have a superficially very similar profile.  They are of a similar age, certainly same generation, have complex marital arrangements, are both proud to be called socialists, and have backgrounds in education when needing to earn the honest penny.  They found their way to mainstream politics through some fairly fringe political organisations.  They are both profoundly anti-war, whole life as it were, not just over recent events, both finding themselves somewhat at odds with their parties over their strongly held views on this subject.

After that one starts to search about in vain for similarities and note the very significant differences.  Bernie is not really a rebel.  He has certainly kept himself very firmly outside mainstream party politics, whilst Jeremy has worked to influence the Labour party within.  But Bernie is a skilled negotiator always happy to take the longer view, to do a deal to secure an advantageous position overall.  Jeremy is a man of very pronounced deep-set principles – a man not for turning.

And Bernie has always enjoyed occupation of office, from Mayor of Burlington to the clutch of Senate committee appointments he holds (he is a very skilled and popular committee man) – including, remarkably for a non-Democrat, senior minority member on the Senate Budget Committee.  Still less can one imagine Mr Corbyn presenting to the legislature a report aimed at “rebuilding the disappearing middle class” as Bernie did earlier this year – a theme he has pursued on many occasions over the years.

In office he has shown himself a skilled executive and operator.  Bernie is very good at getting things done.  His restoration of the heartland of Burlington showed that, and there is no doubt he is well organised and effective, both as a political operator, and as leader of various groups over the years.  Whether Mr Corbyn has such skills we cannot really say, but his start as Labour party leader shows, at the least, a lack of experience in this area.

Could Bernie become President?  He has to seize the nomination first.  He is running much more strongly than was ever expected and the Huffington Post poll of polls shows him at 32/36% against Mrs Clinton on 56/60% (the balance is mostly undecided, there is nobody else in this race).  Iowa is what everybody is looking at at the moment and there the lead narrows, to Mrs C on around 50% to Mr S on about 40%.  That is not great for Hillary, an internationally known candidate running against a nominal independent.  In New Hampshire they are neck and neck.  You might expect Bernie to be doing well there, as neighbouring state to Vermont, but New Hampshire has a very different voter profile to Vermont, though Bernie’s personal popularity must be helping.

Hillary has to win Iowa to be credible; she will get away with losing New Hampshire if she can scoop up Iowa; but if she can’t win either, Bernie must be in for the nomination with a strong chance.  Maybe the time will then be for Mr Corbyn to cross the Atlantic for some independent advice in Vermont – and some serious ice-cream.