Bernie’s Red Vermont, por Matthew Zeitlin (The New Republic):
How Sanders’s brand of American socialism emerged from the crucible of the Green Mountain State’s squabbling counterculture (...)
The Citizens Party was just one of the left-wing groups partially populated by former members of Sanders’s old Liberty Union Party, which he had joined in 1971, after first moving to the state in 1968. Vermont, despite being one of the most Republican states in the country at the time, had seen its demographics and culture shift in the 1960s and ’70s, opening up the space for more radical political movements at the high tide of protests against the Vietnam War.
What was radical then, in some respects, might sound all too familiar to big-city lifestyle liberals or residents of the Hudson Valley. “A counterculture population has emerged in Vermont, consisting of ex-urbanites who have chosen the rustic life, busying themselves with gardening, chopping wood, baking bread, weaving, doing yoga and astrology, smoking pot, and eating organic foods,” Michael Parenti, a Liberty Union member who had been denied tenure at the University of Vermont because of his radical politics, wrote in a 1975 essay.
But Liberty Union was, at its core, a left-wing, antiwar, anti-establishment grouping. It was able, as Parenti wrote, to garner the support of “many low-income, working class people,” and its support was “as high as 25 percent” in poor parts of Burlington. In 1974, at the height of the party’s influence, it ran 43 candidates locally and statewide and was getting between 5 and 7 percent of vote. It was able to peel off a few union locals traditionally allied with the Democratic Party, and even got a union worker, at the urging of Sanders, to run for lieutenant governor.
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