Can empathy beat fascism?

Can empathy fight fascism? The Vermont senator is trying

Senator Bernie Sanders is trying to do something right now.

Which, right off the bat, distinguishes him from many of his colleagues.

He is traveling across the country, including to very red places, and speaking out against the Trump-Musk oligarchy.

In video clips that have gone viral, he has been doing a striking thing on this tour: soliciting audience accounts of the lived experience of pain and hardship in America.

Six years ago, when I wrote a TIME magazine cover about Sanders’s second run for the presidency, I first noticed what was then a new approach of asking for citizen testimonies and then synthesizing what he was hearing into a bigger narrative.

It was something of a departure for a man who is not necessarily the most touchy-feely guy you’ve ever met. I tried to dig in to what Sanders was doing, and why. I spoke to many of his advisers and his wife and him. What I learned is excerpted below.

It was, in short, that he was trying to help citizens better connect their individual pain to the larger forces misgoverning the country.

And it appears now that he is doing it again. While many are banging the drum about fascism and a coup and all the rest, Sanders is reminding us that connecting those issues to the emotional life of voters is vital.

Oligarchy and autocracy and the like are not textbook concepts. They make life suck.

---

Feel the Pain

If the keyword of Bernie 2016 was rigged, Bernie 2020 is about pain. It is a campaign about stress and anxiety, about tens of millions of people suffering alone, together.

I traveled some 6,000 miles with Sanders this spring, by bus, plane and van: Manhattan; Moline, Ill.; Davenport and Muscatine and Burlington and Fairfield and Oskaloosa, Iowa; Las Vegas; Washington; Madison, Wis.; Gary, Ind.; Coopersville and Warren and Detroit, Mich.; Lordstown, Ohio; Pittsburgh and Bethlehem, Pa. Talk of a rigged system has hardly vanished, but now Sanders focuses on the human toll of a rigged system, rather than just the profiteering and exploitation and lobbying and campaign contributions he is famous for decrying. As one staffer explained, Sanders is “assigning an emotion” to the rigging. He is, in this and other ways, learning to be personal.

“From the very beginning, he was always concerned about policy. Always concerned about making a meaningful difference. He didn’t have time for the niceties,” Jane Sanders, the Senator’s wife and closest adviser, told me. “He has, over time, really become more—he’s still very issue oriented, but he’s placing focus on the people and the impact that those policies have.”

That new focus was evident this spring in a less familiar event format for Sanders: intimate, almost confessional town halls. A panel of three or four ordinary citizens would share stories of their hardships, and others in the audience would share their own tales, and Sanders would respond with a mix of awkward sympathy, synthesis of their situations and his stump speech.

In the theater of a Burlington, Iowa, school one afternoon, three panelists, all women, sat onstage with Sanders. The first, Carrie Duncan, spoke of her trouble getting health insurance: not having coverage when she worked in a school cafeteria in a nonunion job, getting coverage when she landed a union job in an ammunition plant and then losing it again because of rising costs. “The fat cats continue to grow richer by drinking from the big bowls of cream that us little cats get for them,” she said. “It’s time to make the fat cats meow!” A nurse practitioner named Teresa Krueger spoke of living with Type 1 diabetes and her work caring for patients with that condition, many of whom cannot afford insulin, which has surged in price over recent years.

Then came Pati French. “I’ve been married for 26 years and had three great kids,” she said. “We have had a good life. We have made lots of memories.” Then she told the story of her son. Trevor was into music and politics, and in 2016 he canvassed for Sanders. He also had a pill addiction. He struggled and then he got help and got sober and was seven months clean with his own job and apartment and was proud of himself. Then he felt a surge of anxiety, the old demons returning, and went to a clinic and got 140 pills and instructions to go see a counselor when a vacancy came up. But he didn’t get in before an accidental overdose killed him. “We have never been the same,” French said. Sanders, turning bright red and somber with emotion, reached out and gave her a few comforting pats.

The audience began to give their testimonies. A woman spoke of the dearth of mental health care resources and how she had lost two of her friends to suicide and seen others struggle to get help—“including myself, who I have almost lost many times.” A man who works at McDonald’s spoke of scraping by on nine bucks an hour. A man from the local steel plant spoke of jobs vanishing to India and the Czech Republic. And a woman who grew up on a family farm spoke of crop prices falling and bankruptcies climbing.

As these stories and emotions poured in, they landed on the shoulders of a man who is, depending on whom you ask, a person of great empathy or a gruff curmudgeon. “I think everybody thinks I’m very somber and very angry and very, very serious,” Sanders told me in Ohio, “which is half true.” Faced with these testimonies of struggle, Sanders doesn’t usually do what other leaders do in our therapeutic culture: doesn’t hug people, tell them he feels their pain, ask follow-up questions about how the family is doing. What he does with their pain is analyze it; contextualize it; connect it to laws and agencies and instances of greed they may not know about; and offer it back to them as steaming, righteous, evidence-based anger. People tell him of the bill they can’t pay that keeps them awake, and he tells them that the chief executive of the local insurance company makes however-many million. Throwing percentages at them like little darts, he gives them the statistics that might explain their pain, gives them a thesis to connect the dots of their lives. He teaches them to look at themselves in a new way—systemically.

“There’s a lot of individual credit and blame in a capitalist society,” Jane Sanders told me. She described Bernie’s message in the town halls as: “You know, this is not an individual failure that you’re having trouble meeting your bills, or that your health has suffered because you can’t afford health care. He tries to give them a context that says, ‘Hey, stop blaming yourself. Start thinking about how you, in a democracy, can help change the system.’”

After a few of these town halls, Sanders’ own stoicism makes more sense. He begins to seem almost a secular priest: People come to him with stories of despair, and he lifts their pain up into the air, to a place where it is no longer personal but something civic. He gives them the language and information to know it isn’t their fault. His speeches are like that hug in Good Will Hunting. It’s not your fault; it’s not your fault. The system did this. Big corporations did this. A bought-and-paid-for government did this. He connects their pain to the pain of others, and in the process that pain is remade, almost transubstantiated, into a sweeping case against a corrupt system. The priest, in this metaphor, doesn’t reveal himself because his job is to float above his own feelings, own needs, own desire to be liked. His job is to make space for, make sense of and make use of your pain.

Read the full story in TIME here: