By Sam Frizell
The man who brought fire back to the Democratic Party
Was it Opposite Day at Liberty University? Here was Bernie Sanders, who spent his 20s preaching sexual liberation and social revolution, taking the stage to speak to a student body of fresh-faced Christian conservatives at the school founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell. Liberty students pay a $25 fine for “attendance at a dance” and $50 for “visiting alone” off campus with a member of the opposite sex. At 74, Sanders was an old man among young people, a self-described “democratic socialist” in the boiler room of the Christian right. And you could argue that his presence was the opposite of clever. After all, why was this overachieving underdog of the Democratic Party–the breakout star of a season that was supposed to be all about Hillary–stumping for votes in a place where he had virtually no chance of finding them?
Why does a missionary venture out among the heathen? Bernard Sanders, a paint seller’s son from Flatbush, an early-’60s campus radical, a rumpled transplant to progressive Vermont who worked his way gradually up a small ladder in a small state to become the unlikely embodiment of a very large yearning–leads with his heart and his sermons. He seeks conversions, not just votes.
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