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By the pool at their house, which fronts a golf course whose sprinklers turn on every ten minutes during the worst drought in California history, the calls and messages fill me with guilt. I recall the times in fall 2011, during the occupation of Philadelphia’s City Hall, when I’d do something frivolous, like browse in a bookstore, and be overcome by the shame that attaches to any private activity undertaken in a moment of public upheaval. Or worse, the feeling that intellectual work, even in the service of politics, is useless — that the only thing to do is to give yourself over entirely to the cause.
She quickly retrains me: Remember to ring the doorbell and also knock, sometimes the bell doesn’t work, try knocking twice; if they don’t know who they’re voting for, try to persuade them; if they’re voting for Hillary, leave them alone (that’s between them and their rotten, cynical conscience, she neglects to add); here’s the list of Sanders’s policies ($15 minimum wage, single-payer health insurance, free higher public education, antifracking, all of it true but not to the point — the point is he’s the first candidate in two generations who is not a neoliberal, the first in decades to call himself a socialist, running as a Democrat but, bless him, not one). In the moment, I have trouble recalling why I canvassed for Obama, or what I said in his favor. The virtue of the Sanders platform is that I have no trouble articulating what he believes, because much of what he believes, I believe. I can say what I think, for the most part, and it comes out sounding like what Sanders thinks. It occurs to me that I have never felt this way about national electoral politics in my life.
This conversation feels like a victory and inaugurates a string of houses — closer now to South Philadelphia — where nearly everyone is voting for Sanders. People seem to enjoy keeping me in suspense. “Can I ask if you plan to vote on April 26th in the Democratic primary?” “Yes, you can.” “Uh. Are you planning to vote on April 26th in the Democratic primary?” “Yes, I am.” “Right. Can I ask who you’re voting for?” “Yes, you can.” “OK. Who are you voting for?” “BERNIE SANDERS!!!” They shake my hand and send me on my way. I mark box after box: “Strong Sanders.”
It seems implausible, entire blocks voting for this weirdo. I can barely believe it, and it occurs to me that I’ve been thinking of my support for Sanders as a private obsession, a strange fascination unconnected to the preferences and actions of most people. Even the millions of votes cast for him so far seem spectral to me, mere data, unrelated to everyday life. Yet here were strangers who seemed to believe more or less the same insane things I believe, things I usually have trouble uttering, let alone defending, in polite company. The high this gives me is inspiring, and for the first time I begin to fantasize, blithely, about what it would be like for Bernie Sanders, self-described democratic socialist, to become President.
After I quit volunteering for the union, I found myself spending afternoons weeping through TV screenings of Norma Rae. I missed the commitments I had spent years building. To stand up in the textile factory, to raise the ragged placard with the word UNION on it. To stand up to everyone around you. To spend nights and weekends in a kind of exhausted frenzy, making hundreds of phone calls, digging deep into the news archives for a bit of telling data that would help you screw the bosses, driving to one home after another, one workplace after another, pleading with workers, pleading with everyone you knew but, in truth, with yourself, that there was nothing more important, that your work, that laundry and cooking, would all have to wait for this higher cause . . . was there anything greater? I missed it like a limb.