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Planks opposing affirmative action, busing, the Equal Rights Amendment, legal abortion, gun control, and the penalization of segregated schools by “ IRS bureaucrats” won him a notable admirer: Bill Wilkinson, Imperial Wizard of the militant Klan group The Invisible Empire, who gushed that the platform read “as if it were written by a Klansman.” In his convention speech, Reagan had warned of the danger of government and “its great power to harm us,” even as he proposed a more aggressive anti-Soviet policy and massive increase in military spending. Under Reagan, the GOP’s platform read like a wish list for the radical right, emphasizing above all slashing taxes and government spending. The previous year had closed with a landslide presidential victory for Ronald Reagan, a movement conservative weaned on proto-libertarian Austrian economics and rabidly anti-communist literature, who wanted to “make America great again,” and had once been considered too right-wing to be electable. On its face, 1981 was a strange year for a self-proclaimed socialist to take power anywhere in the United States. And the cycle of setback, persistence, and eventual victory that characterized his battle with ETV would be transplanted to Burlington’s City Hall. Yet within two years, the four-time also-ran and socialist documentarian who complained that the airwaves were inhospitable to “anything that deals with class conflict” would be in exactly that position - mayor of Burlington. And Sanders would make more films for the broadcaster, including a no-frills look at poverty in Vermont he hoped would show people “the need to stand together, to organize, and to fight.” None of this was exactly the resume of a typical politician, even one with his eye on running a small city of thirty-seven thousand. The Debs film eventually did run, once the strike was over. But Sanders’s film still didn’t air - he refused to let it run while ETV production workers were on strike, calling the idea “an insult to memory.” More importantly, it formed a board made up of community groups like farmers, feminists, artists, and the poor to make decisions about public television. In the face of its obstinacy, Sanders and others formed Concerned Citizens on ETV, pressuring management to show more locally made content and hand greater say over its programming to the public.īefore long, ETV caved on the Debs film. Sanders viewed that as a cover for ideological objections. There was just one problem: Vermont Educational Television (ETV) wouldn’t show it.ĮTV claimed its decision was made on quality grounds. By 1979, he had moved to video, producing his magnum opus: a half-hour-long documentary about socialist Eugene Debs, the twentieth-century union organizer who won a million votes from prison in the 1920 presidential election.
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With election campaigns in the rearview mirror, he decided to try his hand at filmmaking, cofounding an educational nonprofit and driving all over New England in sleet or snow, selling cheaply produced film strips directly to schools. Sanders had been many things since moving to Vermont for good in 1968: carpenter, freelance writer, and, for a time, unemployed. Charging that the Liberty Union had broken promises to stay active in the “struggles of the working people against the banks and corporations which own and control Vermont and the nation,” Sanders had left the party after his best ever showing, turning his focus toward elbowing his way onto the airwaves. The thirty-eight-year-old Sanders had seemed to exit gracefully from electoral politics in 1977, having run four times under the Liberty Union banner since 1972, twice each for governor and Senate, coming a distant third each time. But the target of his ire was, uncharacteristically, not a major corporation or one of its political allies - it was the state’s public broadcaster. It was 1979 and Bernie Sanders was, as he so often would be for the next forty years, in the middle of a fight.