Go knock on some doors; Bernie Sanders sounds off.

Bernie Sanders thinks the American left should put down the cappuccino and start going door-to-door explaining that class is the issue and that socialism really can work in America.

"It is good to sit in the coffee shops among all the radicals and talk about all the things that we should do," says Sanders, the former mayor of Burlington, Vermont, who this fall will seek his fourth term as the only independent socialist in the U.S. House. "But then we want to leave the coffee shop, we want to go to the working-class community, and then we want to knock on those doors and talk to those folks, and get their support for a political movement. I'm much more interested in that aspect than the coffee-shop talk."

In the face of the most rightwing Republican Congress since the 1940s, a Democratic Party that has embraced Wall Street, and a rising tide of voter disenchantment that as often as not expresses itself in votes for billionaire "populists" and rightwing commentators turned "tribunes of the working class," Sanders says that progressives can no longer afford to sit on the sidelines of the political process.

It is time, he says, to get down to the business of engaging the broad American electorate in discussions of class and economic democracy.

"If you cannot communicate with ordinary people, then you're not going to have a serious effort. And that means getting involved in school-board elections and city-council elections and getting out there where people live," says Sanders, the most politically successful socialist in American politics since the 1920s.

Sanders cautions progressives not to be put off by some of the attitudes that they will encounter.

"You and I can sit around and make all these wonderful analyses, but if you cannot leave and then knock on doors and be able to talk to people who might have sexist ideas, or might have racist ideas, or might have homophobic ideas, it isn't going to work. You can't say, `This person is a homophobe, this person's a sexist. I just can't communicate with them. I refuse to talk to that person.' You have to talk to people where they are at, and you've got to deal with the issues that are on people's minds. And you've got to remember how little information ordinary people are getting from the television and the radio and the newspapers - you've got to have that in the back of your mind and understand that. You can change the way people express themselves, you can plant new ideas, but none of this will happen unless you enter into a real dialogue with them."

After an adult lifetime devoted to political activism - including enough unsuccessful campaigns in the early years to earn him derision as Vermont's Harold Stassen - Sanders is well aware of the challenges facing the left at what almost everyone sees as a critical juncture in American politics. But he argues that the very volatility of American politics creates an opening for progressives who are willing to mix pragmatism and principle with the hard work of running and winning elections. And, Sanders argues, winning elections really does matter.

Sanders chairs the Progressive Caucus, a coalition of thirty-four left-leaning U.S. House members. In the first weeks of the current Congress, when the Democratic leadership remained shell-shocked by the Republican takeover of the House and the Senate, Sanders and the Caucus launched a "Cancel the Contract" campaign that was the first serious challenge to House Speaker Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America."

"If you accept the Gingrich point of view and the corporate mentality, then you say: `It is too bad that the standard of living of everybody is going down; it is too bad that the gap between the rich and the poor is growing wider; it is too bad that all of our jobs are going to Mexico and China and that corporate America is downsizing. It's all just terribly bad, and we understand how much pain people are feeling. But, obviously, the government can't play any role in this because we know that if the government does anything it will only make the situation worse. So, clearly, we need the government to play less of a role - maybe provide some education and training, but nothing else,'" says Sanders, with the mix of mockery and deep seriousness that marks him as one of America's most entertaining and impassioned politicians.

"Well, I don't accept the Gingrich point of view. In the deepest sense, what they're really saying is akin to saying, `We're sorry that you've been diagnosed with a serious illness, but don't go to the doctor because the doctor can't do anything. It's just not possible to cure it; you have an illness and that's it.'

"We have a serious structural economic crisis in America, and to believe that we have to leave the remedy and the cure to the wealthiest people - who are doing enormously well - is absurd. The corporatists argue that we have to leave things to the CEOs of AT&T and Scott Paper, that we cannot possibly have ordinary people - through their elected officials - get involved in the process. That's insane."

Throughout the current Congressional session, Sanders has been a thorn in the side of the Republican leadership, frequently using his independent status to forge unlikely coalitions of progressives and renegade Republicans.

"Bernie has a tremendous talent for making people forget about party labels and focus on what needs to be done," says Cheryl Rivers, a Vermont Democratic state senator who has worked closely with Sanders on a number of projects over the years. "He's very straightforward about where he stands on the issues, but because he's an independent he's willing to reach out across party lines and bring people together in unexpected coalitions."

That was what happened last year, when Sanders delivered a stinging rebuke to the Clinton Administration and Congressional leaders who supported a Mexican bailout plan. It was Sanders who organized the left-right coalition that won passage of a rule requiring the President to receive Congressional approval for loan guarantees to help shore up the value of the peso.

"As an independent, I think that sometimes I can escape a little bit of the heavy-duty partisanship which goes on there," says Sanders, recalling the Mexican bailout vote. "We won that with support from a very unique coalition. We had the progressives, and we had the rightwingers who consider themselves populists. What we lost were the corporatists, the moderate Republicans, some of the liberals - all of those who are beholden to the banking industry. Was it easier for me to do that than a Democrat or Republican? I think so."

This March, Sanders and other members of the Progressive Caucus held a hearing on "The Collapse of the Middle Class." The hearing focused on the practical realities of a stagnating wage structure, particularly for young people. Sanders notes that the median income for families headed by someone under twenty-five was $24,000 in 1979. In 1991, it was $16,000. "That's a disaster," he argues. "People are scared to death about what's happening to their kids. That is the reality facing America. That is the reality people want to talk about."

For the better part of two decades Sanders has been addressing that reality in Vermont - a state that, on the surface, would appear to be an unlikely base from which to launch a socialist politician. Vermont was once considered the most solidly Republican state in the nation. It has voted Democratic in only two Presidential elections this century. And in 1936, it was, along with Maine, one of just two states in the nation to opt for Republican Alf Landon over Franklin Roosevelt - leading Democratic boss James A. Farley to quip, "As Maine goes, so goes Vermont."

While the Italian quarry workers of Barre embraced anarchism and socialism in the early years of the century, Vermont never developed the sort of heavy industries that in other states provided a base for trade unionism and New Deal Democratic politics. Democrats generally ran well in Vermont's largest city, Burlington. But a dominant Yankee Protestant population kept the state safely Republican well into the 1960s.

It was in that decade of social upheaval, however, that Vermont's political landscape began to change, and Bernie Sanders was part and parcel of the shift.

The "back-to-nature" movement that saw hippies and radical thinkers of various stripes fleeing crowded metropolitan centers for the countryside brought thousands of young people from Boston, New York, and other Northeastern cities to the wilds of Vermont. In most states, the new arrivals would have been inconsequential, but in Vermont - the state with the third smallest population in the nation - they were part of an influx that has led to a 35 percent jump in the state's population since 1960.

For the most part, the newcomers of the 1960s and 1970s stayed on - setting up an alternative economic, social, and political culture that slowly remade Vermont. Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream - with its Deadhead capitalism - is evidence of the trend, but Sanders's political success is a far more significant example.

The son of a paint salesman who emigrated from Poland to Flatbush, in Brooklyn, Sanders was a leftwing activist at the University of Chicago. After arriving in Vermont in 1968, he quickly waded into the political fray. He joined the state's fledgling Liberty Union party, a left grouping that paralleled California's Peace and Freedom Party and Michigan's old Human Rights Party.

In fact, Sanders was the Liberty Union standard bearer in a series of noble, if not particularly successful, statewide campaigns. During the 1970s, he was twice the party's nominee for governor and twice its candidate for the U.S. Senate. Never did Sanders win more than 6 percent of the vote.

"Bernie's strength is that he doesn't get discouraged," says Marty Jezer, a longtime Vermont activist who was a Sanders backer from the beginning. "He's been willing to run and lose and run and lose, and to say the same thing over and over and over again until people start to listen."

Sanders was in danger of dismissal as a perennial candidate when, in 1981, people suddenly did begin to listen. That year, he shocked even himself by unseating the veteran Democratic mayor of Burlington by ten votes. "The whole Bernie Sanders phenomenon all comes down to ten votes. If he had failed to win that race, he would have been history," says Sam Hemingway, a columnist for The Burlington Free Press who has covered Sanders for almost twenty years. "Bernie saw a Democratic machine in Burlington that was asleep at the switch. He knocked on a lot of doors and worked his head off and he just hit it right."

The victory of a socialist in the traditionally Republican state drew national headlines - "Revolution in Vermont" - and jokes about the establishment of "the People's Republic of Burlington."

Though much of the national attention focused on Sanders, he actually assumed he mayoralty as part of a progressive coalition that succeeded in reshaping Burlington's tradition-bound politics. Sanders hired a top-flight staff, shifted city money to start a municipal child-care center, expanded the pool of low- and moderate-income housing, established a pollution-control facility on Lake Champlain, and shifted the local tax burden from homeowners to hotels, restaurants, and companies that used public facilities.

While the practical accomplishments of the Sanders administration were impressive, his greatest success may well have been in proving that an avowed socialist could cut through the stereotypes and distortions that characterized the dawn of the Reagan era and reach working-class voters.

"I'm not much of a theoretician, but what I can tell you is this: I was elected mayor of Burlington and consistently I did better in the working-class and low-income wards. Check all the election results: In the wards where we had working-class people, I would get 60 to 70 percent of the vote. In fact, that is true all over Vermont. On a class basis we do well among working-class and lower-income people," says Sanders.

"So what I would say is that we ran a government where everybody in the city of Burlington knew I was a socialist. This was a government that started a sister-city program with a city in Nicaragua, that started a sister-city program with a city in the Soviet Union. I was probably the mayor in America most critical of Ronald Reagan. People knew who I was. I was very vocal and out there. And we won and won and won and won. We doubled the voter turnout for a while; people participated in the city government. So what I'm saying is that, if you stand up, you're honest with people, and you're prepared to take on the big-money interests and bring working people and young people into the process, I think you can do well."

Today, the Progressive Coalition controls the city government in Burlington and has two members serving in the state legislature. It also has a growing number of adherents in communities around the state. Many activists look to a Sanders-for-Governor campaign in 1998, and Free Press political columnist Sam Hemingway says Sanders could actually win - making him the first independent progressive governor in America since the 1930s.

Sanders is convinced that the independent progressive successes in Vermont can be translated to the rest of the United States.

"If there is a model that people should be learning from, it's what Sanders has done in Vermont," says Ed Garvey, a former Democratic candidate for the Senate from Wisconsin who has long argued that the Democratic Party must shed its centrist stripes and begin addressing issues of economic disparity.

Sanders warns against putting too much faith in the prospect of reforming the Democratic Party, however. Ultimately, he says, only a third party can bring a consistent and unwavering class analysis to the political debate.

"At the least, what a third party - speaking from a progressive, working-class perspective - can do is lay out an agenda, lay out a class analysis, which is something take Democrats really cannot do," the Congressman says.

That is particularly true this year, when the entire Democratic Party apparatus is geared toward reelecting Bill Clinton.

Sanders supported Clinton in 1992, arguing that the Reagan-Bush years had to come to an end. But the Congressman's disappointment with the President is intense.

The difficulty involved in getting people to support Bill Clinton is that he spent an enormous amount of capital pushing for NAFTA and GATT and Most Favored Nation status for China," explains Sanders. "It's very hard to tell a working person who understands the issues that that's your guy. You have to say, `Well, he's better than Bob Dole.' But it's very hard to get an enthusiastic response to Bill Clinton."

That said, Sanders admits that he may endorse Clinton again-albeit grudgingly.

Clearly, I'm not very excited about him. But here's where it becomes very difficult, and requires a great deal of maturity," says Sanders. "As I sit in the United States Congress seeing what these extraordinarily rightwing people - who literally do not even believe in the concept of government in a democratic society - want to do, I think, What happens if you get a Republican President who will not veto or speak out against these devastating cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, education, environmental protection, women's rights, and so forth and so on?'

"Let us not minimize what that will mean for America: You will be talking about efforts to have open-shop legislation for the entire United States-destroying the trade-union movement. You will be talking about no time-and-a-half after a forty-hour work week, no minimum-wage increase. You will be talking about monumental setbacks in environmental protection. You will be talking about a Constitutional amendment to ban abortion. This is really devastating stuff, and people should not minimize that. That's what a Bob Dole Presidency will mean."

Sanders's willingness to consider a Clinton endorsement is symptomatic, some of his critics say, of a willingness to compromise on his socialist principles and on a broader progressive agenda.

"Clinton's still the lesser of two evils and I would prefer not to vote for evil," complains Peter Diamondstone, a onetime ally of Sanders who has twice challenged the Congressman on the Liberty Union line.

Diamondstone, who received about 1 percent of the vote in each of his races against Sanders, objects to the Congressman's support for U.S. military interventions abroad and to his backing of the Crime Bill. He also objects to Sanders's running as an independent, rather than as a member of a third party.

At least the Democrats and the Republicans leave something for the future after each campaign," Diamondstone says. "An independent leaves nothing behind."

In a twist on the Diamondstone criticism, there are also some Vermont Democrats who object to Sanders's refusal to join their party.

"There are folks who complain about Bernie from several perspectives, like lefties are prone to do," says Free Press columnist Hemingway. "But on election day, for the most part, they vote for Sanders. In the booth, they're for Bernie."

Nationally, Sanders has fielded several barbs from columnist Alexander Cockburn. While Cockburn and Sanders share a passion for the sort of outreach politics that will broaden the base of support for progressive economic policies, the columnist argues that Sanders has stumbled badly, particularly on the Crime Bill and on the process of building an ongoing alternative political movement.

Sanders bristles at such criticism, joking that he looks forward to Cockburn's candidacy for Congress or a governorship.

"I was mayor of Burlington for a year and I was criticized by somebody because I hadn't eliminated poverty-a sellout, no doubt. So I'm used to it," Sanders recalls. "But I do think we're a little hard [on progressive leaders]. It's easy to criticize Jesse Jackson - 'Jesse is terrible, Ralph Nader is terrible, Barbara Ehrenreich is terrible, Bernie Sanders is terrible. Everybody is terrible.' This is not by any means to say that I should not be subjected to criticism, or Jackson, or Nader, or anybody else. But instead of sitting back and criticizing the people who are out there trying to do something, why don't the critics organize movements in their states. After they succeed and establish their models, then we'll learn from them."

Sanders says he sees some of the most impressive political work in the nation being done by Labor Party Advocates and the New Party - left groups that seek to build a base from the grassroots.

"The New Party deserves a lot of credit because they are doing things at the local level - which is what we did in Burlington," Sanders. "That, to me, is critical. I get a little tired of people who make all the right analyses and decide they want to run for President of the world but they aren't willing to do the basic grassroots work."

Ultimately, says Sanders, if the grassroots work is done it will succeed in building the viable third party that is essential to the revitalization of American democracy.

Critical to any such movement, says Sanders, will be the reconnection of low-income and working-class Americans to the political process.

"The Washington Post published a national poll recently that indicated that 40 percent of the American people did not know the name of the Vice President of the United States," explains Sanders. "So we have to appreciate that the vast majority of low-income people are completely turned off to the political process. Given the nature of the media today, and the political parties and everything else, there is no significant institution that is addressing their needs and relating their needs to the political process. They're way out; they're not even near the process. And it's going to take a long time to connect them to the process."

Sanders knows that it is easy for political activists to grow frustrated with the dimensions of the task ahead.

But after winning seven elections in fifteen years, he is convinced that if progressives will simply stop talking about what they can't do and start knocking on doors, they will find the tide turning in their direction.

"I think the answer is not as complicated as it looks. One of the reasons we have been as successful as we have been in Vermont is that we have not been as smart and as sophisticated as other people all over the country. We're just country hicks here," he jokes.

"All over the country, people make these lengthy, detailed analyses of why they cannot be successful. We have fortunately not been bright enough to do those analyses. What we have done is gone out and knocked on doors and talked to people. And sometimes when you do that you get quite surprised by the results. I am sure that if I had listened to all the brilliant analyses of why I could never have been elected mayor, I would not have won in the first place. But, again, we were not that smart. We just did it and we succeeded."