Jaffe wrote:

Drawing on the teachings of Wilhelm Reich that Sanders had embraced in college, he argued in an essay for the Freeman that cancer may be caused by emotional distress. That was especially the case, he wrote, with breast cancer, which he attributed to sexual repression of young girls, referring often to The Cancer Biopathy, Reich’s 1948 book that proposed a direct link between emotional and sexual health, in particular the dire consequences of suppressing “biosexual excitation.”

Jaffe reported that in the 1969 Freeman essay, Sanders asked, “How much guilt, nervousness have you imbued in your daughter with regard to sex?” and continued with the question,

If she is 16, 3 years beyond puberty and the time which nature set forth for childbearing, and spent a night out with her boyfriend, what is your reaction? Do you take her to a psychiatrist because she is “maladjusted,” or a “prostitute,” or are you happy that she has found someone with whom she can share love? Are you concerned about HER happiness, or about your “reputation” in the community?

Murphy, in the Mother Jones article, describes Sanders’s lifestyle in the 1970s:

“He was living in the back of an old brick building, and when he couldn’t pay the electric bill, he would take extension cords and run down to the basement and plug them into the landlord’s outlet,”says Nancy Barnett, an artist who lived next door to Sanders in Burlington. The fridge was often empty, but the apartment was littered with yellow legal pads filled with Sanders’s writings.

“When he was eventually evicted,” Murphy wrote, Sanders moved in with a friend.

In 1969, Sanders, who has been married twice, fathered a son, Levi Noah Sanders, with a third woman with whom he briefly lived, Susan Campbell Mott.

Sanders and his supporters have argued that his early history is part of a no longer relevant past and that he intends to run on his platform, not on his personality or personal life. Nonetheless, if Sanders wins the nomination, Trump and his Republican Party are certain to try to make the young Bernie Sanders a major issue.

What are the politics of Sanders’s commitment to democratic socialism?

An August 2018 YouGov survey found that 26 percent of voters had a favorable view of socialism (6 percent “very favorable,” 20 percent “somewhat favorable”) while 42 percent had an unfavorable view (31 percent very, 11 percent somewhat).

While Democrats in the survey were favorable on the topic of socialism, 46-25, independents and Republicans were not, 19-40 and 11-71.

During the primaries, Sanders is unlikely to face demands for a persuasive response to charges that the domestic spending programs he supports — Medicare for All, a federal job guarantee, a Green New Deal, free tuition at public colleges, universal child care — would cost trillions of dollars. The libertarian-leaning Mercatus Center at George Mason University estimated that Medicare for All alone would cost “$32.6 trillion during its first 10 years of full implementation,” which would require tax hikes on the middle class as well as on the rich and corporations — a sum that would, in fact, be virtually impossible to raise or procure.

Sanders’s fondness for the word “revolution” led an opinion columnist for The Washington Post to criticize him for his “angry, unrealistic call for ‘revolution.’ ” The revolution he called for while he was running against Hillary Clinton, The Times reported in 2016, was virtually identical to the revolution he was calling for in 1984. The website of Our Revolution, which describes itself as “the next step for Bernie Sanders’s movement,” begins with the words “STAND UP! FIGHT BACK!” and ends with a call to action: “It’s time to warrior up! See you on the front lines!” The militant tone of this manifesto is more jarring than Sanders’s campaign rhetoric, which is at pains to describe what he proposes not as socialism, but as “democratic socialism” along the lines of the Scandinavian model.