“And they say..’oh Bernie Sanders…he’s a socialist! You can hear the echoes of the Red Beat and McCarthy’…I want the world to know that Martin Luther King was a Democratic Socialist! (crowd roars) Albert Einstein was a Democratic Socialist! Helen Keller was a Democratic Socialist! And then they say ‘Let’s be pragmatic’. One of the fathers of modern pragmatism, John Dewey, was a democratic socialist! You can’t say you ‘evolved’ on same-sex marriage…you looked at the polls!” (thunderous applause) – Cornel West

By deploying her husband Bill Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire for the primaries to campaign for her in January 2016, Hillary Clinton made a move towards embracing her husband’s presidential legacy, which is much at odds with her current professed platform. It seems a strange choice to make, given how hindsight has exposed the neo-conservative legislations of the outwardly ‘liberal’ Clinton era – The Defense of Marriage Act which postponed the achievement LGBT rights by twenty years till recently, the Crime Bill responsible for the mass incarceration of minorities in the country as well as mandatory minimum sentencing, the deregulation of the banking sector and the repeal of the Glass –Steagall Act (which separated savings and speculative investment capital) which started America on the journey towards the Wall Street crash of 2007. Bill Clinton also signed the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), and the PNTR (Permanent Normal Trade Relations) agreement with China. Both of these, while rewarding Clinton and the Federal Government with surplus budgets that he could tout to his Republican-controlled Congress as having surpassed business-friendly Reagan’s achievement, also led to mass unemployment, with the outsourcing of industrial and consumer manufacture to countries like Mexico and China, and the outsourcing of higher paid white collar jobs in the service sector to countries like India and India as well. Walmart has long replaced General Motors as the largest private employer in the USA. Each of these political decisions and their socio-economic consequences still serve as the major issues that America faces today, and that Presidential candidates debate over. The only non-Clinton era mistakes in the political discourse are military intervention abroad, and the twin conservative-rallying issues of abortion and guns.

At first look, Hillary appears to have played her cards badly. The 2016 Presidential race has proved to be like no other ever before, where candidates from outside the political establishment have fared far better at rallies, debates and polls than oarty stalwarts. Hillary chooses to highlight her gender as her ‘outsider’ factor, rather than her record or policy, which could have been shown to be ‘different’ from the standard roles outlined Washington policy consensus in the two parties. The truth is, her policy and platform do not differ. Drawing on her husband’s legacy and his active participation is the final rallying cry of the Democratic establishment for a ‘thoroughly vetted candidate’.

However, legacy is still important. Having watched all of the Republican debates till now, it is striking to see how the Republican candidates are twisting and turning to avoid comparisons with and invocations of former Republican presidents. Perhaps they are aware (Jeb more than others) that the memory of George W. Bush and his misrule is still fresh in the minds of most Americans. Beyond the scarcity of any semblance of any comprehensive policy, the Republican candidates stick to talking points such as “family values” (anti-abortionism and patriarchy), guns, attacking some country or the other (the Middle East often wins the raffle) and woo their voters with naked racism, corporate cronyism and fearmongering. The occasional allusion to Reagan (such as Trump’s borrowed “Let’s Make America Great Again” slogan) is a large victory for historicism.

The roots of Hillary Clinton’s patterns of embracing her husband’s legacy lie in her knowledge that she can never compete with her insurgent socialist rival for the Democratic nomination Bernie Sanders on ‘outsiderness’, whether in terms of consistency, honesty, integrity or policy. What Clinton is attempting to escalate, is her months-long ‘electability’ argument against Sanders to Democratic voters, to try and cut off the juggernaut of enthusiasm that has been awakened among Democrats, progressives and Independent unaffiliated voters by Sanders’ message. It was one of her first attacks against her Sanders campaign, echoed widely for months by a corporate media that tried hard to conceal its vested interests through selective reporting. However, every poll that came out since October 2015 showed Bernie Sanders defeating every hypothetical Republican opponent by larger margins than Hilary, who often lost in these matchups to some Republicans such as Cruz and Rubio. While these polls rightly proved Hillary’s assertions as misplaced, and perhaps allayed the doubts of a large section of the electorate regarding electability, the link between polls and actual electability cannot be accurately proved, especially when assertions are made at the national level.

Sanders’ responses to such attacks on electability have been empirical, forthcoming and mostly positive when asked by the media, which to its credit atleast transmitted them to its viewers, while Clinton was being celebrated throughout 2015 as the inevitable nominee. According to the media, Sanders has been mostly passive when attacked. What the media failed to see was the things that did boost Sanders’ actual electability - concrete steps that he took, polemically and ideologically, to place himself as a viable, authentic and committed candidate, as will be discussed below.

With primary season underway, the time has come from a candidate to turn into a statesman, or be left behind. Hillary’s turn to Bill is her scramble to make up that gap, and have at least her husband look statesmanly for her, while she goes on the petty offensive against Sanders. The race is hers to lose, in her eyes.

But her current platform and her husband’s legacy are deeply contradictory, one would argue. The problem for Hillary Clinton is the fact that there is no other legacy left to appropriate. From the first CNN Democratic Primary Debate in October, Bernie Sanders has successfully appropriated the legacies of most of the great Democrat presidents, leaving nil for Hillary to seem to be standing for. For a candidate who was seen as an angry solitary socialist at war with world, this has been the political and ideological masterstroke that has solidified his path to the White House, while draining the number of liberal, progressive, or even stately icons whose legacies may be deployed to counter Sanders’ populism and welfarist agenda. Sanders has now become the window through which every oppressed socio-economic group sees a glimpse of a historical figure they consider their savior. A symbiotic process, he appropriated major figures in history and the people have, in turn, appropriated him.

The fact that some of these legacies and allusions are contradictory only points to the success of Sanders’ political discourse. When his welfare plans in the realm of healthcare and education are attacked, Sanders points to European economies, and Canada (and as his favorite examples, the Scandinavian nations) as having implemented all of these quite successfully without impoverishing the citizenry with high taxes, generating a standard of living that the USA, as the richest country in the world could surely catch up with if only there was initiative and political will. When his policies as termed as ‘socialist’, alien and unviable, Sanders points to the ideals and actions of former presidents such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson – and counters asking whether those gentlemen had been socialist – in effect, showing that he wasn’t offering anything particularly radical in America by historical standards, only out of step with the current party establishments and in step with the majority of the people. He thus marketed his proposals as representing core American values.

Eugene Debs

First and foremost, Sanders embraced the passion and uncompromising populist fervor of his hero Eugene Victor Debs. Let us start with some quotations by Sanders.

From his Wall Street speech:

“We will go to the billionaires and their Congressmen. We’re gonna make them an offer they cant refuse.” “To those on Wall Street who may be listening today, let me be very clear. Greed is not good. Wall Street and corporate greed is destroying the fabric of our nation. And here is a New Year’s resolution that we will keep: If you do not end your greed, we will end it for you.” “Living with dignity is sometimes more important than living itself.”

He attacked Hillary Clinton from the Left at the Univision Democratic Debate:

"In terms of my political career, fighting for the workers and fighting for the poorest people in this country, Madam Secretary, I will match my record against yours any day of the week." (rousing applause) "Clearly the Secretary's words to Wall Street has really intimidated them, and that is why they have given her $15 million in campaign contributions… (raucous laughter) ….I am proud that the gentleman who is the head of Goldman Sachs ... said I was dangerous, and he's right. I am dangerous for Wall Street". (standing ovation, crowd goes wild)

Like Debs, for most of his career Sanders kept himself independent, until his Presidential run. This gave him a pedestal with which to change the establishments of both parties, Sanders himself neatly above the fray of bipartisan corporate cronyism. It was the influence of Debs that inspired Sanders to always be at the side of the unions whenever exploitative management indulged in wage-cuts, lay-offs, or denied basic economic and worker rights. It is worth stating that Sanders focuses on income redistribution and equal opportunity through taxation and welfare, and corporate accountability through workplace democracy, rather than state or public ownership of the means of production. Perhaps Sanders’ socialism is a 21st century socialism, where the redistributive rules would regulate the dominant form of capital (finance capital), rather than confiscation or ownership of physical assets (which are increasingly irrelevant to the financial-speculative superstructure of the US economy). Physical assets and physical capital (and consequent production) provides jobs, but financial speculation provides the profits – not production as much. The acceptability of such a Washington-Wall Street consensus formed the grounds on which Sanders led his famed attack against Alan Greenspan. It has been many decades since manufacturing controlled the US economy. At the pinnacle of its power in the Reagan years, manufacturing capital decided to simply outsource.

When Sanders names specific businessmen or corporations (such as the Koch brothers, Exxon Mobil, Boeing, General Electric, the Walton family and Walmart, as well as fast food chains) at his speeches or rallies, it sounds more like a speech at an old Industrial Workers of the World (the ‘wobblies’) rally or strike, led by Debs, holding nothing back, in the pocket of no one, never for sale. If the formulation Sanders’ brand of socialism is more experiential than theoretical, departing from the radical class-antagonistic discourse of Eugene Debs in some ways, it is also fair to say that Sanders’ combativeness makes him the 21st century Debs.

Here is an excerpt from a Debs speech from San Francisco:

“The United Railways, consisting of a lot of plutocrats and highbinders represented by the Chamber of Commerce, absolutely control the city of San Francisco. The city was and is their private reservation. Their will is the supreme law. Take your stand against them and question their authority, and you are doomed.”

Debs’ influence came out most during Sanders’ mayoral tenure, in the internationalism of his stances, and the fact that his city was the only city with a foreign policy. Burlington, Vt. has a sister city in Nicaragua and one in the erstwhile Soviet Union. Sanders was one of the few elected officials to stand up for Daniel Ortega, or to combat Reagan on Cuba. It was rare to watch a mayor on CPAN discussing only foreign policy, but when it happened, it was Sanders. The author finds it difficult to fathom how the mainstream media can claim that Sanders’ forte was domestic issues only. The media argued just the very opposite in the 1980s and 90s about Sanders.

Further, Sanders’ anti-war stance on Vietnam, the Cold War, the proxy wars in Latin America, the Afghan proxy-war the Gulf War and the Iraq War, leading the charge in all but the first, put him in a peculiar position. A socialist issuing populist battle-cries at a time (war) when the ordinary American (the draft and the workers) was expected to be most obedient to the American state, made him, like Martin Luther King, a menace to the American state. Sanders did not involve himself in sedition, like Debs did, and he didn’t gain the statesmanlike national prominence in the time of war opposition, like Martin Luther King did. But Sanders’ progressive credentials and voting record at watershed moment continues to hound the Clintons and expose their every compromise.

Dwight Eisenhower

Frequent in Sanders’ line of attack as a Representative and later a Senator was the arms lobby and the military industrial complex, which fueled inflated government spending, militarization of police and reckless wars all over the Third World. “The warning that President Eisenhower gave us about the influence of the Military-Industrial Complex in 1961 is truer today than it was then.”

Here are some Eisenhower quotes from his Presidential farewell speech to reinforce the argument:

“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations… …This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society… ..In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.”

In another speech, Eisenhower asserted that

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

When asked how high his tax rates would be, at the second Democratic debate in November, Sanders stated that President Dwight Eisenhower had taxed the rich at over 90% and the country had prospered because of that, and that he would peg his tax rate as high – joking that he was not as much of a socialist as Eisenhower seemed. The moment drew a round of applause and a good amount of laughter from the audience. What is more significant, it is safe to say, that the name Eisenhower was never mentioned again by any of the Republican candidates.

Sanders also envisions a large amount of infrastructure spending to create jobs and to rebuild broken bridges, roads and railways. In fact, his $1 trillion plan (paid for by removing corporate tax loopholes and preventing the stashing of profits in the Cayman Islands) would be the single biggest infrastructure plan since Dwight Eisenhower’s building of the Interstate highway system.

Theodore Roosevelt

What is just as interesting is his invocation of Theodore Roosevelt, harnessing the latter’s policies and ideas, for his own anti-monopolist presidential agenda.

At the Second and Fourth Democratic Debates, Sanders argued that

“If Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, were alive today, what would he do with these large banks? He would break them up!”

Sanders went further on occasion of his Wall Street speech to declare that

‘within a year, I will break up these entities’.

Thoedore Roosevelt broke up the Standard Oil Trust because its size was beginning to be an overbearing risk for the US economy as a whole, not to mention its monopolistic strongarm tactics in its own sector. Roosevelt also curbed the overseas spending sanctioned by the US Congress, to defend the taxpayer from speculation and wasteful spending abroad. Sanders in the 1990s repeatedly questioned Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers on the $9 trillion loan that the US Congress had sanctioned to the IMF to pump into Russia after the Soviet collapse. Sanders’ questioning made it clear that there were zero returns to that investment – whether to the US Fed Reserve, the IMF, or even the Russian economy – at the cost of the American taxpayer.

Sanders had been at the forefront of the opposition to the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act, which had till then enforced banks to keep savings and investment capital apart in 1999, while Bill Clinton had signed the repeal.

Here is Bill Clinton on the day of the repeal:

“You heard Senator Gramm characterize this bill as a victory for freedom and free markets. And Congressman LaFalce characterized this bill as a victory for consumer protection. And both of them are right… “It is true that the Glass-Steagall law is no longer appropriate for the economy in which we live…And today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down these antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority. This will, first of all, save consumers billions of dollars a year through enhanced competition. It will also protect the rights of consumers. It will guarantee that our financial system will continue to meet the needs of underserved communities…”

Harry Truman

Hillary in 2008:

“Since when do Democrats attack one another other on universal healthcare? I thought we were trying to realize Harry Truman’s dream.”

In the 1990s the Clintons had tried to expand healthcare, but a closer look shows that the universal single-payer option (with govt acting as the sole provider of healthcare and insurance, rather than as a funder of schemes or private insurance coverage) was not considered even then, something Bernie Sanders as a member of the House of Representatives had been pushing for in the form of free healthcare-for-all. In 2008, when Hillary had presented her healthcare plan as a presidential candidate in the Democratic primary, she stated her ultimate goal as universal healthcare. Now, as a candidate in the 2016 race, she is attacking Sanders from the right, on the cost of his healthcare proposals, despite several public statements by him that his universal plan would in fact cost the government and citizens far lesser than the private contractor system currently in place, which provides for only a section of the population, at costs inflated by the pharmaceutical industry. By having abandoned the objective of universal healthcare, Hillary Clinton shed her hold on the only popular issue she has a history of advocacy for, along with her till-then sole proprietorship of Truman’s legacy.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

While it was Hillary Clinton who announced her presidential run at the Four Freedoms, over the months, it is Sanders who turned out to be FDR’s true ideological heir. It cannot be more apparent. Sanders has been vocal for years for reinstating Glass-Steagall with enhanced provisions to check shadow banking, an evolution of Roosevelt’s policy. Sanders was also in the lead in 1999, opposing Bill Clinton’s repeal. Hillary, on the other hand, has rejected the prospect.

Sanders had confidently taken on the mantle of Roosevelt when he declared that he would undo Bill Clinton’s welfare reform, expand Social Security, emphasize domestic production and employment, pass on more bargaining power to the unions, make it easier to unionize, parallel Roosevelt’s innovations from another era: the Social Security Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act and the National Labour Relations Act.

What is most skirting is the similarity in the message. What Sanders is promising is reminiscent of Franklin D Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights. The narrative of a Sanders ad makes the inspiration apparent:

FDR: “We have come to a clearer realization that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security” Bernie Sanders: “That was Roosevelt’s vision 70 years ago. It is my vision today. It is a vision we have not yet achieved. And it is time we did.”

In his speech on Wall Street and in the Second Democratic Debate, Sanders worked the crowds with “The billionaires are going to dislike me….and Wall Street will like me even less”. This echoes FDR’s “I welcome their hatred” statement. On the same occasion, Sanders made a strong case for capping ATM fees, for lowering credit card interest rates because the public had bailed the banks out, proposed a tax on short term speculation to fund free public higher education, closing the tax loopholes and bring back money from tax havens such as the Cayman Islands to fund infrastructure investment which would drastically reduce unemployment. To bring this into fruition, he promised to reinforce the Voting Rights Act to repeal restrictive voter laws in states which were designed to discourage minority and poor voters. The priority given to enforcing a federal minimum wage of $15 and the right to unionize is the hallmark of Sanders’ welfarism, values associated most with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Lyndon B Johnson

Throughout his career, Sanders has championed causes that were originally policy initiatives by Lyndon B Johnson - Medicare, the War on poverty, Equal Opportunity Act, Head Start programme, often justifying expansion of these programmes by lowering defence expenditure since the Cold War was over. Hillary, on the other hand, has been more concerned austerity and efficiency than welfarism. The Bill Clinton era was rife with Hillary canvassing to ‘end welfare as we know it’, to pull the carpet of social welfare from the feet of millions – in the name of ‘welfare reform’. Further, by having been a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, Sanders is quite free from the downsides of LBJ’s legacy.

Martin Luther King

Sanders has a racial justice platform that encompasses economic rights and racial equity. Some of what he has outlined is: a $15 minimum wage, free education in public colleges and universities, an end to private prisons, a promise that the USA would not be the country with the highest number of prisoners in the world by the end of his first term. He also asserted that the local police must look like the communities they serve in terms of diversity, that he supports body cameras on policemen, a federal Justice Department investigation into the killing of any unarmed citizen, that policemen who break the law be punished, that police forces not look like invading armies set in military gear, and an end to the federal criminalization of marijuana.

As a member of CORE (Committee on Racial Equality), Sanders had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in the Washinton March for Jobs and Freedom in the 1960s, had collected and sent money to civil rights movements in the South, and had also led a struggle in Chicago to abolish segregated housing in apartments held by the University of Chicago (in 1962). Recently, video footage and photo evidence has emerged of a young Bernie Sanders being arrested and chained to a black woman for protesting against segregation and racial justice.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, at the time was campaigning for the presidential run of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, whose platform had as its most distinguishing feature a promise to repeal the Civil Rights Act.

Martin Luther King, Jr. had agitated for a revamped G.I. Bill of Rights for poor people, black and white – and questioned the very basis and morality of waging the Vietnam war. The supporters and surrogates of Sanders have not missed the connection.

In an MLK Round Table between Sanders, former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner, rapper Killer Mike and eminent scholar Cornel West. Killer Mike argued that Bernie Sanders represented the logical evolution of Martin Luther King, the statesman, not just the community leader.

In the schools, people are taught about King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech and his non-violence. If he had been only about desegregation, he would not have been killed. He was killed for many of the same issues this man (indicating Sanders) is fighting for.

Sen. Turner remarked that

“One of the last things Dr King did in his life was the poor people’s movement. He went to Memphis for the striking garbage workers.”

King organized the poor people’s march to Washington, and sided with the unions in strikes against poor working conditions and low wages. Prof. West was forceful in his assertion of Dr. King’s anti-establishmentalism:

The FBI said that he was the most dangerous man in America. And yet all he did was bring people together. Records on Martin Luther King showed that he organized the poor of all races and thus constituted a threat to Wall Street and big corporations, in the eyes of the state. His image has been sanitized to portray him as harmless to the American state and the ruling classes.

In addition, Sanders had endorsed, campaigned for and won Vermont for the presidential bids of Rev. Jesse Jackson, a protégé of King, bringing many political independents into the Democratic party for what he saw was a shot at real change.

Sanders has also expanded race issues beyond racial justice, into a broader struggle of the oppressed and exploited. Standing for a $15 minimum wage, gender pay equity, free childcare and family leave and a $1 trillion infrastructure – Sanders is flavoring the race discourse into affirmative action for economic rights as well – by pointing out that 51% of African American youth are unemployed, and that the median family wealth of African American households is $7,000 a year.

He also recently blasted Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel for being beholden to Wall Street, blaming closing down dozens of schools in the name of debt after having marketed the same risky financial schemes as a way of funding public education, as well as for his handling of shooting of an unarmed Arfrican American youth named Lacquan McDonald.

When he toured Baltimore, in addition to detailing out point-by-point his racial and criminal justice platform, Sanders also pointed out key features of racial-economic inequality such as the lack of ATMs and grocery stores in black neighborhoods leading to increased food expenditure and predatory lending by payday loan sharks.

An important aspect of Sanders’ message on race is the fact that his progressive stance on race and campaign racial platform is the same in front of black and white audiences. Sanders is not afraid to devote most of his speech to criminal justice reform, even in front of white crowds, unlike most of his opponents in both parties. That sends out a sincerity to African Americans that other campaigns just do not attempt.

Libertarianism

After Rand Paul’s departure from the horse-race, it is difficult to see the libertarian vote going to another Republican contender, especially when his base was distinguished by the very fact that establishment Republicans were seen as inadequate and misguided. If one were to look at the stance of Sanders on privacy and the Patriot Act, it was second, if at all, to only Ron Paul’s crusade, as was Sanders’ stance on marijuana decriminalization, military intervention, breaking the clout and risky-behavior of Wall Street and gun rights.

Here is Ron Paul, the libertarian icon himself, on Sanders:

”On occasion, Bernie comes up with libertarian views when he talks about taking away the cronyism on Wall Street, so in essence he’s right, and occasionally he voted against war”.

Also commenting that

“There are some things that Bernie and I overlap on. He and I could work together to go after corporatism and corporate welfare, even though he’s a Socialist, we could agree on things”.

In addition to his support for medical use of marijuana, Feelthebern.org, a website laying out in detail Sanders’ policy proposals, states this for his stance on recreational usage: “Bernie has said he would vote yes as a resident of a state considering legalization. For federal legalization, he has said that he supports ending the federal prohibition on marijuana, allowing states to opt for legalization if they so choose.”

The appeal of the Bernie Sanders campaign among libertarians is hence notable.

The Pope, Religion and the Revolution

Another remarkable feature of the Sanders campaign has been the success of its message on religious conservatives, an economic and political appeal on moral grounds. He never fails to lose an opportunity to point out the remarks of Pope Francis on issues ranging from income inequality, greed and climate change.

He invoked numerous passages from the Bible at his speech at Liberty University, informing the student audience that he respectfully disagreed with them on issues such as abortion, and moved on to what he saw as moral common ground on corporate greed, the wealth gap, Wall Street speculation as usury, and basic human welfare. In addition, Sanders has held public meetings in mosques, defended Muslims against bigotry, toured black churches and Historically Black Colleges.

Fasten Your Seatbelts!

Despite having drawn from figures from the great past, Sanders presents himself not as a savior, but as an enabler of peoples’ democracy. With now a panel of Congressional hopefuls challenging establishment Democrat incumbents, he has positioned himself as the crusading outsider who will make the party more responsive to movements. He doesn’t talk down to his audience, and speaks to the audience’s hearts on the issues that matter.

He is careful not to present himself as a messiah, reminding his supporters that

No President, not Bernie Sanders, nor anyone else can make these things happen on his or her own. We must build a political revolution where millions of people come together and tell the billionaires and tell their Congressmen to work for them or get voted out. We will make them an offer they can’t refuse. Together we will make things happen. Thank you, and welcome to the revolution!

None of what Sanders has achieved so far in the Presidential Race would have happened had he not fired the imagination of young voters who were willing to volunteer, phonebank and canvas for what they saw as the coming of true change. Sanders would not have been winning the hearts of millions of democrats and Republicans had there not been hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic citizens ready to redefine socialism and to convince the general public that Bernie Sanders is the only candidate that matters. The difference between the remainder of the presidential contenders, both Democrat and Republican in terms of economic policy, is miniscule. None of the others constitute a threat to corporate greed and reckless speculation by behemoth banks. Further, Sanders would not have stood a chance had the public not been so averse to being spoonfed another Clinton or Bush.

In addition to being the closest thing to a union-rouser running for President, Sanders has successfully exposed the establishments of both parties as having abandoned, for the past forty years, their core Republican and Democratic values and what their great leaders had stood for. Any candidate running against Sanders from either party is instantly cast as complicit in this departure from core ideals. Somehow, a lifetime independent socialist, THE ‘outsider’ candidate, has quite sneakily managed to absorb and voice the legacies of all the tallest Democrat and Republican presidents of the 20th century, leaving the Republicans only Reagan and Nixon (the latter too disgraced to invoke) and leaving Hillary with only her neoliberal husband and Obama, and perhaps the warmongering Woodrow Wilson, whatever the good that will do.