Bernie Sanders and the Democrats' Very Own Tea Party

His ascendancy in the primary is a sign of the party's hard left turn, not his personal appeal.

BY JOSH KRAUSHAAR

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May 31, 2015  For an example of how far leftward the Democratic Party has drifted in the last two decades, look no further than Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont emerging as the progressive icon who can capture the spirit of Elizabeth Warren in the body of a rumpled, crotchety old white man. Indeed, it's awfully telling that Hillary Clinton's main opponent for the Democratic nomination is a 73-year-old self-proclaimed socialist.

Make no mistake: Sanders is not a "liberal purist," as The New York Times referred to him in its Burlington dispatch—he's further left than that. He's never even been a Democrat, and for much of his congressional career was regarded as a radical curiosity. In his presidential kickoff, he called for a "political revolution" against the billionaire class, shades of Marxist rhetoric therein. His revolutionary instincts extend to foreign policy: For his honeymoon in 1988, he vacationed in the totalitarian Soviet Union, and the next year he traveled to Cuba in hopes of meeting Fidel Castro.

But it's Sanders, and not a more conventionally liberal candidate like former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, who's capturing the enthusiasm of the progressive grassroots. Last week's Quinnipiac poll found him polling at 15 percent—good for a comfortable second place in the Democratic field, well ahead of Vice President Joe Biden (at 9 percent) and O'Malley (only at 1 percent). Among the most liberal Democrats, he polled at 28 percent, with Biden trailing him by 24 points in a hypothetical matchup.

But Sanders' early prominence is not a reflection of Sanders himself. Instead, he's serving as the avatar for the emboldened attitude of the party's progressive wing.

In the past, the notion of an unreconstructed socialist winning widespread support—even as a protest candidate—would have been fanciful within the Democratic Party. The closest recent parallel to Sanders is Dennis Kucinich, who tallied less than 4 percent of the total primary vote in 2004. Ralph Nader's high-water mark was in 2000, when his 2.7 percent third-party tally was nonetheless enough to spoil Al Gore's hopes for the presidency. Other progressive insurgents within the party, from Vermont's own Howard Dean to Bill Bradley to Gary Hart, were squarely within the party's mainstream—even if they stood on the leftward side of it.