What Kind of Revolutionary, Exactly, Is Bernie Sanders?

ALTOONA, Iowa – On Monday afternoon, before his fourth trip to Iowa as a potential candidate for president, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders took a moment to bask in a real win. His fellow Democrats, decimated in November’s elections, gave the second-term “independent socialist”–his description–the ranking membership of the Budget committee.

This was big, a high-water mark of American socialism. A job that often belonged to dealmakers was going to the author of the occasional Progressive Budget, which called for progressive estate taxes, higher taxes on capital gains, and a higher cap on Social Security taxable income. Democrats had been clobbered in red states while calling for much, much less. And Sanders saw that as a problem.