Charles Pierce: There Is an Actual Socialist Running for President

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/29930-focus-there-is-an-actual-socialist-running-for-president

One of the funnier things in political journalism is the fact that, every time a Democratic senator runs for president, the National Journal -- home of Ron (Leadership!) Fournier -- concocts a survey purporting to show that the senator in question is the "most liberal" member of the Senate. John Kerry once was the most liberal senator. So was Barack Obama. And the funniest thing, of course, is that, while both of those men were running for president, Bernie Sanders, an actual Socialist, was a member of the Senate from Vermont. Today, of course, as Sanders announced that he would be running for president, the NJ decided to remind Americans that, yes, being a Socialist does in fact make you pretty damn liberal. In fact, it makes you "far left." Nice work, gang.


I suppose that if John Kerry can be the most liberal member of a Senate that also included Bernie Sanders, then anything's possible. What is remarkable about Sanders's platform is how unremarkable it would sound to any run-of-the-mill Democratic politician 40 years ago, and how moderate it would have sounded to Eugene V. Debs, the last major Socialist candidate for president.

A long time ago, I met a guy named Frank P. Zeidler. He was a Socialist and once he was the mayor of Milwaukee, the last Socialist to be elected mayor of a major American city. (Milwaukee elected three of them, as Alice Cooper once informed Wayne Campbell.) Zeidler won his first election, as Milwaukee County Surveyor, on the Progressive Party line, as a Bull Moose liberal. Once, I heard him say that, when he was coming up, what made you a Socialist was the fact that you believed your city should fix potholes and that it should have a fire department. As Bernie Sanders begins his run for president in an era in which people scream "Socialist!" as a kind of conjuring word to make moderate reforms vanish, it's probably important to remember that being a Socialist once meant that you shouldn't have to put out your own fires. That's Bernie Sanders's campaign -- he's the last Bull Moose in the forest.