There was something new in his speech — a revolutionary spirit that I’d not heard in his public comments before. Specifically, he worked up to this key point: we have a power structure built around inequality. He talks around this notion before he introduces Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights, which states that there can be no freedom without economic security.

Taken together, these ideas amount to his definition and defense of democratic socialism: if our power structure is built around inequality, then the promise of American Democracy is broken.

It’s a remarkable observation. If power derives from inequality, then what is left of Democracy? In a system of enforced inequality, where is the justice and freedom? How does this square with any notion “the American dream”? It’s not radical to point this out. On the contrary, it’s radical to participate in a system that reinforces this. By invoking democratic socialism as a palliative to inequalities that threaten Democracy, Sanders is trying save what little threads of Democracy we still have left, in order that we may weave them back into the fabric of a working society again. That’s about as radical as mending your sweater.