Bernie Sanders wanted to be fooled by the Soviet Union. After all his years in politics he's still a gullible fool, hopelessly naive, romantic about the glories of state control.
He should be seen as a man out of time, someone whose era has been exposed as a brutal and inhuman farce. Instead, young people are flocking to him. It's not just youthful idealism. They see the sickness in our country, but they misdiagnose its source. They think more government intervention in the economy is the solution, not realising that the present great degree of government intervention is the cause.
Government management of the economy does not create wealth and well-being. Good governance does, including clear, understandable, and evenly enforced rules of the game. But we don't have good governance, we don't have clear rules, they are not understandable and they often conflict, the rules are written to favour some and disfavour others, and they are not evenly enforced.
And Sanders is not offering a solution to that. He's offering a system where even more than at present political connections will be necessary to get anything done; a system that will inevitably incline towards authoritarian control.
That our choice this November may come down to two versions of populist authoritarianism is deeply unsettling. The U.S. has endured such dangers before - the authoritarianism of FDR is rarely discussed in proper depth - but perhaps never when trust in democracy was at such a low ebb.