Kirsten Powers writes:

There has been a mass freak-out among the Democratic establishment as Bernie Sanders continues to surge in the polls. In two surveys released Tuesday, the Vermont Senator has opened up a double-digit lead over his closest competitors in the Democratic primary.

The desperation has caused many Democrats to set their sights on former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg as the man who will save us all from Donald Trump. But first he’ll have to save us from Bernie Sanders. The billionaire businessman has paid a pretty penny for every point he has risen in the national polls to overtake the prior moderate savior, Joe Biden.

For most of the primary season, politicos, commentators and journalists have dismissed the Sanders candidacy at best or attacked and misrepresented it at worst with the New York Times editorial board myopically comparing Sanders to Trump and calling his policy prescriptions “overly rigid, untested and divisive.” How often do we hear it claimed with soothsayer certainty, “A Democratic Socialist will never be elected president in the United States?”

You know who else will “never” be elected president of the United States? A former reality TV star with zero governing or policy experience who attacks war heroes, the parents of war heroes, brags on tape about grabbing women by the p___y, and…well, you get my point.

This is not to say that because Donald Trump became president — after improbably winning a Republican primary praising single payer health care, attacking the Bush family, the Iraq War and challenging other previously sacred cows on the right — that anyone can become president. It’s to point out how the ground has shifted in terms of what is possible in politics. The old rules simply do not apply, so we should stop using them.

It’s true that at one point calling yourself a “Democratic socialist” would be a bridge too far for many voters, including Democrats. But that was before people began to realize how unmoored the American capitalist system is from any sense of ethics or morality. The level of economic inequality and suffering from lack of affordable health care, crushing debt, and a discriminatory and racist for-profit incarceration system in one of the world’s wealthiest countries is astonishing. People are exhausted from working non-stop trying to just survive financially in a system that dangles the carrot of financial stability or wealth always slightly out of reach except for a favored few. Nothing about this is normal and that is fundamentally Bernie Sanders’ so-called “radical” argument. [Continue reading…]