Anis Shivani in Medium:
Bernie is in, and if anything, compared to his run three years ago, he finds himself in much more favorable territory, based on any number of measures, not least because of the alternative narrative he himself, and through prominent disciples who have picked the baton from him, has created and spread far and wide in the body politic. The heresies and unorthodoxies of his last run are mere commonplaces now (wealth tax, Medicare-for-all, $15 living wage, free college), to the extent that the media should find it easy to depict his policy prescriptions as so much ho-hum, not much different than, oh, say, Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren.
But make no mistake about it, Bernie is the only candidate on the Democratic side with a radical agenda that takes on the perversions of capitalism, while all the rest of them — every one of them, to some extent or other — continue to offer, in the best Clintonian tradition, paeans to American exceptionalism. It was precisely this obeisance to exceptionalism — America is already great, in the words of Michelle Obama, or Hillary Clinton, whoever said it — that crashed the political system last time around, and it is precisely this naïve, faithless, robotic, uninspired, spectacular ode to exceptionalism, whether it comes from the mouth of Cory Booker or Julian Castro or Beto O’Rourke or Kirsten Gillibrand, that would guarantee Trump another four years.
More here.