Let me start by saying, which you already know but perhaps others don't, that I'm not a big fan of Sanders, he wouldn't be my preference in the primary and I'm apprehensive about his chances against Trump. I do think it's possible that he might win, just perhaps less likely than if the nominee were Biden or Warren.

Also, what's baffling and annoying me about Sanders is the way both his campaign and his fiercest supporters and his fiercest opponents are pretending that any of all these grandiose promises, like Mook listed in his other post, stand any chance whatsoever of becoming reality in anything resembling their present form. They don't. Everybody with any common sense can see that, because only a small fraction of the Dems in Congress are on board. So can we please stop with the ridiculous over-promising on the one hand, which will only cause a massive backlash in the event that he does get elected and can't deliver on any of it even if the Dems hold both houses, and the equally ridiculous scare-mongering on the other hand?

I do hope Sanders won't be the Democratic nominee, but if he is, it wouldn't make any difference in my preference in the general election and I find it pretty baffling that it would in yours, given that the alternative is Trump. If we were talking about a serious Republican candidate, it'd be another story. The administration and policies of a President Sanders would not be so radically different in the end from a President Biden or Buttigieg, much less from President Warren. The US still wouldn't become even remotely as left-wing as Sweden, never mind the communist scare stories like Venezuela or Cuba.

Also some points on Brooks' column below.

Let's get a few things straight here. The Sandinistas and the Castro regime are not the Soviet Union and are not guilty of Stalin's mass murders. They were certainly guilty of murders and human rights abuses on a large scale - but as you and Brooks know perfectly well, so were the right-wing groups that they fought against and which the United States had no problem supporting. Comparing them to Hitler like you (though, in fairness, not Brooks) do below is even more ridiculous, considering the way the Nazi regime is forever defined by the Holocaust.

Also, let's not forget that during the 1980s, the US government of the time was not just supporting the Contras, it was doing so by selling weapons to its supposed enemy Iran, while openly selling weapons to Iran's enemy Saddam Hussein - in short, supporting blood-thirsty regimes or rebels all over the globe. A left-wing mayor in Vermont praising certain parts of the Castro regime seems like rather small beans in comparison.

And it's not so strange that he would be praising certain things. Cuba had and has the usual strengths of communist countries, including the Soviet Union: very good healthcare, literacy and women's rights, compared to what non-communist countries at comparable levels of economic development had and to some extent still have today. If you're living in Cuba or Central-America and your only choices are either left-wing dictatorship or right-wing dictatorship, there are certainly solid reasons to prefer the former. And sadly, often those were the only choices.

The Soviet Union in the 1980s was, for all its faults, not remotely as brutal anymore as in Stalin's days, and Cuba or Nicaragua aren't the Soviet Union. The people in those countries who supported far-left insurgencies still had those same high ideals. As I would imagine Sanders also did. You can call that naive, but then there's a lot of naivete to go around in political ideology.

I wouldn't call him liberal either, but then Americans do love to misuse that word as just a synonym of 'left-wing'. If Brooks' goal is to make people use that term more correctly, he'll get no objection from me.

Sanders definitely has some annoying supporters treating him like some kind of Messiah, but I don't think he sees things in white and black, or that he doesn't change his mind as new facts come to light. Or that he has such a dictatorial leadership style.

I don't think Medicare for All is viable in the US, but it's not like the idea in itself is completely crazy - and yes, if somehow it was magically implemented, the correct point of comparison would be Scandinavia, or even the UK, rather than Venezuela or the Soviet Union.

The theory behind his numbers, that the huge increase in government spending would be coupled with an equally huge if not even larger decrease in private insurance spending, hence leaving people not worse off, isn't absurd as such. Look at the UK, not a particularly left-wing country on the whole, but it has its National Health Service which is comparable in many ways to Medicare for All. But I simply don't see how you get from here to there - even if the political will to do so were fully there, which it obviously isn't and I don't think ever will be.

Uh, perhaps because America in the 1930s hadn't done the things that it did in the 1970s and 1980s? As arguments go, that makes about as much sense as 'Sanders isn't like FDR because FDR didn't do online fundraising'.

It may not be precisely accurate, but it's certainly a lot more accurate than acting as if he's trying to import the Venezuelan or Cuban model. For instance, yes, Sweden does offer free college too.

Even supposing you're equally disgusted by Sanders as by Trump, the obvious fact remains that a Democratic-led Congress would keep Sanders from implementing too left-wing policies, while the Republican-led Congress/Senate hasn't exactly been keeping Trump from doing anything he wanted to do.

Yes, I do wonder, does he have authoritarian tendencies? David Brooks keeps claiming he does, but without any evidence because he's too busy whining about Cuba. Do you have some perhaps?

Which is unheard of and has never happened before in either major party of the US. Definitely a sign of the approaching revolution/apocalypse.

See above re: Hitler comparisons. But certainly there are plenty of people out there who are praising the good sides of other right-wing dictatorships like Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, Pinochet's Chile, Batista's Cuba, and so on. And Trump doesn't even care if a dictator is left-wing or right-wing, so long as he's interested in getting a Trump Tower in his capital city.