Ten years ago this week, Vermont socialist Senator Bernie Sanders formally announced his first bid for the White House. It was the most serious left-wing campaign since Henry Wallace in the late 1940s, with a platform that included massive new spending, oppressively higher taxes, and a crippling $18 trillion in new debt.
By any definition, it was an extremist agenda. Yet while a similarly extreme far-right candidate would have faced withering criticism from the press, the establishment media celebrated Sanders for his “passion” and the “seriousness” of his radical ideas.
“It’s just so wonderful and refreshing to have somebody saying some of these things,” the Boston Globe’s Annie Linkskey pronounced a few months after Sanders’s announcement.
“He’s out there raising fundamental questions about the American political system and the…
