evidence: In my view — not really; million-makers can defend themselves, at least qua makers of millions. But there is something to say in defense of Sanders as a consistent politician and an honest broker, which is really what his detractors are out to dispute. First, Sanders’s complaint isn’t that millionaires exist per se. After all, if America’s household wealth were distributed evenly across the population, then every family of four would have a net worth of $1.2 million. Sanders’s critique is that the United States’ super-rich are symptomatic of a system that churns out a small class of extremely wealthy people who rule over the vast remainder. Key to Sanders’s argument against the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a small elite is that their largesse allows them to wield disproportionate, anti-democratic political power by funding campaigns and lobbying politicians; seeing as Sanders’s campaign is funded strictly by small donors and he is not a lobbyist himself, it would seem that his having made more than 1 million dollars in a year doesn’t exactly run afoul of that critique. [...] It may instead be a failure of another kind: Call it cupidity, or — worse for political types — an insensitivity to optics. Neither misstep compromises the final integrity of Sanders’s politics nor implies he’s insufficiently serious about them, especially after so many decades pushing the same policies with no best-selling books or millions to show for it.