evidence: When The New York Times’ popular podcast The Daily broadcast an episode about the field of Democratic presidential candidates, the political reporter Alex Burns described a "full spectrum" of contenders "running from sort of quasi-Marxist to avowedly moderate," with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont situated on its left flank. [...] That’s an entirely defensible analysis. And voters long accustomed to a political spectrum oriented around economic ideology might agree that Sanders, who calls himself a "democratic socialist," is the left-most candidate in the race. [...] I value Sanders’s opposition to corporate rent-seeking, his anti-war credentials, and his universalist approach to our wonderfully diverse democracy, while I dislike the ideological socialism that caused a younger, hopefully more naive Sanders to praise murderous regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua and to spin Sandinista bread lines as a sign of economic health, as Michael Moynihan documents. ("Vermont could set an example to the rest of the nation similar to the type of example Nicaragua is setting for the rest of Latin America," Sanders once declared.)