BERNIE SANDERS: THE PIED PIPER OF OUR TIMES, writes Ron Radosh:

Decades ago, the late socialist leader Michael Harrington used to say that there was a “socialist caucus in Congress,” referring to the few rather obvious House members who were far to the left. Now, the entire Democratic Party has moved in that direction, which is why Sanders gives the broadest definition of socialism he can come up.  This makes the line blurred between Democrats and self-proclaimed socialists. Since the 1920s, socialist candidates have run for president on their own Socialist Party ticket.  Now, Sanders, who is no less a socialist than Norman Thomas was in the Socialist Party’s heyday, is running in the Democratic Party and caucuses with them in the Senate.  No wonder Debbie Wasserman Schultz had such a hard time telling Chris Matthews what the difference between them is.

Sanders argues that his model for socialism is not the old totalitarian Stalinist system, but the Scandinavian countries like Denmark, Norway and Sweden.  The fallacy of a Scandinavian model  has been demolished by Jeff Jacoby, Mona Charen and Kevin Williamson. All three authors show just how it has failed, as their welfare state policies have proved to be unsustainable; their ruling political parties have been forced to reform or eliminate many of the programs similar to those favored by Sanders. They have, in fact, found it necessary to use market forces to help their economies and, like Clinton, Sweden even introduced welfare reform in the ’90s.

As Kevin D. Williamson noted in 2009 — dissecting a column championing European socialism by Sanders in the Boston Globe to boot, “A critic once asked Milton Friedman what he thought about the fact that Sweden has basically no poverty, and Friedman answered: We don’t have many poor Swedes in America, either.”

But that sort of attitude seems rather anathema to an American left busy reshaping America’s immigration policies and flooding its welfare ranks via the immigration model implemented by fellow leftist Teddy Kennedy. Or as Michael Walsh wrote at the start of the month, “Like America in 2015? Thank the Ted Kennedy of 1965.”