Sen. Bernie Sanders has been accused of many things, but inconsistency is not usually one of them.

In many ways, the Vermont independent’s inability to accept change in the face of shifting circumstances is both his greatest strength and his most devastating weakness. For a self-professing radical, it’s an ironically conservative tendency. And it’s not entirely unbecoming: In a way, one suspects that despite the credulity of the senator’s pseudo-Marxian worldview, there’s an earnestly genuine honesty to it, devoid of the cynicism that so often pervades our national politics. If one squints hard enough, it’s even possible to see why the Sanders campaign enjoyed such religious devotion from a portion of the electorate.