Bernie Sanders has been noted, above all, for his consistency. He doesn’t change his mind. Ever. Except, maybe, a little bit on gun control. And this inflexibility is considered a virtue among politicians. Especially in this season, given his opposition.

Sanders has been advocating the same positions on the same issues with the same angry energy for more than forty years.  But for all his political passion, there is something about the man that is suggestive of Lenin who, as Paul Johnson writes in Modern Times, “… had none of the customary blemishes  of the politically ambitious: no vanity, no self-consciousness, no obvious relish for the exercise of authority.  But his humanitarianism was a very abstract passion.  It embraced humanity in general but he seems to have had little love for, or even interest in, humanity in particular.  He saw the people with whom he dealt, his comrades, not as individuals but as receptacles for his ideas.”