The Democratic Party now belongs to Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders is the prophet with honor in the Democratic Party. The former socialist gadfly is now the socialist trendsetter.

This doesn’t mean he’ll be the next Democratic nominee for president, or even run. It doesn’t mean that his ideas are good (I consider them godawful), or that they’ll make for a salable platform for the Democratic Party (which I very much doubt).

It does mean that when it comes to domestic policy on the left, it’s Bernie’s world and the Democrats live in it.

Sanders was an irrelevance for a couple of decades in Congress. The Vermont independent ran in 2016 to get a higher profile, and succeeded not merely in that, but also in seriously challenging Hillary Clinton. He’s now a pacesetter in the party while she rues what might have been…

 You can hardly be a US senator who hopes to run for president if you aren’t co-sponsoring pillars of the Sanders agenda such as Medicare for All, free college and the $15 minimum wage.

“Just a few short years ago,” Sanders crowed last year, “we were told that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour was ‘radical.’ ” Indeed, he was told that, and for good reason. But he had five co-sponsors for a $15 bill in 2015 and has a majority of Senate Democrats now.