Conrad Black helps National Review Online readers look into socialist Bernie Sanders’ bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Sanders began his long career in third-party left-wing politics in a mélange of left-wing causes called the Liberty Union Party. Under this banner, Sanders was a candidate for governor of Vermont in 1972 and 1976, and for the U.S. Senate in a 1972 special election and in 1974, taking 4 percent of the statewide vote in the second Senate contest, against Patrick Leahy, now in his eighth term. …

… Sanders gained steady employment for the first time when he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vt., by ten votes in 1981, at the head of a coalition of leftist civic-action groups against a five-term Democrat who was tacitly endorsed by the Republicans as well. Sanders accused him of being a patronage-tainted stooge of local developers. …

… Bernie Sanders believes in mobilizing the less advantaged 50.1 percent of the voters in America, as in Vermont and in Burlington, by promising them a sufficient share of the wealth and status of the upper 49.9 percent of society, while assuaging any reservations about confiscating the wealth and income of others by denouncing the system and representing such redistribution as fairness. He wants an environmental revolution, no doubt to reduce pollution as a side benefit, but more importantly as a planet-saving cover for his assault on capitalism and his acquisition of the votes of the relatively disadvantaged.