How Bernie Sanders is winning the Internet

The 2016 campaign is underway – Hillary Clinton: "I'm running for president" – and it's pretty clear who's leading the Internet exchange. So how do you become president of the Internet? Well, you speak your mind and you don't give a damn about the consequences. George Stephanopoulous: "Right now I can hear the Republican attack ad: 'She wants to make America look more Scandinavian.'" Sanders: "And what's wrong with that? In those countries, health care is a right of all people, in those countries college education and graduate studies are free. Retirement benefits and child care children are stronger than in the United States of America." Bernie Sanders runs as a Democrat, but in reality he is like a Scandinavian social democrat.

He is not a socialist of the USSR. But he's a guy who believes free markets should be sharply constrained by expensive public services. Even if that means very high tax rates. There are not many politicians who defend this so candidly. Or who don't really care about raising money from the rich. Sanders: "This great nation and its government belong to all the people, not a handful of billionaires." And the public actually agrees with many of his positions. The people are with him in the reform of labor legislation. They are with him on the increase in the minimum wage.

They agree with him that the rich pay very little federal taxes. And Sanders is the guy who launched a one-man filibuster to try to stop the Bush tax cuts. Sanders: "...giving tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires who don't need them." There's even a new poll indicating that more than 50% of likely voters could agree with Sanders on the merits of a completely government-run health care system. Still, Sanders is not ready to reach the White House. So even if relatively few Americans agree with all of Sanders' views, they agree enough to like everything on Facebook and upvote everything on Reddit.

Six months ago, if Bernie Sanders had started talking about free college tuition, no one would have covered it. But because people saw how much enthusiasm there was about some of his previous statements, a lot of people, Vox.com and all the websites I know, wrote about it. The American party system is unusual around the world. We only have two parties that represent more than 300 million people. Canada has about a tenth of that population, but there are five parties in its parliament. Israel is small but has 10 parties in its legislature. Sanders: "People are frustrated and angry about a two-party system dominated by big money and paying no attention to the needs of workers, the elderly or the poor." This is how Bernie Sanders is

winning

on the Internet.

He doesn't speak in the bland lowest common denominator model of most presidential candidates. He is like a third party candidate, who happens to be running within the Democratic Party. Which is literally what he's doing.