Bernie is slightly to the left of Nixon, who, by today's standards, is a radical liberal.
The way he sells the message, not caring one wit how you get there, makes him a radical, not the end point.
He seems to not realize what country he actually lives in and how things get done; he talks like a 1960s leftist forgetting why they haven't succeeded. He seems to want everything right now and don't understand pushback that will come with that.
Many of his fans, with talk of voting Trump of all people! perfectly explain why I think he, and them are deluded; they think that if you blow everything up you can pick up the pieces and build a better world; well, all history is littered with the remains of such thinking.
Also, he seemingly has a misunderstanding of how those socialist European countries actually work. What he wants is some kind of idealized 1960s version of them.
I'm in Canada, so if he just points to us as were he wants to be eventually (but even there I feel he has no real clue how things work here); I'm OK with that if he actual informs himself on this reality.
He must understand it takes a hell of a job to get there, especially in country fractured left-right like the US; this includes not alienating the people you have to work with eventually even in your own party.
In Canada, things got done because it came through consensus, not someone trying to ram things through. Even here, if you try to push things through, things don't go so well (National Energy program of the 1970s have very long term repercussions, including the rise of a more right wing branch of the conservatives).
Canada has a huge number of fist generation immigrants btw, 22% (28% in Ontario), less wealth than the US; but all and all, our policy have not led to the kind of fractured scism politics there is the US.
