Supporters argue that “his agenda is more popular than many American elites understand. Most Americans favor a higher minimum wage, higher taxes on the rich and corporations and expanded versions of Medicare and Social Security. The Sanders approach — progressive on economic issues, without much focus on social and cultural issues — is in many ways the sweet spot of American politics.”
David Leonhardt, New York Times

“Since his earliest days getting arrested for protesting segregation, Sanders has shown a firm commitment to advancing a progressive agenda. He’s someone we can trust: he has been ‘on message’ for four decades… He’s not someone whose ideals seem to have emerged conveniently just in time for their presidential campaign… Sanders [also] has an unusual advantage against Trump: he’s capable of effectively countering the type of nationalist populism that elevated Trump to office, by offering a more hopeful and heartfelt appeal to popular instincts.”
Nathan Robinson, The Guardian

Critics, however, contend that “Sanders’s words and actions have shown me time and time again that he is more concerned with boosting his image as a white savior figure of social justice than actually uplifting the voices of the communities he so direly pretends to represent… [given that] race, gender, and sexuality influence almost every single aspect of how we live our lives today, Sanders’s call for color-sex-orientation blindness in voting for president is not much different from potential candidate Howard Schultz’s claims that he doesn’t see color.”
Isabella Gomez Sarmiento, Teen Vogue

Some posit that “Sanders has a soft spot for Latin American strongmen… If he wins the nomination, Sanders’ old (and not so old) videos praising failed socialist experiments and tiptoeing around recent cruelties in Latin America will surely resurface, playing on a loop while Trump warns about the long-dreaded socialist takeover of the United States of America. This may be fearmongering, but Democrats dismiss its effectiveness at their own peril.”
León Krauze, Slate

Responding to critics on the right, many note that the reductionist rhetoric of socialism vs. capitalism “discourages people from engaging in a debate we ought to have about the right role for government… the Democratic Party’s liberal wing… often argues that the government ought to do more to solve such problems as climate change, rising healthcare costs and the widening gap between the rich and the poor… Republicans are free to retort that pushing the federal government more deeply into those arenas wouldn’t be helpful or cost-effective. But exploring these ideas is hardly a step down a slippery slope that leads to ruin — or Venezuela.”
Editorial Board, Los Angeles Times