“I am not a capitalist soldier. I am a proletarian revolutionist. . . .  I am opposed to every war but one.” So said Senator Bernie Sanders in 1979, reciting a speech from five-time Socialist Party of America presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs for a Folkways Records collection.

The language was out of place in a country about to enter the Reagan revolution, where even the modest accomplishments of the American welfare state would come under attack. Yet two years later, Sanders became mayor of Vermont’s largest city. The Vermont Vanguard Press celebrated the “People’s Republic of Burlington” with a special issue. Sanders put up a portrait of Debs in his new office — a portrait that now hangs in his Capitol Hill office.

Sanders is technically an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. And his own variant of socialism is more reminiscent of former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, a fellow social democrat, than the Bolshevik-sympathizing Debs. Sanders likes to compare the accomplishments of the Scandinavian welfare state with the inequity of American society, highlighting our childhood poverty and lack of affordable health care. His solutions — progressive taxation and robust public services — are not too far out of step with those of his most liberal Senate colleagues, like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.