Yesterday, Bernie Sanders gave a much-anticipated (and, in some quarters, much-derided) speech on democratic socialism. Socialism is an ideology that, in the United States, has more often than not been cast as a kind of deadly foreign pathogen that, left unchecked, will tear through American society, destroying its democratic institutions, warping its children’s minds, causing pestilence and drought, making pets turn on their owners, soda turn flat, and so on.

Though no doubt infuriating some on the Left, Sanders — who’s weathered decades of this kind of thing — wisely situated his vision of socialism in the long tradition of US progressivism and, crucially, the New Deal liberalism forged by Franklin Roosevelt that dominated American politics until somewhere around the late 1970s.

“Over eighty years ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt helped create a government that made transformative progress in protecting the needs of working families,” Sanders said on Wednesday. “Today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we must take up the unfinished business of the New Deal and carry it to completion.”