Salon: "Sanders the populist, Trump the fascist: The truth about comparing two unlikely presidential

[Attorney in Texas]

contenders":

Comparisons between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are often lazy and sloppy—a point Chris Hayes humorously underscored recently by demonstrating how both men pronounce “huge” the same distinctive way—but there is an element of truth involved: they represent two different forms of a worldwide populist phenomena that’s become much more prominent since the Great Recession hit in 2008, promoting a dramatic rise in discontent with national and global elites, whose basic competence is severely in doubt.

...

In sharp contrast, Trump’s shadowboxing with mythic phobias—Obama’s birth certificate last cycle, immigrant rapists this time around—is much more of a cathartic performance, aimed only at a select part of the electorate, Sarah Palin’s “real Americans.” Digging down into the details, greater overlap between the two appears on some issues—both oppose cutting Social Security and Medicare, for example—but not on others: Sanders supports raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, while Trump recently said, “I think having a low minimum wage is not a bad thing for this country.”

We’ll return to the overlap in a moment. But what’s most significant is the profound difference in the very nature of their thinking. Sanders’ no-nonsense thinking is deeply informed by his engagement with reality—both the reality of decades working with constituents to help solve their problems, and the reality of how other countries have created better lives for their own citizens—universal healthcare, paid sick leave and family leave, etc. Trump’s thinking, in sharp contrast, is soaked in fantasies, both those shared with GOP base voters, and his own personal set of narcissistic fantasies expressed in trumpeting his own self-importance.

[Attorney in Texas]

1. "Specific empirically-informed demands, such as strengthening Social Security, which Bernie Sanders

great quote from the analysis:

"Specific empirically-informed demands, such as strengthening Social Security, which Bernie Sanders has built his campaign on, can straight-forwardly contribute to building a better, fairer world, in which ordinary people can thrive. Although framed in terms of challenging a corrupt system, they go far beyond simplistically assigning blame, informed with significant concrete evidentiary support."