The day before Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma gave his 2014 State of the Union address, in which he made eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty the cen­ter­piece, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I‑Vt.) made an appear­ance on CNN’s ​“Sit­u­a­tion Room.” About halfway through the seg­ment, he start­ed to lose his cool.

“When you take on the billionaire class, it ain’t easy.”

Sanders and Michele Bach­mann, the for­mer Repub­li­can rep­re­sen­ta­tive from Min­neso­ta, had been trad­ing ver­bal jabs for sev­er­al min­utes and step­ping all over each other’s lines, when they land­ed on the sub­ject of Social Security.

“Do you believe in the chained CPI?” Sanders asked Bach­mann, refer­ring to an idea then being con­sid­ered that would have decreased pay­ments for cost-of-liv­ing adjust­ments in Social Secu­ri­ty ben­e­fits. He want­ed Bach­mann to con­cede that the GOP aimed to cut Social Secu­ri­ty. She alter­nate­ly dodged the ques­tion and scold­ed him for lying.

“I asked you a ques­tion, and you wouldn’t give me an answer,” Sanders thun­dered after repeat­ing the ques­tion five times.

“Well, calm down.”

“Do you sup­port a chained CPI?”

“Calm down.”

Bach­mann then expressed sym­pa­thy for an unem­ployed woman who had been fea­tured in an ear­li­er seg­ment of the show: ​“The real­i­ty is, we want Ann’s life to be bet­ter.” Sanders respond­ed with an eye roll.

The exchange was typ­i­cal of Vermont’s junior sen­a­tor, who entered the race for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion in late April. He ven­tured deep into the pol­i­cy weeds — at the risk of con­fus­ing view­ers who had no idea what he meant by a chained CPI — and he was impa­tient, con­fronta­tion­al and deter­mined to get his point across.

That pas­sion and focus can car­ry Sanders — who famous­ly iden­ti­fies as a demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ist and rep­re­sents Ver­mont as an inde­pen­dent — right up to the edge of seem­ing like a crank. And if he had run against Bill Clin­ton in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry 20-odd years ago, he no doubt would have been dis­missed as just that, and eas­i­ly ignored.

But this is not 1992. Bernie Sanders can­not be ignored — his mes­sage speaks too pow­er­ful­ly to the cur­rent polit­i­cal moment. And he cer­tain­ly will not calm down — not when, as he says at every oppor­tu­ni­ty, 99 per­cent of all new income is going to the top 1% of Amer­i­cans, the ​“real” unem­ploy­ment rate is 12.7 per­cent and the Unit­ed States has the high­est rate of child pover­ty in the devel­oped world.

Sanders’ pas­sion and sin­gle-mind­ed­ness seem to be ground­ed, in large part, in his child­hood in Brook­lyn, grow­ing up in a small apart­ment. His father, who immi­grat­ed to the Unit­ed States from Poland as a teenag­er, was a paint sales­man. It was his mother’s dream, nev­er real­ized, for the fam­i­ly to own a home. ​“What I learned as a kid,” Sanders told an audi­ence at the Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion in ear­ly Feb­ru­ary, ​“is what the lack of mon­ey does to a fam­i­ly … the kind of stress­es and pressures.”

He didn’t elab­o­rate, but he believes that a grow­ing num­ber of Amer­i­cans know pre­cise­ly what he means.

“When you take on the bil­lion­aire class, it ain’t easy,” he said at Brook­ings. He was still decid­ing whether to run for pres­i­dent. To mount a cam­paign, he said, ​“We would have to put togeth­er the strongest grass­roots move­ment in the mod­ern his­to­ry of this coun­try, where mil­lions of peo­ple are say­ing, ​‘You know what? Enough is enough.’ ”

He entered the race two months lat­er, appar­ent­ly per­suad­ed that he can orga­nize a grass­roots cam­paign around the idea that enough is, in fact, enough.

Ahead of the game

The end­less elec­tion sea­son is a boon for long-shot pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates, giv­ing them a plat­form, a spot­light and more than a year to make their case. In 1996, Steve Forbes cen­tered his bid for the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion around a call for a flat tax. There were rel­a­tive­ly few pro­po­nents at the time. It has since become a favorite idea with­in the GOP.

Forbes’ flat tax would have cut his own income tax bill by an esti­mat­ed $240 mil­lion. The 1990s were fer­tile ground for such anti-pro­gres­sive eco­nom­ic ideas, as pover­ty fell off the polit­i­cal radar amid the tech bub­ble. Then, in the ear­ly 2000s, the glob­al ​“war on ter­ror” became all-consuming.

Bernie Sanders spent much of that time in the House, serv­ing as Vermont’s only rep­re­sen­ta­tive begin­ning in 1991. He ran for the Sen­ate in 2006, win­ning with 65 per­cent of the vote, and was reelect­ed in 2012 with 71 percent.

Through all those years, while eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty was most­ly off the nation’s polit­i­cal agen­da, it was Sanders’ abid­ing pas­sion. In Out­sider in the House, a book he wrote in 1997 about his con­gres­sion­al race the pre­vi­ous year, Sanders wrote, ​“In Amer­i­ca we have the most inequitable dis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth in the entire indus­tri­al­ized world. The mid­dle class is shrink­ing, the work­ing class is scrap­ing by, and the poor are ever more deeply mired in poverty.”

Sanders was either way behind the times or way ahead of them. Fifty years ago, the move­ments for civ­il rights and eco­nom­ic jus­tice, steadi­ly build­ing for years, cul­mi­nat­ed in the last great wave of social-reform leg­is­la­tion: the Vot­ing Rights Act of 1965 and the pro­grams of Lyn­don Johnson’s Great Soci­ety agen­da, includ­ing Medicare, Med­ic­aid, Head Start and food stamps.

Now, 50 years after the Great Soci­ety, we are — per­haps — in the midst of anoth­er moment of build­ing momen­tum to address racial and eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ties. The Occu­py movement’s rise in the wake of the 2008 finan­cial cri­sis was the first sign of the chang­ing times.

In late 2011, GOP spin guru Frank Luntz told Repub­li­cans at a con­fer­ence that he was ​“fright­ened to death” of ​“this anti-Wall Street effort” because ​“they’re hav­ing an impact on what the Amer­i­can peo­ple think about cap­i­tal­ism.” And though Occu­py as a for­mal move­ment has large­ly fad­ed, its mes­sage con­tin­ues to find new cham­pi­ons and new chan­nels of expression.

For exam­ple, Thomas Piketty’s mas­sive book about ris­ing inequal­i­ty, Cap­i­tal in the Twen­ty-First Cen­tu­ry, became a sur­prise best­seller in 2013; Pope Fran­cis has reassert­ed Catholicism’s his tor­i­cal empha­sis on eco­nom­ic jus­tice, recent­ly describ­ing inequal­i­ty as ​“the root of social evil”; cities are tak­ing the ini­tia­tive in rais­ing the min­i­mum wage absent lead­er­ship from Con­gress; and pun­dits and activists are push­ing back, in response to the Supreme Court’s Cit­i­zens Unit­ed deci­sion, against the inequal­i­ties and influ­ence-buy­ing built into our politics.

Last year, mean­while, in a wide­ly read and dis­cussed piece, The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates laid bare the deep struc­tur­al racism that helps per­pet­u­ate eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ties. The protests and media cov­er­age pro­voked by police vio­lence against African Amer­i­cans have helped make the same point. ​“Plun­der,” as Coates told an audi­ence at Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty soon after the protests in Bal­ti­more began in April, ​“is the key to under­stand­ing the rela­tion­ship between African Amer­i­cans and the U.S.”

This is a moment, in oth­er words, when Sanders’ laser-like focus on inequal­i­ty har­mo­nizes with the nation’s polit­i­cal cli­mate. A Gallup poll released in May found that 52 per­cent of Amer­i­cans favored redis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth through heavy tax­es on the rich — up from 35 per­cent in the late 1930s and 45 per­cent in 1998.

The chang­ing polit­i­cal cli­mate is notice­able enough that even pro-busi­ness pub­li­ca­tions and Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial hope­fuls acknowl­edge inequal­i­ty as a prob­lem. ​“It’s worse than you think,” as For­tune put it last year. The piece quot­ed two schol­ars who found that wealth inequal­i­ty ​“has fol­lowed a spec­tac­u­lar Ushape evo­lu­tion over the past 100 years. From the Great Depres­sion in the 1930s through the late 1970s, there was a sub­stan­tial democ­ra­ti­za­tion of wealth. The trend then invert­ed, with the share of total house­hold wealth owned by the top 0.1 per­cent increas­ing to 22 per­cent, from 7 per­cent in the late 1970s.”

Respond­ing to Obama’s State of the Union address in Jan­u­ary, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has since thrown his hat in the ring for the GOP pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion, said that the eco­nom­ic elites have become ​“fat and hap­py” and that ​“the top 1% earn a high­er share of our nation­al income than any year since 1928.”

In this con­text, Sanders is more than just anoth­er can­di­date with low name recog­ni­tion and no chance of actu­al­ly win­ning. He is the per­fect can­di­date for this moment. What that means, exact­ly, remains to be seen.

The Sanders effect

“Peo­ple should not under­es­ti­mate me,” Sanders told the Asso­ci­at­ed Press on April 30. ​“I’ve run out­side of the two-par­ty sys­tem, defeat­ing Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans, tak­ing on big-mon­ey can­di­dates, and … the mes­sage that has res­onat­ed in Ver­mont is a mes­sage that can res­onate all over this country.”

Sanders has an advan­tage in that the first Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry will be in New Hamp­shire, where his long polit­i­cal career in neigh­bor­ing Ver­mont has made him well known. An upset there would give him ear­ly momen­tum. And in Iowa his cam­paign events have drawn over­flow­ing crowds. But bar­ring a melt­down by the Hillary Clin­ton cam­paign, her name recog­ni­tion and cam­paign war chest are daunt­ing — per­haps impos­si­ble — obsta­cles to over­come. In May, a CNN poll showed that just 10 per­cent of Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­ers favored Sanders. Fif­teen per­cent favored Joe Biden and 60 per­cent favored Clinton.

Seek­ing to explain his long-shot bid, pun­dits usu­al­ly note that Sanders will push Clin­ton to the left. And there is lit­tle doubt that he will, at least dur­ing the cam­paign. When he isn’t talk­ing about eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty, Sanders is usu­al­ly talk­ing about cli­mate change. Clin­ton, who has not dis­tin­guished her­self on either issue, will be forced to respond. Strong oppo­si­tion from Sanders and Eliz­a­beth War­ren to the Trans-Pacif­ic Part­ner­ship (TPP) trade deal, for exam­ple, seems to have forced Clin­ton to keep her posi­tion vague, though she has a his­to­ry of sup­port­ing free-trade ini­tia­tives. Sanders, War­ren and oth­er pro­gres­sive Democ­rats argue that it will hurt Amer­i­can work­ers and fur­ther erode the mid­dle class.

But the poten­tial sig­nif­i­cance of Sanders’ cam­paign for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­na­tion goes far beyond the 2016 race. And it goes far beyond what­ev­er effects his cam­paign will have on Clinton.

Since the 1980s, Repub­li­cans have promised to grow the econ­o­my by cut­ting tax­es, pri­va­tiz­ing the pub­lic sphere and dereg­u­lat­ing the econ­o­my. Democ­rats have main­ly promised to lim­it the dam­age done by Republicans.

Sanders is a rad­i­cal because he unapolo­get­i­cal­ly asserts a vision of what gov­ern­ment by the peo­ple and for the peo­ple can actu­al­ly accom­plish — and has accom­plished. That vision has ani­mat­ed the pro­gres­sive move­ment for more than a cen­tu­ry. But rel­a­tive­ly few have had the nation­al mega­phone that he will hold over the next year. His pol­i­cy pro­pos­als include a jobs pro­gram to rebuild roads, bridges, air­ports and schools; hik­ing the fed­er­al min­i­mum wage; break­ing up the biggest banks; reform­ing the tax code and elim­i­nat­ing cor­po­rate loop­holes; and invest­ing heav­i­ly in renew­able ener­gy sources.

“If I do some­thing … I want to do it well,” Sanders told the Brook­ings audi­ence in Feb­ru­ary. The mea­sure of whether he suc­ceeds, though, will not be whether he wins the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­na­tion or even whether he wins a cer­tain per­cent­age of the vote. A bet­ter mea­sure will be whether he can help shift our nation­al dia­logue and revi­tal­ize the pro­gres­sive move­ment. What Sanders wrote of his 1996 cam­paign might also be said of his cur­rent run for the pres­i­den­cy: It is ​“about hopes and dreams that will not be real­ized in our life­times. It is about the fragili­ty of democ­ra­cy in America.”

On one lev­el, suc­cess will mean chan­nel­ing and ampli­fy­ing the grow­ing voic­es of protest against ris­ing inequal­i­ty — racial, eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal — in the Unit­ed States. More than that, it will mean trans­lat­ing the frus­tra­tion of mil­lions of Amer­i­cans into an alter­na­tive vision of the nation’s future. It will mean mak­ing the con­nec­tion between the Repub­li­can agen­da and ris­ing inequal­i­ty — and point­ing a way for­ward for those who are say­ing ​“enough is enough,” and who can be mobi­lized, as Sanders believes, into a grass­roots move­ment with the resources and the will to push back.