“There is currently a struggle of enormous consequence taking place in the United States and throughout the world,” Sanders said in a 2018 speech. “In it we see two competing visions. On one hand, we see a growing worldwide movement toward authoritarianism, oligarchy and kleptocracy. On the other side, we see a movement toward strengthening democracy, egalitarianism and economic, social, racial and environmental justice.”

Sanders isn’t a militarist, but he’s no isolationist, either. “If he was in office, and he actually pursued that foreign policy, that would be much to the detriment of Vladimir Putin,” said Max Bergmann, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and an Elizabeth Warren supporter who considers himself a Russia hawk.

It’s ironic: Throughout his career, Sanders has repeatedly excoriated American foreign policy, refusing to accede to the myth of America’s fundamental innocence. But in a race with Trump, he would represent American exceptionalism. “As the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth, we have got to help lead the struggle to defend and expand a rules-based international order in which law, not might, makes right,” he said in 2017.

Putin, of course, is bent on subverting the rules-based international order. By most accounts, he’s less interested in cultivating faith in his own system than in destroying belief in alternatives. He aims to paint liberal democracy as nothing but an empty slogan papering over zero-sum contests for power.

In this project, Trump couldn’t better serve Putin’s interests if he were a conscious Russian asset. Under Trump, the U.S. has abandoned the pretense of backing democracy and human rights, meaning there are no longer any great powers that even pretend to put morality at the center of foreign affairs. The horror of this era isn’t just the emergence of an axis of authoritarianism, but the fact that there are so few allies to counter it.

If Sanders was elected president, that could change. His unlikely ascendance would be a blow against the corrosive cynicism in which authoritarianism thrives. America would be the country where young people of all races powered a campaign that proved stronger than plutocracy, stronger than nationalist demagogy, stronger than any of the tools that men like Putin have used to bring liberalism to its knees. To young idealists around the world, America would look — dare I say it — great again.

Building a multiracial social democracy is one of the great political challenges of our time. Few nations on earth have figured out how to create, in heterogenous populations, the solidarity needed to sustain a robust public sphere. Putin has exploited this difficulty, stoking tribal fears in countries with changing demographics to make liberalism look like a form of social dissolution.