Now consider a third framework for analyzing U.S. politics: a spectrum that runs from “most establishment” on one end to “most anti-establishment” on the other. For some Democrats, it will seem obvious that Sanders inhabits the latter pole, back on the left flank of the Democratic field, where he is seeking to rein in billionaires, corporations, and a hawkish military-industrial complex, via a mass movement funded by small donations from a big donor pool. Some of his supporters perceive him as the only credible reformist outsider.

But other Democrats more prone to judging individuals based on their immutable traits see Sanders as yet another old, straight, cisgender white man seeking an office held by similarly privileged sorts for most of U.S. history.

That renders him more “establishment” in their view than a black woman like Kamala Harris, who represents progress in terms of diversity and representation, even if she substantively exacerbated the injustices that the carceral state inflicts on the wrongly accused, arguably harming people at the bottom of socioeconomic and racial hierarchies more than any other candidate.

In sum, one cannot draw any easy conclusions about how Democrats will understand Sanders’s candidacy—or assess his chances of beating President Donald Trump—merely by knowing whether they want a more centrist or leftist party.

While I’m an independent, not a Democrat, I don’t know where I personally stand on Sanders. Perhaps my uncertainty can further illuminate relevant complications.

I value Sanders’s opposition to corporate rent-seeking, his anti-war credentials, and his universalist approach to our wonderfully diverse democracy, while I dislike the ideological socialism that caused a younger, hopefully more naive Sanders to praise murderous regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua and to spin Sandinista bread lines as a sign of economic health, as Michael Moynihan documents. (“Vermont could set an example to the rest of the nation similar to the type of example Nicaragua is setting for the rest of Latin America,” Sanders once declared.)

The most indefensible of his bygone comments didn’t stop me from preferring an older, hopefully wiser Sanders to Hillary Clinton in 2016—the least defensible parts of her record included support for catastrophic wars in Iraq and Libya. While the next president will be unnervingly free to start wars of choice abroad without securing the lawfully required permission from Congress, he or she has no chance of imposing anything close to “democratic socialism.”

Still, I want to see Sanders grapple with the occasions when he has prioritized his commitment to socialism above his commitment to civil liberties. And I want him pressed on what Kmele Foster smartly flagged as the most interesting line in the speech when he announced his 2020 candidacy: “We are the wealthiest nation in the history of the world,” Sanders declared in order to highlight the unacceptability of U.S. failures to provide for the least well-off.