Bernie Sanders was one of Jeremy Corbyn’s first phone calls following the United Kingdom’s parliamentary elections in June of 2017, in which Corbyn’s Labour party had gained seats. On the call, Sanders asked where Corbyn got his campaign ideas. “Well, you, actually,” responded the admirer across the pond.

The feeling was mutual. Right before the 2017 elections in the UK, Sanders had gone on a three-day campaign swing for Labour and given Corbyn a more full-throated endorsement than he had ever offered Hillary Clinton.

The Bernie-Jeremy bromance has been blossomed ever since.

With the 2017 British elections coming just months after Hillary Clinton lost the presidency despite winning the popular vote in the United States by 3 million votes, Bernie Sanders saw it as his job to twist the knife and establish that only hard Left socialists could win, not pragmatic progressives interested in getting things done. But Sanders needed a real life example to bolster his case, and Jeremy Corbyn, despite having actually lost the elections in Britain, provided the perfect test case. Bernie Sanders has openly held up Corbyn as a model on how Leftist politicians could win broad electoral mandates.

Bernie Sanders is, of course, not just a man. He’s also a brand. His embrace of Corbyn would not be complete without the forces of the far Left that generally line up behind him doing so for Corbyn as well.

That support coalesced quickly. Just as Sanders was congratulating Corbyn for a job well done in 2017, Leftist opinion writer James Downie at the Washington Post was penning a column calling Corbyn’s Labour a model for American progressives who are attracted to Bernie Sanders. Around that same time, Mehdi Hasan at The Intercept laid down even starker similarities between Corbyn and Sanders, describing Corbyn as “unashamedly, unabashedly, unapologetically left-wing offer” who “spent 32 years toiling in obscurity on the backbenches before becoming leader of his party.”

Riding high with Corbyn as a successful test case, the Sanders-Corbyn comparisons kept putting in the sail of the American socialist Left. The Huffington Post UK and The Outline described Corbyn as a hero and an inspiration for the American, Bernie Sanders-Left. The Guardian, a staple publication among the socialist left, wrote up the love affair between the two far-left movements connected by the Atlantic. They should have been careful of taking too many lessons from a campaign that lost by 4 million votes, in my opinion, but I digress.

In April of 2019, as Bernie Sanders started running for president again and Brexit appeared in some trouble, the leftist Nation magazine likened the connection between Sanders and Corbyn to the conservative golden era of Reagan and Thatcher. They dubbed Corbyn “a British version of Bernie Sanders” who used to be seen, not unlike Bernie Sanders, as “a cranky radical” in the face of “New Labour’s move to the right,” similar to how the radical Left often views the Democratic party of Obama and Clinton. The Conservative party in Britain, they said, was “disintegrating in the face of Brexit,” and so obviously, it was a time of hope for the Sanders-Corbyn style brass, socialist, cranky radical politics.

Even as recent polling in Britain showed a Labour slump coming, True Believers in the Socialist Left kept the faith, as an article of faith.