Barack Obama set the stage for the Vermont socialist’s rise to national prominence. But the Democrat’s Marxist coming-out party happened too soon for America.

Those who are surprised by Bernie Sanders’ power in the Democratic Party primaries of 2016 and 2020 have not been paying attention. The self-styled “democratic socialist” from Vermont has inherited what President Obama sowed. Sanders is riding a wave of well-funded and highly trained young Marxists weaponized by President Obama. It is Obama’s hard work that allowed Bernie to jump from fringe character to viable presidential candidate.

These 21st-century progressives are not the loser SDS-types familiar to Baby Boomers. They know all about power. They are fundraising juggernauts on social media. Democratic candidates cater to them or drop out.

They foisted the “resistance” on traditional liberal Democrats. After Trump’s inauguration, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) were talking about working with the president. Hordes of activists descended on them, threatening their positions and threatening their homes.

The growing power of the hard Left within the Democratic Party’s ranks is not new. It is not the result of Trump derangement. It is the cause of Trump derangement.

Progressives punch way above their weight class, first writing the regulations as government bureaucrats and then using threats of lawsuits to control corporations and colleges. They write the federal and state regulations that require racial and gender quotas. They run the human resources departments to enforce compliance. Activists invade and intimidate boardrooms (one of the things Obama led and taught as a community organizer) insisting corporations adopt woke policies by accusing them of racism, homophobia, and misogyny, and threatening lawsuits.

They insinuated themselves into teacher’s colleges, the writing of textbooks, government education policy, and setting college entrance exams so effectively that progressive brainwashing and public shaming is the new normal in our public schools and colleges. Two generations of kids have been raised on progressive’s anti-American stew of envy, grievance, and bullying tactics.

That’s why Sanders, with the backing of Millennial leftists, is eating Joe Biden’s lunch.

There is a reason the radical Left achieved a tipping point during Barack Obama’s tenure. Obama had eight years to use the full power of the presidency as a community organizer.

Taking advantage of the banking crisis, Obama illegally funneled $3 billion of federal bank fines to his favorite left-wing groups, such as La Raza and Acorn-type organizations, those committed to “revolutionary social change.”

Those $3 billion trained and hired enough activists to change the direction of our country.

Obama pressured campuses with threats of losing federal education dollars, forcing them to hire scores and even hundreds of diversity officers. This was a jobs-for-radicals program. Diversity training was required for every freshman, forced on schools that had resisted for decades.

Activist administrators organized students to push colleges for more woke rules, more funds, more positions. There are now more bureaucrats in our colleges than there are professors. Almost 100 percent are left-wing. They have the power to require woke curricula in all departments, even science and engineering. Yale doubled its existing $50 million campaign to increase faculty “diversity” hiring. Brown began a $100 million diversity initiative.

It is the cost of bureaucratic salaries that has exploded students’ college loan debt and been a major source of college radicalization. Sanders is exploiting this to the hilt with his promise of free college.

Obama forced colleges to begin rape witch hunts, to radicalize girls on campus with the woke narrative that masculinity is toxic and ordinary male behavior is “rapey.” He launched anti-rape initiatives from the White House to target high school students. To cover their rear ends, colleges created Bias Response Teams to supervise the speech of 2.84 million college students.

Obama began the push for privileged treatment for transgender pathology in our schools and the military.

One example of an Obama handpicked activist among many: Obama promoted Linda Sarsour as a White House Champion of Change. Sarsour was a co-organizer of the Trump Resistance pussy-hat march. She later had to resign because of her anti-Semitic, pro-jihadi attacks on fellow feminists.

Obama spent much of his time fundraising, but not for the Democratic Party, which he left weakened and broke. Too weak and too broke to oppose the far-left challenge. Obama channeled most of the funds he raised to his private group, Organizing for Action, which trained tens of thousands of community organizers—an army of professionally trained activists dedicated to turning America left.

Obama’s Department of Justice hired exclusively from five leftist advocacy groups (including UnidosUS and the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund). They are still running their radical agenda from within the federal bureaucracy. They inject woke politics into every aspect of life touched by federal law. They are among the deep state’s secret saboteurs.

The progressive website Slate Star Codex says the single most influential moment in turning Millennials into radical activists was “Hands Up Don’t Shoot.” Few people remember the “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” lie was promoted by President Obama, after then-Attorney General Eric Holder was dispatched to Ferguson, Missouri and saw the autopsy reports that exonerated police officer Darren Wilson. Obama cynically used Black Lives Matter to rally flagging support among blacks as the midterm elections approached. People died in the war on cops, with the assassinations and riots that followed.

A full year after the shooting, I visited Cambridge, Massachusetts, and found every church from Harvard Yard to surrounding white suburbs still hung with 10-foot banners declaring their support for Black Lives Matter. It was a formative moment for a generation of young people.

Through it all, Obama presented himself as a moderate and the media pushed that fake image. Americans bought it because they wanted to believe that Obama would bring racial healing.

Now the movement has come out into the open. Obama’s social justice warriors are the majority in Democrat primaries, but ironically, they are not admirers of Obama. Obama’s cagey pretense to be mainstream is a turn-off to the young. They want their Marxism straight. They like Sanders.

The face of the Left is no longer the Ivy League cool of Barack Obama, but the apoplectic “get off my lawn” persona of Bernie Sanders. How galling for Obama. In his second term, Obama reportedly told aides he wished he could do a “Bulworth.” Bulworth was a movie character who won the White House, then revealed he was a socialist. Obama was too disciplined to indulge himself that way. By hiding his Marxism, Obama made it to the White House, twice. He knows Sanders will never get there.

The left-wing fueled Resistance has not been a success. Trump has hit an all-time high in approval numbers. His pro-business, pro-America, liberty-loving policies have turned America around, breaking record after record in jobs, wages and the stock market. Democrats, independents and former nonvoters now flock to his rallies.

The Democrats’ Marxist coming-out party happened too soon for America.