The good news is that the 2016 pres­i­den­tial race has become a ​“mad-as-hell” cam­paign. The bet­ter news is: Bernie Sanders will win it.

If Trump’s candidacy symbolizes the dead, bitter end of our long march to the right, the Sanders campaign symbolizes a turning point in our politics and a fundamental shift in our priorities.

Cam­paigns of the mad-as-hell type are rare in our Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. The past five pres­i­den­tial elec­tion sea­sons — stretch­ing from Bill Clinton’s victory’s in 1996 re-elec­tion cam­paign to Barack Obama’s re-elec­tion in 2012 — were busi­ness-as-usu­al affairs, lead­ing to rel­a­tive­ly mod­est tacks to the left or the right. Such elec­tion sea­sons change the par­ties’ pri­or­i­ties and the themes that dom­i­nate our polit­i­cal dis­cus­sions in fun­da­men­tal ways. The elec­torate decides, as the pro­tag­o­nist of the 1976 movie Net­work did, that it isn’t going to take this anymore.

Obama’s 2008 ​“hope-and-change” cam­paign came close to the mad-as-hell type. There were cer­tain­ly nods to Demo­c­ra­t­ic anger over eight years of George W. Bush. But the issue that dom­i­nat­ed the elec­tion cycle, and the great­est change that emerged from Obama’s vic­to­ry, was health care reform that relies heav­i­ly on pri­vate insur­ance com­pa­nies — a mod­est tack to the left that most­ly reaf­firmed the sta­tus quo. And while George W. Bush did gov­ern as a right-wing rad­i­cal in many ways, he explic­it­ly ran on a plat­form of prag­mat­ic, ​“com­pas­sion­ate con­ser­vatism” in 2000. It was Sep­tem­ber 11, not the cam­paign, that cleared the path for a rad­i­cal con­ser­v­a­tive agenda.

The last true mad-as-hell elec­tion sea­son was in 1992, when Bill Clin­ton defeat­ed the elder George Bush, who got 37 per­cent of the pop­u­lar vote, and Ross Per­ot, who ran as an inde­pen­dent. Perot’s eco­nom­ic pop­ulism — his rail­ing against that ​“giant suck­ing sound” cre­at­ed by jobs mov­ing to Mex­i­co — and empha­sis on fis­cal aus­ter­i­ty won 19 per­cent of the vote. For Per­ot, the nation­al debt was the root of all evil, and reign­ing in out-of-con­trol fed­er­al spend­ing was our most urgent challenge.

Repub­li­cans took note of Perot’s suc­cess and rode the aus­ter­i­ty theme to vic­to­ry in the 1994 midterm elec­tion, promis­ing ​“a com­pre­hen­sive audit of Con­gress for waste, fraud or abuse” in their Con­tract with Amer­i­ca. The GOP’s land­slide in the House — the par­ty picked up 54 seats — was a pre­lude to Clinton’s dec­la­ra­tion of the death of big gov­ern­ment in his 1996 State of the Union address, and his sign­ing of the bipar­ti­san wel­fare-reform bill lat­er that year.

The 1992 cam­paign also gave us Patrick’s Buchanan’s ​“reli­gious war” speech, which stoked reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives’ mount­ing anger over abor­tion, gay rights, and what they viewed as the gen­er­al sec­u­lar­iza­tion of Amer­i­can soci­ety. ​“In [the] strug­gle for the soul of Amer­i­ca,” Buchanan told the Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion audi­ence, ​“Clin­ton and Clin­ton are on the oth­er side, and George Bush is on our side.” Three years lat­er, the direc­tor of the Chris­t­ian Coali­tion, Ralph Reed, appeared on the cov­er of Time beside the head­line ​“The Right Hand of God.” The orga­niz­ing mus­cle of the Chris­t­ian Coali­tion and sim­i­lar faith-based groups would play a key role in Bush’s elec­tion in 2000.

The oth­er mad-as-hell elec­tion sea­son in post­war pol­i­tics was in 1968, when Richard Nixon defeat­ed Hubert Humphrey and inde­pen­dent George Wal­lace, who won 13.5 per­cent of the vote with his explic­it­ly racist defens­es of states’ rights. Nixon’s more veiled racial appeals ini­ti­at­ed the GOP’s cur­rent incar­na­tion as a par­ty dom­i­nat­ed by South­ern­ers, reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives and old­er white peo­ple. In 1968, they were mad as hell about civ­il rights pro­tes­tors, anti­war pro­tes­tors, fem­i­nists and, as they saw it, the gen­er­al col­lapse of law and order. This coali­tion of work­ing class whites — Nixon’s ​“silent major­i­ty” — and the new­ly Repub­li­can sol­id South became the cat­a­lyst for Ronald Reagan’s elec­tion in 1980, a vic­to­ry made pos­si­ble by strong sup­port from Nixon’s ​“silent major­i­ty” of work­ing-class whites.

Mad-as-hell elec­tion sea­son­ss aren’t defined by the par­ty nom­i­nees, who are typ­i­cal­ly cen­trists like Bush, Clin­ton, Nixon and Humphrey. They’re defined by the surge of reformist ener­gy that they both chan­nel and gen­er­ate. Such elec­tions over­flow the bound­aries of our nor­mal pol­i­tics and reshape the pri­or­i­ties of the major par­ties over the course of sev­er­al elections.

The most obvi­ous evi­dence that this is a mad-as-hell elec­tion sea­son comes from the GOP, notably from Don­ald Trump — but also from sev­er­al sec­ond-tier can­di­dates, includ­ing Ted Cruz, Scott Walk­er and Ben Car­son. Some of their themes — like their attacks on repro­duc­tive rights and LGBT equal­i­ty, and their stri­dent defense of ​“Chris­t­ian Amer­i­ca” — have been con­sis­tent parts of the Repub­li­can play­book for decades. But Trump’s revival of anti-immi­grant pol­i­cy pro­pos­als has been the most potent force on the Right — and the most sur­pris­ing. A par­ty whose future depends on attract­ing more minori­ties is flirt­ing with a self-styled ​“truth-teller” whose rhetoric and pol­i­cy pro­pos­als are inco­her­ent non­sense — and so deeply offen­sive to His­pan­ics that his net favor­a­bil­i­ty rat­ing among them is neg­a­tive 51 points (a rat­ing that will like­ly only con­tin­ue to slide after Trump’s recent ejec­tion of Uni­vi­sion anchor Jorge Ramos from a press con­fer­ence).

For that rea­son, Trump’s cam­paign is more like­ly the last stand of the GOP’s most fer­vent base than a sign of its strength. He will go on draw­ing huge crowds because ​“peo­ple are super tired of politi­cians,” as Howard Stern put it recent­ly, and because an anti-estab­lish­ment busi­ness leader with charis­ma will always charm a cer­tain seg­ment of the elec­torate. One who aggres­sive­ly push­es their hot but­tons will thrive, at least for a time.

But it’s Bernie Sanders, not Don­ald Trump, who rep­re­sents the future, and it’s Sanders who is chan­nel­ing the pent-up, reformist ener­gy that will reshape our pol­i­tics over the com­ing decades. He is, as David Shrib­man wrote recent­ly for Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics, ​“a man on fire,” and his mes­sage is per­fect­ly in tune with the times. ​“This is where a good por­tion of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty is today — proud of elect­ing Barack Oba­ma but dis­ap­point­ed he didn’t go far enough,” Shrib­man writes, ​“skep­ti­cal of trade pacts, fired with revul­sion about police excess­es, con­vinced eco­nom­ic mobil­i­ty is more a phrase from the Amer­i­can past than a touch­stone of the Amer­i­can future, wary of half-steps on the econ­o­my and rit­u­al­is­tic bows to pro­gres­sive issues.”

In oth­er words: mad as hell.

That doesn’t mean that Sanders will win the nom­i­na­tion, much less the pres­i­den­cy. Nor does it mean that he’ll mount a third-par­ty bid — some­thing he has promised not to do. What it means is that he is gal­va­niz­ing ener­gies on the Left that can’t be con­tained by the par­ty estab­lish­ments, and whose effects will unfold over sev­er­al elec­tion cycles.

Mad-as-hell elec­tions may be won by the cen­trists rather than the insur­gents. Yet in their wake, the entire polit­i­cal land­scape is altered. After Nixon won the 1968 elec­tion, his attor­ney gen­er­al, John Mitchell, famous­ly pre­dict­ed that the U.S. ​“is going so far to the right you won’t rec­og­nize it.”

If Trump’s can­di­da­cy sym­bol­izes the dead, bit­ter end of our long march to the right, the Sanders cam­paign sym­bol­izes a turn­ing point in our pol­i­tics and a fun­da­men­tal shift in our pri­or­i­ties. Mov­ing inequal­i­ty and injus­tice to the cen­ter of our polit­i­cal dis­course will make Sanders the win­ner of this mad-as-hell pres­i­den­tial cam­paign — no mat­ter which can­di­date wins the White House next November.