The oddest thing about the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator seeking Democratic nomination for President, is not his distaste for fund-raising, his insistence that he is a “democratic Socialist,” or even his unofficial slogan, “Feel the Bern,” a phrase that vividly recalls Jane Fonda at the moment of her disentanglement from the New Left. It is his popularity with kids. Since tossing his worn cap into the ring, in April, Sanders has racked up a disproportionate share of the youth vote: thirty-seven per cent of voters twenty-nine or younger, compared with Hillary Clinton’s forty per cent, in one poll. Why? Outwardly, he does not seem like a particularly hip or youthful guy. Sanders is nearly seventy-four, dresses like Willy Loman, and can name, from direct memory, the Dodgers’ lineup in the year 1951. When he shows up at events, his fleecy hair, or what remains of it, looks ravaged, as if he had puttered all the way there in a drop-top Model T. He wears a watch; it’s not by Apple. And yet, today, Sanders boasts a larger Facebook following than Clinton and Jeb Bush combined.

It’s on Facebook that Sanders fandom, and a language associated with it, has flourished. Followers post about the way he “slayed” in this or that speech, how he seems “so logical” compared with other politicians, how he motivated them to vote, for the first time, in their late twenties. As Sanders, an independent, throttled into a strong second place for the Democratic nomination, Bern-ers on Twitter praised him as “clever” and “trustworthy.” In the magazine last week, Daniel Wenger reported on an eighteen-year-old kid’s attempt to organize a Sanders YouTube viewing party in his parents’ living room. On Friday, in a greater coup, Sanders received the endorsement of the fifteen-year-old prank candidate Deez Nuts, who made a splash in some Midwestern polls earlier this month, and who cited his frank and accessible style. Queried about Sanders’s leading opponent in the race, Hillary Clinton, Mr. Nuts simply asked, “Why can’t you be more open and friendly like Bernie?”

“Open” is a reasonable description of Sanders’s campaign, which has worked to underscore the candidate’s ideological consistency over the decades. When Sanders started out, in the sixties, he was a civil-rights activist and a sit-in coördinator. After settling in Vermont, he worked in carpentry, wrote weird satirical erotica, and set about the business of losing elections. The goals of the young Sanders were a lot like the goals of Sanders now. From 1981, in his first elected post, as the mayor of Burlington, he fought for corporate regulation and against big-money fund-raising. He sought to lift the minimum wage. Recently, his supporters have produced old footage from his early years, as if to show that, in a field of opportunists, Sanders has held firm to his beliefs. The anachronism of his world view proves both his authenticity and his lack of hidden baggage as a candidate. For young voters, who approach the booth with shallow political memories, this “open” attitude toward Sanders’s past can come as reassurance: they don’t have to worry about being pinioned by a history that they don’t know, because history, for Sanders, is a backward projection of the behavior that they saw last week. The approach is striking in an era when even personal life is preconceived, polished, performed. Sanders is exceptional because he seems, demonstrably, the same guy who he was before the iPhone cameras first appeared.

The nature of that lineage may play a role in Sanders’s youthful popularity, too. He speaks often of “revolution,” as in: “Today, we begin a political revolution to transform our country economically, politically, socially, and environmentally.” Revolution is a term that’s rarely heard now, but it recalls the period when Sanders landed on his political cause. Radicalism nostalgia—the Boomer-propagated idea that the sixties were a halcyon age in American culture—survives today even among people born decades later. For the uninitiated, Sanders is a link back to that heady time. “Neil Young playing at the end of #BernieSanders SC speech is making me hippie fangirl out,” someone far below the hippie age cutoff tweeted this past weekend. Now that American youth culture is increasingly business-oriented—there are shopping recommendations based on your exact location, parties with playlists picked by subscription algorithm, and privatized mobile transportation apps to ferry you between—Sanders’s tinge of hippiedom, his seeming lack of calculation, lets members of the smartphone generation embrace the political sixties trip they never had.

Hillary Clinton, an establishment figure whose very breath seems mediated by design and process, is curiously at odds with this moment in liberal life. Sanders is closer. The outrages of the past year—Ferguson, Baltimore, Staten Island—have inaugurated a new era of direct action for progressives. The grassroots radicalism that, for years, relegated Sanders to the wingnutty sidelines of the field now bind him to the liberal zeitgeist. When the kids laud Sanders for being “logical” or “clever,” they are speaking of the logic of his activism—his cause-and-direct-effect rationale for stepping in, his eagerness to revamp the entire system—more than his adeptness as a political strategist. For people to whom statecraft seems mandarin and unknowable, Sanders offers a point of entry from the outside.

Is “Feel the Bern” Howard Dean 2.0? It’s hard not to think about the last Vermonter who summoned the youth vote, churned the Internet, and seemed to threaten the establishment’s preferred nominee.But there are differences. For one thing, Dean reached beyond Vermont parochialism with a hard-edged foreign policy: he made strong opposition to the invasion of Iraq a central point of his campaign. Though Sanders’s foreign-policy stances have been reported, his platform tends to double back to the domestic. (Since global affairs are Clinton’s home field, it’s a reasonable strategy.) On the other hand, Sanders enters the contest at a moment when it’s possible to be taken seriously—very seriously—as a liberal with a youthful following. It was young people who famously helped lead Obama to victory in 2008 and 2012, when voter participation among those eligible under thirty jumped to about fifty per cent and secured him victories in four crucial states. Today’s Millennials, who will make up thirty-six per cent of eligible voters in 2016, have no such candidate to call their own, except for Sanders. If they were to vote at their capacity, they’d be the country’s largest voting bloc. As it is, they may be compelled to wave back the Clintons, their parents’ regime, into the White House.

The “trustworthy” quality that Sanders’s young supporters find in him, then, is an accountability to process rather than to results—beginning with his campaign-finance practices. Trust in American politics has alternately carried two related but separate meanings. There’s the trust you feel in honesty of character, the old ideal of frank speech and lucid motives. And there’s the trust you place in your leader to get the job done. Often, these two trusts are at odds. We want our politicians transparent, yet we want them powerful as well, and power, even in the best of circumstances, means the management of information and the mastery of process. Direct action, in executive office, is demagoguery. For Sanders’s campaign to succeed in taking over the White House would, in some sense, be for its precepts to fail; the campaign is less about about wielding power than about guiding the Presidency from outside. “It's not a political campaign to elect the man, but a campaign to change how American politics operate,” one young admirer wrote. In an era of gridlock and systemic abuse, trust in the sanctity of the political process may be the most valuable gift a young voter can get. Sanders shows the kids what’s possible, even if, strictly speaking, it’s not feasible yet.