That Bernie Sanders, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, is so deranging sections of the establishment suggests he is doing something right.

Ever since he gave Hillary Clinton a run for her money in 2016 he has come under sustained attack from elite voices on both the right and the left. And as he heads into the South Carolina primary tomorrow, and Super Tuesday after that, the mad claims about him have hit fever pitch.

Many on the centre-right seem convinced that Sanders, a self-touting ‘democratic socialist’, is really a crypto-Stalinist, hellbent on destroying the American republic. A recent National Review piece namechecked Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, expressing fears that Sanders and his know-nothing supporters were ‘normalising socialism’ in America.

It ends with the charitable assessment: ‘No, Bernie isn’t Stalin. He claims to be a democratic socialist. I get it. But there’s an array of good reasons no one says, “Hey, let’s give democratic fascism a shot”.’ Billionaire investor Leon Cooperman said in a recent interview that Sanders is a ‘bigger threat’ to the stock market than the coronavirus, and accused him of being a full-on communist.

It is hard to overstate how insane all of this is. They are talking about a man whose primary policy in this campaign is a government-run health-insurance system, and whose vision for America, in his words, amounts to making it a bit more like Denmark. That Sanders and his supporters (incorrectly) call this programme ‘socialist’ should not be enough for otherwise thinking people to decide that what he really has up his sleeve is gulags and a 21st-century great leap forward.

A more nuanced version of this attack line is that Sanders is more a useful idiot, who has sympathised with every authoritarian socialist and communist state going. But this has been blown out of all proportion. On 60 Minutes this week, Sanders defended comments he’d made praising Fidel Castro’s education programmes in Cuba, while making clear he was ‘very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba’.

At the Democratic debate in South Carolina this week he also called Cuba a ‘dictatorship’ – something his centrist billionaire rival, Mike Bloomberg, seems strangely incapable of doing when referring to China. On the more ludicrous end of this mini Red Scare, neocon figurehead Bill Kristol got all upset recently that Sanders once said Soviet-era Moscow subway stations are beautiful. Even though they are, whatever else might be said of that brutal regime.

Sanders more ‘moderate’ competitors have also leapt on his supposedly dubious sympathies, as they have with the inevitable barmy panic about Russians potentially swinging the nomination in Sanders’ favour through the awesome power of Reddit and dank memes. The centre-left commentariat, meanwhile, seems more focused on painting Sanders as just a slightly more acceptable version of Trump – as someone who is shouty, male, pale and stale, and whose supporters are insufficiently woke.

‘Racist, liberal whites seem to love them some Bernie Sanders’, said MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson recently – a pretty wild accusation he didn’t bother to back up. ‘The man cares nothing for intersectionality’, he went on, before dismissing Sanders’ black female spokespeople as hailing from ‘the island of misfit black girls’.

Other pundits have claimed that those who opt for Sanders over Elizabeth Warren are ‘showing their sexism’. (Warren also tried to claim that Sanders once told her a woman couldn’t be president, even though he reportedly encouraged her to run in 2016.) What riles these people so much is that Sanders has an instinctive aversion to identity politics. When asked at debates what he will do for X, Y, Z community, he usually pivots to how his programme will benefit everyone – while his rivals dive headlong into intersectional wittering.