Webb was cor­rect about the odds of Con­gress pass­ing much of Sanders’s agen­da for pub­lic spend­ing. But he was wrong to con­flate that agen­da with the rev­o­lu­tion Sanders has in mind. What makes Sanders a rad­i­cal, and what con­sti­tutes the essence of his rev­o­lu­tion, isn’t his com­mit­ment to cer­tain spend­ing pri­or­i­ties or a par­tic­u­lar eco­nom­ic plan — it’s his fierce com­mit­ment to democracy.

“Change nev­er takes place from the top down,” he told his audi­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go. ​“It always takes place from the bot­tom up. It takes place when peo­ple by the mil­lions, some­times over decades and some­times over cen­turies, deter­mine that the sta­tus quo — the world that they see in front of them — is not the world that should be, and they come togeth­er. And some­times they get arrest­ed. … And some­times they die in the strug­gle. And what human his­to­ry is about is pass­ing that torch from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion to generation.”

Though they are very dif­fer­ent in their approach­es to achiev­ing it, Sanders shares this com­mit­ment to a rad­i­cal ver­sion of democ­ra­cy with Saul Alin­sky, the activist and orga­niz­er who made Chica­go his home and has played an out­sized role in our recent nation­al pol­i­tics. Alinsky’s book Rules for Rad­i­cals, the sum­ma­ry of his orga­niz­ing phi­los­o­phy that was pub­lished a year before his death in 1972, is par­tic­u­lar­ly noto­ri­ous among right-wing pun­dits, and he was often invoked by con­ser­v­a­tives in the 2008 and 2012 elec­tions as evi­dence of Barack Obama’s secret rad­i­cal­ism. Oba­ma was, famous­ly, a com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er in the 1980s for a Chica­go-based orga­ni­za­tion, the Devel­op­ing Com­mu­ni­ties Project, inspired by Alinsky’s strate­gies. Hillary Clinton’s ties are even more direct. She was born in Chica­go and grew up in a sub­urb, and she wrote her the­sis at Welles­ley about Alin­sky. In a let­ter she sent him in 1971, Clin­ton wrote that ​“the more I’ve seen of places like Yale Law School and the peo­ple who haunt them, the more con­vinced I am that we have the seri­ous busi­ness and joy of much work ahead.” His ghost will no doubt be con­jured once again if Clin­ton wins the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nomination.

As with Sanders, though, Alinsky’s rad­i­cal­ism wasn’t a mat­ter of the spe­cif­ic reforms he pushed for, which were about win­ning incre­men­tal and often rel­a­tive­ly mod­est improve­ments in the lives of the poor and dis­en­fran­chised. Rather, he was a rad­i­cal and a rev­o­lu­tion­ary because he actu­al­ly believed in democracy.