Bernie Sanders campaigns at Baldwin Wallace University

In this file photo from February, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders addresses a crowd at at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea.

(Gus Chan / The Plain Dealer))

Tim Gill, is a doctoral student at the University of Georgia

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, political commentators pronounced the death of socialism and the triumph of the United States. Amid the celebration, the ideological and military defeats in Southeast Asia less than two decades earlier were soon forgotten. Francis Fukuyama, one of the country's most prominent political scientists, for example, wrote a nearly 500-page treatise that posited that the world had witnessed its political-economic endpoint: liberal democratic capitalism.

The narrative seemed so accurate.

It proclaimed:

The United States triumphed. Democracy triumphed. Capitalism triumphed.

The Soviet Union failed. Dictatorship failed. Socialism failed.

And yet, not all the pieces of the U.S. political puzzle congealed.

In the same year as the Soviet collapse, Bernie Sanders, an avowed democratic socialist, first sauntered into Washington as a congressional representative from Vermont. Five years later, local citizens elected former Cleveland Mayor Dennis Kucinich, who, although he never voiced an affinity for socialism, recurrently challenged corporate capitalist excess.

Fast forward to the 2016 presidential race and Fukuyama's thesis appears remarkably premature.

On the surface, Sen. Sanders' rise as a serious presidential candidate is indeed startling. For many U.S. citizens, the idea of socialism connotes authoritarian rule, queuing in lines, and the absence of individuality. In 2012, the Pew Research Center found that six in ten citizens evidenced a negative reaction to idea of socialism. More recently, in a 2015 Gallup poll, less than half of respondents (47 percent) said they would vote for a socialist. To put that in perspective, Gallup respondents reported that they were more likely to vote for an atheist (58 percent), a Muslim (60 percent), and an evangelical Christian (73 percent).

Perhaps it's been the surface-level understanding of socialism, though that has provoked such sharp responses. Instead of Soviet-style authoritarianism, what Sanders has, in fact, proposed are comparatively (by international standards) modest reforms that purport to equalize access to our national resources and end the privileges that accrue to a finite number of individuals as a result of the chance of birth.

Put simply, Sanders has promised to democratize access to our national resources. This includes our hospitals and medical facilities, our universities, our political system, and our economy. For Sanders, this is what true democracy entails - allowing all to participate and benefit regardless of location in the socio-economic hierarchy.

The most covert obstacles Sen. Sanders now faces are the politicized mental shortcuts that many have collectively assumed: Socialism equals dictatorship, socialism equals disincentive, socialism equals control. Let's not forget that it was the Socialist Party's presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, who was arrested in Canton, Ohio, in 1918 for delivering a speech against U.S. militarism and subsequently ran in the 1920 presidential election, and garnered nearly a million votes, from a federal prison cell.

Whatever the outcome, the durability of Sen. Sanders and his campaign is nothing short of historic. He has initiated a national rehabilitation of the idea of democratic socialism. In doing so, he has struck a national chord that will reverberate for decades to come.

Tim Gill of Cleveland is a doctoral student in the department of sociology at the University of Georgia.