Bernie Sanders, who recently announced his 2020 candidacy, is a quasi-Marxist, a USSR sympathizer, a washed-up has-been relic of the radical Sixties.

At least that’s the standard reading of Sanders from the right.

His ambitious policy proposals — free college, free healthcare, massive public works and infrastructure spending — look to many conservatives like socialism, or at best like standard Democratic welfare politics dialed up to 11.

But conservatives could look closer. Sanders’ instincts tend towards simple over technocratic. He called for breaking up the banks, in contrast to Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren’s complicated banking regulation plans. He peppers his speeches with references to the middle class and, almost archaically, “working families.”

And the dreaded socialism? There’s a long history of “all-American,” and even conservative, socialism. Sanders claims that the system is rigged by undue financial influence over elections, corporate tax loopholes, and crony capitalism, which makes something of a conservative case for left-wing policy. And in one humorous moment during a discussion of 20th century tax rates, Sanders quipped that he might not be as much of a socialist as Eisenhower.

Any way you slice it, Bernie’s proposals lean to the left. And if by “socialism” you mean Nordic social democracy, then they might be socialist too. But Sanders possesses a deep strain of what we might call communitarian or temperamental conservatism. Seen in the right light, his platform offers a deeply conservative civic vision for America.

Though Sanders’ campaign site’s issues page does not exist yet, expect a 2016 redux on most topics. Take education and healthcare, two Sanders mainstays, where his rhetoric emphasizes universal availability. Under single-payer healthcare and tuition-free public college most people would pay little or nothing (at point of service, as opposed to through taxation). One incarnation of his higher education plan, from a 2017 bill, provides tuition-free attendance at four-year colleges for children from families making less than $125,000.

In other instances, Bernie seemed to suggest that even the children of the reviled “millionaires and billionaires” would receive free healthcare and could, if desired, send their children to free public colleges. In this vein, Sanders’ policies are softer than his soak-the-rich rhetoric.

During the 2016 cycle, Hillary Clinton argued that the American people should not have to foot the tuition bill for Donald Trump’s kids. Others on the left developed a similar line of attack, criticizing universally available benefits as regressive, in effect forcing the poor to subsidize the rich. (Many on the right, of course, view it the other way — the successful being forced to subsidize, as Trump might say, the “losers.”)

Universal benefits usually enjoy more widespread appeal than redistribution and welfare, with Social Security the most famous example. The appeal derives, in part, from the vision of a system that works for everyone, rather than one of rapacious capitalism overlaid with a stifling system of taxation and regulation.

By asking everybody to pay in and making everyone eligible to receive, Bernie Sanders affirms a deeply conservative principle: the idea that as citizens, we should all have skin in the game, that we are all part of a national community. Instead of some people’s hard-earned tax dollars subsidizing welfare benefits for the poor, everyone’s tax dollars are funding a universal civic inheritance. Such programs are not class warfare, nor are they for “the poor.” They are for Americans.

Bernie’s commentary suggests that his image of a healthy, prosperous economy is more or less the 1950s. It is a strange irony, noted by Yuval Levin and others, that Republicans look to the ’50s for social attitudes while Democrats look to that decade for economic policy.

Sanders’ temperamental conservatism comes through most emphatically on trade. Though Sanders economic vision in a globalized age may be simplistic, it demonstrates a healthy respect for our particular history and for the idea that social and economic stability might be worth more than the rush of riding creative destruction like a rodeo bull.

Free-trade advocacy uses the language of efficiency and cost savings — $100 televisions! An iPhone charger in every electrical outlet! — and it’s valuable to have a prominent presidential candidate who includes dispossessed workers, decaying cities, and deaths of despair in the cost-benefit analysis. If we properly included those negative factors, we might find that the apparent benefits of free trade are largely a figment of incomplete accounting.

A case can instead be made — and it has been, poorly, by none other than Donald Trump — that the pro-globalization crowd are the real radicals. The people who would “fundamentally transform America” are the Reagan-Thatcher disciples of “dynamism,” the Thomas Friedmans who’ll buy any deal with “free trade” in the title, the corporate titans for whom the fabric and history of real communities are a hindrance to ever-greater growth, profits, and efficiency. There’s nothing conservative about undermining the system of broadly shared prosperity that served America well for decades.

This is not to say that the 1950s economy should, or even could, be encased in amber. But many conservatives have understood, long before Donald Trump entered politics, that the trade-offs of globalization have been severe, and some good things have been lost.

True conservatism is a temperament and a tendency, not an ideology. Though it’s out of fashion now, compromise is an important component, for both intellectual humility and social harmony. Throughout his career, Sanders has demonstrated a willingness to engage political opponents, searching for common ground.

One moment from the 2016 campaign stands out. Sanders visited Liberty University — yes, that Liberty University — and gave a speech in which he highlighted his departures from conservative Christianity, but called for cooperation on matters of agreement, such as fighting poverty and improving access to food and healthcare. Afterwards, he sat down for a Q&A with a Liberty senior vice president, and at the end of the session, bowed his head for a prayer. When asked how the university community could pray for him, Sanders entreated them to pray that Americans could come together and solve problems, especially for the most vulnerable.

It is difficult to imagine any other 2020 Democratic candidate constructively engaging with Jerry Falwell Jr. The fact that Sanders — Jewish, secular, socialist — could speak with grace at a right-wing evangelical college may say more about his humanity and general temperament than anything in his platform.

His campaign tagline may be “complete the revolution,” but Bernie Sanders is no revolutionary. He is a proud stick in the mud. And, though he would not adopt the title himself, in many important ways he is a proud conservative. We need more Americans like him. And we might even benefit from a president like him too.