I think it’s a shade of liberal great man theory to think that a figure like sanders has had a positive effect on bringing people towards socialism without acknowledging the many more people who he has kept away from socialism by setting the idea of socialism as liberalism.

Anyone who has a Bernie phase but ultimately moved on to revolutionary theory would have gotten there anyway, Bernie or not. I’m more concerned with the many many more people who reached the point of accepting Bernie’s theories of change and found comfort in staying there in perpetuity because they are designed perfectly to do just that. Defanging revolutionary energy and herding it back towards democratic party, capitalism, and imperialism is not bringing people to socialism, it is bringing them away from it, and that is exactly what Mamdani is doing in turn