I was a Sanders supporter and I looked at his platforms and policies and there was no crazy socialist far left nonsense in there. He models his platform and where he is coming from on FDR. Free public higher education was not a radical new idea, it was something we had through the 1970s. Raising the tax rates on the wealthiest people in the country, not new or radical, but a return to what we were doing in the past. His healthcare plan was not radical either but rather it is the most popular option in the country and chances are it will at some point become our established healthcare plan. In terms of his other policy nothing radical in how he wanted to deal with Wall Street and the big banks, just putting the brakes on them and moving toward regulation we had in the past. Investing in clean energy was also not radical. 

Really, of the hit pieces I saw on Sanders, most were fiction from the Democrats because they did not want to surrender the party to the more progressive side...read that "progressive" as going back to plans that made this country succeed when it came to have a growing middle class. Quite honestly, these are policies we need to embrace as a country because the policies we've embraced primarily since Reagan, and this includes Clinton and Obama, have seen nothing but stagnation and cuts to public finding that have raised the cost of everything, while keeping wages stuck in the 1980s. It's been grotesque, cruel, unfair, and mostly a disaster. It has created this situation where you have these furious people that will march out to support a clown like Trump because they just do not understand how they have ended up so screwed. 

He was their grenade, only they did not know when they threw him, his plan was to blow them up not the "swamp."

You'd really need to point out what policy Sanders had that causes you concern. He certainly is not Hugo Chavez and he is only as radical as FDR...who by today's standards in terms of what these parties now claim is the "center" would be far left. Hell, the model for today's "center" Democrats is Nixon/Eisenhower who would be viewed by the lunatics in the Republican party now as far left.

Look, I honestly believe that the majority of the 73 million people that voted for Trump did not do so because their biggest fear was socialism, they voted primarily out of fear and anger. I think most of these people do not even know what socialism is nor that we are a massively socialist country but most of the socialism goes to the wealthy. So, the socialism boogeyman word to me is nonsense and mostly pushed by the centrist wing of Democrats...they want to maintain their grasp on the party. They are the ones that have to fight with progressives, not Republicans, and it is kind of shameful the way they handled that.