A Bernie Sanders of their own

With so much else going on the world these days (August=slow vacation time...yeah, right), you may not have noticed this, but Sen. Bernie Sanders is on fire. Out West in Seattle, Portland and Los Angeles, the democratic socialist from Vermont is drawing crowds that are simply unheard of at the stage of the presidential game -- 15,000, 20,000, 27,000, with some of the folks watching on big TVs in the parking lots because they can't get inside to hear his message of a political revolution against wealth inequality in America.

In New Hampshire, the critical first-in-the-nation primary state (Iowa's a less democratic caucus system), a new poll even has Sanders defeating Hillary Clinton. None of this means that Sanders will be the 45th POTUS or even the Democratic nominee; he still has yet to break out of an appeal that's mostly confined to white, upscale liberals who may or may not drive Volvos and eat arugula. But you have to concede that -- in the words of a song I've heard a couple or maybe 537 times -- there's something happening here.

There's also something happening across the pond. In England, there's a growing likelihood that the next leader of the Labour Party will be so liberal as to make Bernie Sanders seem like Scott Walker. His name is Jeremy Corbyn:

He would like to remove private health providers from the National Health Service, renationalize the country's railways and top six energy companies, make state education more monolithic and return to the party constitution a version of the infamous Clause IV, removed by Mr. Blair in 1995, which called for "common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange."

Mr. Corbyn says that public ownership and participation in industry is a key part of Labour's principles and could be achieved through the state's buying up shares for a controlling stake.

On foreign policy, Mr. Corbyn would withdraw Britain from NATO and scrap the country's nuclear deterrent, and he has generally sided with those most opposed to the United States, like the late President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. He has described Hamas and Hezbollah as "friends," without backing all their deeds, and has been close to Sinn Fein: He invited the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams to the House of Commons in 1984, two weeks after the Irish Republican Army tried to kill Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by bombing her Brighton hotel.

A Twitter feed, @corbynjokes, is proving popular, with sallies like: "What have Western capitalism and the Australian cricket team got in common? They're both subject to inevitable collapse," and "Why did the bicycle fall over? Historical inevitability." Some compare Mr. Corbyn to Jesus, and others note that he would be the first bearded party leader since Keir Hardie in 1908.

Well, the world definitely needs more bearded leaders. But most importantly, the fact that Sanders and Corbyn are hitting new highs for politicians on the farther left definitely says something about the state of the world, period. Two generations of ever-expanding income inequality, and the failure of unchecked militarism in the Middle East and elsewhere, certainly has liberals looking toward more radical solutions than were considered acceptable in the late 20th Century. But is it enough to drag the entire body politic -- in the U.S., Great Britain and elsewhere -- toward more progressive actual policies?.

The next 16 months are starting to look very interesting.