Just you watch: By the time Election Day rolls around in November, liberal columnists will be telling us that Bernie Sanders is the “real conservative” in the presidential race.

Many among the center–left commentariat are struggling to come to terms with the likelihood that the Democratic Party will nominate an authoritarian leftist for president. A lot of this anxiety is, no doubt, driven by recent polls that find a majority of Americans are more open to voting for a non-binary Martian atheist than for a socialist.

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Others, however, have begun reinventing Sanders, who, they now contend, isn’t actually a socialist socialist, because he’ll never send you to die in an icy gulag and few of his policy ideas will ever come to fruition.

Matt Fuller over at Huffington Post posits that moderates shouldn’t be too “scared” of a Sanders presidency “when all Republicans and most Democrats in Congress publicly oppose Medicare for All.” Really? The signature policy idea championed by a major party’s leading presidential contender is so unpopular that the majority of elected officials can’t publicly support it, and that should reassure moderates?

“Vote Bernie: He’s got tremendously unpopular positions that will never pass!”

Paul Krugman is more straightforward in his latest column, “Bernie Sanders Isn’t a Socialist.” The real problem, contends the New York Times pundit, is that the man who once rolled with the “Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party” and defended a slew of Marxist dictators throughout the Cold War merely brands himself a socialist, thus handing Republicans a potent line of attack.

After spending a few sentences scolding conservatives for having smeared his favored policy programs as “socialism” over the years, Krugman laments that Bernie plays right into the hands of these “disreputable,” “smarmy,” “dishonest” Republicans.

They were right, though, weren’t they, all those hyperbolic conservatives who warned that corroding economic freedom would lead here? The Democratic Party is on the verge of nominating a man who wants to incrementally abolish capitalism. This time, I’m sure, it’ll be done right.