Bernie Sanders is not a radical leftist.

I took a political compass test, using Bernie Sanders' platform. It was fun, and as an intellectual exercise I strongly recommend that you take such a test -- once for your own views, and once imagining that you hold the views of someone you don't agree with. Anyway, here was the result I got when I took the test as if I were Bernie Sanders:

Okay, so he's not a centrist. He's clearly a leftist. But what kind of leftism is it? It's not the authoritarian leftism that is often what people have in mind when they criticize Sanders as a socialist -- when they ignore the distinction he draws between democratic socialism and totalitarian socialism. When people say or imply that Sanders admires Soviet Russia, they're just lying. Or they don't understand very much about Sanders' views, nor do they understand very much about Soviet Russia. In other words, they're either so misinformed that you can ignore them, or they're so deceitful that you can ignore them.

What would a true centrist look like? Well, that's the thing -- centrism is such an amorphously defined set of beliefs or non-beliefs that it is difficult to agree on one definition. So I'll do something selfish, and co-opt the term for my own purposes. I'll try to imagine the kind of centrist that falls on 'our' side of the anti-Trump divide. Someone who is skeptical or critical enough of Trump or what Trump represents that they are worth trying to tip towards the left.

Here's the same political compass using my understanding of the views of a typical non-Trump-supporter who nevertheless identifies as centrist or moderate (or independent or anti-Trump swing voter).

I suppose my own biases enter into my understanding of these things -- where I'm from, how old I am, how much money I make, my racial experience, etc. More than anything, while I was trying to imagine a 'good' moderate, a Trump-skeptic who values basic human dignity, I kept thinking how I really admire the women who were my grade school teachers in private, Catholic parochial schools in South Louisiana. They were quite religious and were often married to men who worked for oil and gas companies. But they also had a patriotic commitment to fairness and were avidly anti-corruption. It makes sense to me that they would want the government to have more authority, not less, than someone like Sanders -- as long as that authority is not perceived as anti-religion or bad for families.