Taking aim at Bernie Sanders.

There is some irony that both left and right are bashing Bernie for so close an identification with the aims and values of old-style progressivism, socialism, and social democracy.

On the right, he's Bernie the obsolete and embarrassingly too nationalist lunatic red.

Democrats turn hard left

Bernie Sanders ignores realities of economic growth

Why Bernie Sanders' Decades-Old Rape Fantasies Matter to 2016

More and worse out there now and to come.

On the left his thinking is just like him, too old and too white. And also too male, yes.

White progressives’ racial myopia: Why their colorblindness fails minorities — and the left

This is so Joan Walsh, whose specific complaint is that Bernie in particular, the three leading progressive whites, and progressive whites generally (she attacks Bill De Blasio by name) show no signs of turning their campaigns into ancillary megaphones for the sisterhood's specific issues and what she calls "the 'Black Lives Matter' crusade."

She faults them all and even Obama for, as she puts it in lucid leftist style, prioritizing class politics over identity-focused politics, assured as they are (for example) that color-blind class measures will disproportionately help blacks and Hispanics over whites, anyway.

But she speaks for the vast number on the left for whom issues of identity altogether eclipse the concerns central to progressivism and socialism since the 19th Century.

Joan and those she here speaks for are far more New Left in that regard than the white pols she attacks, Bernie perhaps more so than the others.

Whether they know it or not.

She is quite frank that unless they get on that racist bandwagon they will not get enough support from blacks in 2016 to win.

It does not occur to her that getting on that racist bandwagon will hurt the nominee among crucial white voters perhaps even more than his race hurt Obama, without winning anything like the non-white and youth support O was able to rely on.

It does not occur to her that her party is now so wedded to a repulsive view of race in America and so reliant on voters whom no white politician can inspire that it just might not be able to win a presidential election with a white candidate, or indeed any non-black candidate.

Or that, for the same reasons, it might not be able to win again with a black nominee for a good while.