Here we are, exactly one year from the Iowa caucuses, the kickoff to the presidential race, and Democratic hopefuls are lining up to take on Donald Trump.
As of this writing, there are seven Democrats officially running.
More are assured, potentially crowding the field as Republicans did three years ago.
The past few years we have seen the political landscape shift in ways it has not in decades.
Vt. Sen. Bernie Sanders' historic primary challenge against Hillary Clinton proved the term "Democratic Socialism" isn't the Boogie Man Cold War-era propaganda has always made it out to seem.
Because of Sen. Sanders, Medicare-for-all has become codified in the Democratic party platform, as has free college tuition, climate-change mitigation, criminal-justice reform, campaign-finance reform, and other issues that previously either got passing mention or no mention at all.
Sen. Sanders proved Americans overwhelmingly favor progressive positions on issues that most affect them, that those positions are not "radical," but are, in fact, those that defined the Democratic party from the 1930s to the 1990s before the Reaganomics corporate takeover.
His political revolution called for regular Americans from all walks of life to ingratiate themselves in a process from which they had been previously shut out.
This ushered in a new wave of progressive candidates, many of whom were elected this November to state, local, and federal government.
However, change rarely comes easily.
Despite the hegemony beginning to weaken, there are still those inside the Democratic establishment holding on to the cozy corporate status quo, and see these "insurgent" progressives as "subversive."
The most obvious example is New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who rocked the establishment in last summer's congressional primary when she defeated incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez came into the House this month showing us she was not merely making noise to win her seat.
Even before being sworn in, she staged a well-publicized sit-in outside then-incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office in effort to coax Pelosi to support the "Green New Deal" policy.
CBS conspicuously did not give the new House Democrat an opportunity to talk about this, HR 1, or her progressive agenda in her 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper last month.
Instead, Cooper encouraged her to trash Trump, asking her (after making sure he got in the "Democratic Socialist" label) if she thinks the president is a racist.
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