Populist Reform of the Democratic Party

From the linked article: " In the coming years, we will probably see the development of a Democratic Socialist Party in the U.S."

To the contrary, the importance of the Sanders race, aside from the possibility of his actually becoming President, is its potential to reshape the Democratic Party. The author, evidently affiliated with socialistworker.org, comes from a school of thought that's been around for decades -- the Democrats and Republicans are two wings of the same corporate party, there's no significant difference between them, and all we need to do is present a REAL alternative and the workers will rise up and demand socialism (or some other suitably left panacea). Obviously, this has never worked. Its high-water mark was the Nader campaign of 2000, which drew less than 3% of the vote, and was most assuredly not the occasion for launching the Green Party as a credible alternative to the "duopoly" that Nader denounced.

Whatever you think about Nader, no one can deny that Sanders is taking a different course. Despite his background in third-party politics in Vermont, he realizes that, on the national scale, the only sensible route to progressive success is to reclaim the Democratic Party. Far from spurring a national Democratic Socialist Party, the Sanders campaign will give alienated former Democrats a reason to return to the Democratic Party, and will yield a whole crop of activists who are knowledgeable in intra-party politics. He will make it more likely that progressives will work within the Democratic Party rather than stomping off to form a third party (although there've been so many failed third parties that at this point the strategy must be to form something like the tenth party).