And yes, he did say to vote for her ... but more than a month passed after the primaries ended during which he failed to concede (in fact he never did concede, just skipped that step), and when he finally endorsed her, in mid-July, it was more in the name of "doing everything to stop Trump" than a full-out embrace. Mélenchon's followers are apparently considering a movement to either leave their ballots blank or vote for none.
This is about more than two candidates and an electoral fight, however. The parallels lie in the embrace of a wholly economic, old-school Trotskyist ideology (yes, Sanders was once a Trotskyist, too: he "served as an elector for the Socialist Workers Party, which was founded on the principles of Leon Trotsky"
, and the idea that any issues of social justice would "trickle down" from the economics. This is something that fell out of favor for many years since the 1970s, but has regained popularity now among the populist left.
It's the populist issue that's a problem for me, because populism, left and right, seems to be closely linked to authoritarianism. What else would explain both French and American leftists hewing so devotedly to their "leaders" and seeing so-called "centrism" as more dangerous than the far right-wing?
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