You know who else was a 'democratic socialist'?

"You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism."

-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., addressing staff members in 1966.

It's funny -- nearly 50 years later, only 47 percent of the American electorate says it could ever vote for a "socialist" (does that include a "democratic socialist"?...we may soon find out). This weekend, as evidence mounted that Sen. Bernie Sanders is posing a very serious challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, a few folks on the right began sharpening their knives. Rupert Murdoch's house organ, the New York Post, ran a "hit piece" on Sanders career --most of it stuff that's been in the public record for decades and covered thoroughly in my e-book "The Bern Identity". (The most hilarious part is an accusation that Sanders named the minor league baseball team that he'd wooed to Burlington "The Vermont Reds" in honor of his "Commie" political leanings...and not because it was a Cincinnati Reds farm team.)

But that was yesterday. Today, all of America pauses to honor the legacy of a man who was ahead of his time in understanding that real justice wasn't coming to the inner city without economic justice -- including public-works spending for full employment, livable wages and the right of workers to organize. Indeed, his last campaign was to aid striking sanitation workers in Memphis -- the crusade where he was assassinated on April 5, 1968. Had he lived, King was planning to lead a Poor People's Campaign on Washington in the summer of 1968 -- to spotlight the issue that today we call income inequality.

One thing that's been great to see over the last decade is a real effort to reclaim King's radical vision for America from the sanitized, "Disneyland" version of harmony that so many of the nation's politicians would prefer that we see. Now, in the 2016 election, U.S. voters have a real opportunity to kick things up a notch or two. I think MLK would have enjoyed watching this campaign unfold.