Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

Centrists trying to understand what powers the Bernie Sanders surge need look no further than two terms of Obama. The right is empowered by its successes while the left is empowered by its own failures. The worse the left fails, the more problems it creates that urgently need to be solved.

There is a straight line between the counterterrorism failures of Carter against Iran and Clinton against Al Qaeda to the Obama years. And Obama’s failures against Iran and ISIS are likely to give birth to an even more extreme candidate who will make him seem moderate. It not only can happen, it will.

Bernie Sanders is running against an economic malaise that was created when the Clintons turned banks into social justice piggy banks for allied billionaires and the welfare class. Then Obama climbed into office on the heels of that economic disaster and vastly enriched Washington D.C.’s bedroom communities by spending unheard of amounts of money on government and his political allies.

Americans weren’t driven to the brink by free enterprise policies, but by the left using big business to fund the left’s pet causes. Bernie Sanders’ solution is to make it worse by diverting even more money out of the economy to the left’s pet causes. If you hated the last economic disaster, get ready for the next one. But the left always creates the problems that it then promises to solve with more of the same.

FDR created urban ghettoes and then a succession of Democrats ran for office by promising to fix them. Their solutions didn’t fix the ghettos, but turned them into permanent sinkholes of human misery. Urban schools became union sinecures, failed systems that constantly needed more money without ever producing results. Families dissolved into the welfare state turning out generations of feral children. Destroying manufacturing to fight pollution and then driving away non-union and low-wage jobs eliminated the last few alternatives to the welfare state. Pro-crime advocacy turned over entire cities to criminals while the only community activists the left recognized supported the criminals.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are running on promises to “help” black people in the same old ways with more welfare, fewer jobs and a free pass for criminals. But it’s not just the ghettos, which have been experiment on by leftist activists for generations, but the whole country that is being promised solutions by the left to the problems that the left created.

Bernie Sanders will fight the high cost of college and the high cost of health care. But who made college and health care so expensive? The left did. On the one hand, the left offered easy money for student loans. On the other, its regulations vastly increased the administrative burden of higher education. Colleges raised tuition while their administrative sectors grew vastly out of proportion to the educational core. There was always more government money so that colleges kept spending and raising tuition to comply with the latest regulations until there were deans of everything.

And students, who often didn’t understand the financial consequences, ended up on the hook for a useless education whose only real purpose was political indoctrination by leftist faculty.

Free college just sends this cycle into overdrive. And it will pass the bill to the same students anyway who will be taxed by the IRS to pay for their “free college” which, like everything else the government gives away, is only free to those who don’t work. Free is only truly free for the welfare class.

It wasn’t for-profit schools, the habitual whipping boys of the Educracy, who made higher education unaffordable. Big banks didn’t force Harvard to pay Elizabeth Warren $350,000 to teach one course. They didn’t force UC-Berkeley to pay Clinton’s former Labor Secretary Robert Reich $235,791 to teach a course on “Wealth and Poverty” or made CUNY to dole out $225,000 to Paul Krugman to study “income inequality”.

It isn’t the right that shamelessly bankrupted higher education to finance its political party, handing out fortunes to its favored academics while using adjuncts as slave labor. It wasn’t the right that used affirmative action as the subprime mortgages of higher education to dump tons of debt on minority students while moving them to colleges they were not prepared for and then giving them few options except failure or radical political activism.

Bernie Sanders is not planning to fix any of this. His plan is to force everyone to subsidize it.

And if you think that what the left did to education is bad, what they did to health care is even worse. After watching over the VA’s murder factory and lying and denying that anything was wrong over the corpses of veterans, Bernie Sanders wants government health care for all. Of course he does.

Every effort to collectivize health care increased the administrative overhead and diminished the quality. The left created every phase of the health care system it complained about, from HMOs to ObamaCare. Now ObamaCare isn’t good enough either. It’s time for Bernie’s VA Death Panels for Everyone.

Each phase of the left’s health care disasters touched off a clamor of criticism and set the stage for the next disaster. That way grandma got to be pushed off the cliff one step at a time.

ObamaCare is destroying everything from private practice to rural medicine. It hasn’t solved the uninsured issue. All it did was push free market medicine closer to the brink while raising the bar for being able to afford actual health care, as opposed to ObamaCare’s worthless high deductible plans.

Want to fix the problem created by the left? The left has a solution. One government system. Lots of waiting. No health care. Call it SandersCare.

Bernie Sanders is running against ObamaCare by promising to make it much worse. He’s running against Obama’s foreign policy by promising to make it much worse. He’s running against Obama’s educational policy by promising to make it much worse. If you hated the 100-proof left, get ready for the 200-proof left.

Each of the left’s solutions creates the problems that the left then proposes to fix. The New Deal created the mess for the New Frontier and the Great Society to fix. The Great Society’s mess had to be tackled with Bill Clinton’s Bridge to the 21st Century. Then Obama’s Hope and Change came over that bridge.

Bernie Sanders, whose gargantuan government ideology encompasses everything from New Dealism to the decrepit days of Obama, is the perfect follow-up act. If government control didn’t work before, it’s only because the government didn’t have enough control. Only by sweeping away the free market will the failed Socialist policies of a hundred years be made to work. And if they still don’t work, then it’ll be time for even more consolidation, centralization regulation and eventually total government control.

Leftists keep promising to fix the problems they made. After spending generations destroying the educational system, they promise to make it work as long as they can eliminate the alternatives. After generations spent destroying health care, they will finally make it work by eliminating other options.

Because in reality the left never fixes anything, it just makes it worse until there are no more alternatives. If the ghetto is a mess, then use housing mandates to export it. If ObamaCare has failed, go to Single Payer. Every leftist failure becomes an argument for its next wave of extremism.

Clinton’s failures and Obama’s failures create a platform for Bernie Sanders to run on. Each leftist radical policy fails and its failure is blamed on being insufficiently extreme. Left-wing failure generates left-wing extremism.

Bernie Sanders keeps calling for a revolution. A revolution is how the left leapfrogs its existing failures to create much worse failures. Revolutions don’t fix problems. They eliminate existing solutions.

The only problem that Bernie Sanders is running to solve is the problem of human freedom.