Editor,

We’ve all suffered bacterial and viral infections. Prevention: wash hands, mingle body fluids appropriately, maintain immune system. Symptoms: fever, discharges, etc. When the immune system fails, we go with dangerous actions such as surgery, medications, and even isolation.

Our political body suffers infections also. Well intended beliefs and ideologies, normally appropriately contained by our political system (elections, laws, free speech) sometimes become dangerous. On the right, Adolf Hitler. On the left, Josef Stalin.

Somatic infections mutate. Currently, the Zika virus. In American culture on the right, Huey Long (Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s time); now Donald Trump. On the left, people who rationalized and denied Stalin’s “show trials,” purges and gulags.

Sen. Bernie Sanders is certainly less dangerous than Trump, and much admired on the left. Nevertheless, in his infatuation with socialism, I find disturbing parallels with the “fellow travelers” who rationalized and denied the dangers of Soviet communism. I am no admirer of Joseph McCarthy and the hysterical anti-Communism of the 1950s. There were real crimes and real dangers from the left. I am unable to share the current enthusiasm for Sanders.

For a positive suggestion with some “out of the box” thinking, I suggest the Democrats choose Hillary Clinton as their nominee and Michael Bloomberg as her vice presidential running mate. Oxymoronically, I seek a candidate who does not want to be president. Bloomberg, at least, is realistic (dropping his third party ambitions). While neither Clinton nor Bloomberg is that “likable,” to me they pass the “Titun Arum” (known as the “corpse flower” and considered the worst smelling bloom in the world) test far better than the most heavily perfumed candidate the Republicans are likely to offer.

STEPHEN KAHN

Langley