It seems that most people just think "orange man bad" without trying whatsoever to understand why people would vote for him over a normal candidate.
Is it? Do you really think that if Bernie won in 2016 and then lost in 2020 he would call upon his supporters to storm the Capitol?
Republican voters overwhelmingly picked Trump - and then turned out millions more in 2020 after they saw what he had done with the Oval Office. Just no remote equivocation between the two parties.
And read the timeline here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_Party_presid...
Bernie never had an edge; he lost 4 of the first 5 contests and finished with nearly 4 million fewer votes. It’s no secret the party apparatus preferred Hillary - to their great detriment given what happened in the general - but it absolutely ahistorical to insist that Bernie was somehow cheated out of anything.
You remember that the democrats stole the election from Bernie because the GOP wanted democrats to not be excited about voting for hilary, so they spread the message as much as they could
He might as well said "it sure would be a shame if someone was to storm that nice capitol building there"
There is absolutely no fringe candidate on the other side with anywhere near that kind of power. The closest you get is a Presidential candidate who was rejected. The highest office holders an objective observer would identify as "fringe" are Representatives, or perhaps that one Senator.
None of them is very powerful. They receive outsized attention in the media, and are pushed by their opponents as having far more power than they do, but no rational person would compare that to electing and then re-electing a conspiracy theorist to the top job -- supported by large numbers of legislators at all levels.
We still have to deal with our own internal biases, as you say. But they're entirely insufficient to justify any kind of equivalence. The fringe really does run that party.