Brooks on Sanders

Unsurprising but still interesting. The headline on David Brooks’s column is “No, Not Sanders, Not Ever”.

Traditional liberalism traces its intellectual roots to John Stuart Mill, John Locke, the Social Gospel movement and the New Deal. This liberalism believes in gaining power the traditional way: building coalitions, working within the constitutional system and crafting the sort of compromises you need in a complex, pluralistic society.

This is why liberals like Hubert Humphrey, Ted Kennedy and Elizabeth Warren were and are such effective senators. They worked within the system, negotiated and practiced the art of politics.

Populists like Sanders speak as if the whole system is irredeemably corrupt. Sanders was a useless House member and has been a marginal senator because he doesn’t operate within this system or believe in this theory of change.

He believes in revolutionary mass mobilization and, once an election has been won, rule by majoritarian domination. This is how populists of left and right are ruling all over the world, and it is exactly what our founders feared most and tried hard to prevent.

Liberalism celebrates certain values: reasonableness, conversation, compassion, tolerance, intellectual humility and optimism. Liberalism is horrified by cruelty. Sanders’s leadership style embodies the populist values, which are different: rage, bitter and relentless polarization, a demand for ideological purity among your friends and incessant hatred for your supposed foes.

Looks like he feels about Bernie the same way I felt about Jeremy Corbyn.

Who said irony was dead?

Michael Gove has apparently confirmed that up to 50,000 people may be needed to manage the paperwork for the borders of the newly-‘liberated’ UK. This prompted George Packer and Daniel Thomas to observe (in today’s FT) that “By the time Britain exits the transition period, the private sector may have hired four times more people to fill in customs forms than the 12,000 people working as fishermen in the U.K. — the industry that is supposedly one of the big beneficiaries of Brexit.”