One of professional political commentary’s most irritating and, thus, dominant new traits is the pundit’s habit of appending the invented suffix “splaining” to a variety of nouns. “Mansplaining,” “straightsplaining,” “whitesplaining,” et cetera. It is a condescending way to accuse someone of engaging in condescension, and it’s no coincidence that this bastardized construction is favored by the social justice-obsessed New Left. Given that, the surge of support for Bernie Sanders among Democratic primary voters has been particularly entertaining for a variety of reasons; perhaps none more so than the efforts by some prominent Democrats to explain to the public that they shouldn’t believe their own ears when it comes to Mr. Sanders.

For committed Democrats, the rise of a self-described socialist Senate backbencher seems to confuse more than it clarifies. Take, for example, a rising star among Democratic coastal elites – The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates. The columnist has made a name for himself by engaging in the embittering and Sisyphean task of rehabilitating the concept of reparations, not merely for the descendants of African slaves but for all of black America as meager recompense for a variety of offenses. But while Coates seems proudly radical, he is no revolutionary. If he were, he would express a resentment of existing institutional structures and a desire to see them torn down and replaced with something entirely new. Coates’ antipathy toward such a self-destructive approach to governance is evident in his consternation toward Sanders for failing to embrace his preferred reparations program.

“Sanders says the chance of getting reparations through Congress is ‘nil,’ a correct observation which could just as well apply to much of the Vermont senator’s own platform,” Coates recently observed. “The chances of a President Sanders coaxing a Republican Congress to pass a $1 trillion jobs and infrastructure bill are also nil.” Given that so much of Sanders’ agenda is little more than throat-clearing, Coates reasoned, why shouldn’t the senator lend some credence to his own pet cause?

This is not an especially convincing argument either against Sanders or for reparations. It essentially concedes that all parties in this argument are engaging in fantastical thinking. In indicting Sanders, not for his wild-eyed dreaming but for failing to make room in that cavernous imagination for his own fantasies, Coates cites another liberal in good standing: Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. The New York Times economist had a few days prior made an equally unconvincing argument, only his was a defense of the Affordable Care Act.

Krugman offered a tepid defense for the president’s health care reform law that has become a surprising pivot point in the Democratic race for president. ObamaCare, Krugman explained, is essentially “a somewhat awkward, clumsy device with lots of moving parts.”

“This makes it more expensive than it should be, and will probably always cause a significant number of people to fall through the cracks,” he added. Krugman noted, however, that the imperfect ACA is about as good a get for progressives as anything that might replace it. Rather than take a gamble on a single-payer system, which would require massive tax hikes on every sector of society and which could not pass through Democrat-majority Congress in the president’s first term, he suggests Sanders scale back his dreams. Unlike Coates, who wants Sanders to embrace unworkable policy prescriptions purely for their rhetorical value, Krugman would prefer that Sanders display a touch more pragmatism. In both cases, however, these left-of-center intellectuals concede that Sanders is peddling happy make believe and calling it policy.

Even the outgoing presidential administration is trying to put the brakes on Sanders’ intemperate and uncompromising attitude about the kind of radical changes he would pursue as president.

In a wide-ranging interview with CNN’s Gloria Borger, Vice President Joe Biden initially appeared warm to the senator from Vermont. He even provided the insurgent Democrat with a boost by contending that Hillary Clinton is struggling due primarily to her very recent decision to embrace populist, anti-Wall Street rhetoric and policy positions aimed at addressing the alleged scourge of “income inequality.” Biden did, however, take the opportunity to lecture Sanders about what he really believed.

“You know, if Bernie Sanders never said he was a democratic socialist, based on what he’s saying, people wouldn’t be calling him a democratic socialist,” the vice president averred. “We need — not just in my country, but in other countries — a more progressive tax code. Not confiscatory policy, not socialism, a tax code.”

“Everybody pays proportionally a fair share. This is not meant to penalize everybody,” Biden declared. Lest you thought this was an extemporaneous shot across Sanders’ bow, the vice president repeated his admonition in writing. “We need a more progressive tax code,” he tweeted from the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. “Not socialism. A tax code.”

From all corners of the American liberal coalition — from its intellectuals to its radicals to its most prominent elected officials — the consensus seems to be that Bernie Sanders is a fanatic. What’s more, he’s not their fanatic and, as such, merits deep suspicion. This should all sound rather familiar to Republicans. Their party is uniquely paralyzed by the rise of a demagogue who has made a virtue of ideological heterodoxy, and whose support structure is utterly divorced from traditional sources of electoral strength – namely, other elected officials. While the left is busily explaining to Sanders that he shouldn’t believe in the things in which he believes, the candidate is lighting a fire under disaffected far-left progressives who are being told precisely what they want to hear, feasibility be damned.

Traditional moderate conservatives haven’t had much luck arresting the fevered anti-elitism that has overtaken their party. Perhaps Democrats will have an easier time of it. That, however, is an effort that will be complicated so long as the party’s governing class chooses to make their case against Sanders by appealing first to contempt.

+ A A -
You may also like
Share via
Copy link