By Jonah Goldberg
Saturday, February 13, 2016
Watching last night’s Democratic presidential debate, I
came to several conclusions. They are in no particular order:
1. I don’t get paid nearly enough.
2. My feet are cold too much these days, I need to wear
warmer socks around the house.
3. Bernie Sanders is the most typecast presidential
candidate of my lifetime. What I mean is that I can’t remember another
presidential candidate who I could more easily imagine in a different setting.
For instance, there’s a Starbucks near me in D.C. where old Reds take time off
from yelling at clouds to get together and tsk-tsk the newspapers and talk
about how much they hate Fox News. I wrote a big chunk of Liberal Fascism there
(if they only knew!). I’d eavesdrop as they’d rail about Israel, billionaires,
and their sciatica. Bernie Sanders could join them tomorrow in dirty Bermuda
shorts, black socks, and tennis shoes, and seem perfectly at home there as they
kept bringing up the overthrow of Allende as if it had happened last week. I
could also think of a dozen other settings where he wouldn’t stand out. I could
see him in a bathrobe walking down the promenade in Santa Monica. I could see
him yelling at kids crossing his lawn on the way home from school. “Young men!”
he’d shout, shaking his fist, “Shame on you!” Sanders’s familiarity is
interesting because it makes him charming, but not altogether likeable (sort of
like how critics used to say, a bit unfairly, that Sarah Jessica Parker was
sexy but not pretty). I suspect I would find Sanders utterly tedious if I had
to sit and converse with him for very long. But as a politician he’s
compelling, like a basset hound dressed up in a Prussian military uniform, he
takes himself so seriously and that makes him endearing.
4. Hillary Clinton has no message. At this point, this is
hardly an original thought. But the best evidence for it is that in all of
these Democratic debates, Hillary ends up having to talk about Bernie Sanders’s
One Big Issue for most of the time because she doesn’t have one. Sanders is
often ridiculous in the way he tries to make everything about millionaires and
billionaires and Wall Street. Hillary Clinton is right when she says that this
is not a “single-issue country.” But there is no theme to the Clintonian
pudding, to mangle a Churchillian phrase. In a very weird way, her whole sales
pitch is Trumpian: It’s all about me, me, me. Her flip flops, triangulations,
and the rest are supposedly justified by the fact she’s just so awesome. Her
only problem: There’s really no awesomeness to Hillary. She’s promising “wins”
too, but in the language of a bureaucrat. Her mix of condescension and
pandering flattery (or flattering pandery) reminds me of a certain kind of
overeducated saleswoman at, say, a Barnes and Noble, desperate to sell you a
membership discount card, but clueless about how to close the deal save to talk
down to you.
5. We’re running low on scotch.
6. Bernie Sanders slandered Herbert Hoover, at least on
Sanders’s terms. When asked what politicians he admired most, his first answer
was FDR, which was less surprising than the realization that if I drop steak on
the floor, my dog will eat it. He said of FDR:
And then what he did is redefine the role of government. You know, you
had Herbert Hoover before that saying, no, we got to only worry about the
deficit. So what if mass unemployment exists? So what if children are going
hungry? That’s not the role of the government.
And when FDR said, “Yeah, it is,” that we’re going to use all of the
resources that we have to create jobs, to build homes, to feed people, to
protect the farmers, we are a nation which if we come together there is nothing
that we could not accomplish.
First of all, I am really sick of this idea that if we
all come together, there’s nothing we can’t accomplish. If we are unified
around the idea that Mars should have a breathable atmosphere, will that
suddenly happen? If we all agree that Lena Dunham should be a sex symbol, will
we get any closer to that being true? If 100 percent of us agree that bears
must use indoor bathrooms, will they magically leave their wooded toilets
behind them?
Indeed, this whole idea that if we just rally the people
to some grand cause we can get it done is simply gross. It’s Five Year Plan
talk. It’s how dictators justify monuments and totalitarians bully dissidents.
If only someone wrote a book about this. Oh, and it doesn’t work. North Korea’s economy isn’t suffering from a lack of
unity or participation.
Where was I? Right. Hoover. I’m not a big fan of Herbert
Hoover, but the notion that he was this heartless bastard cheapskate is total
mythmaking. Even William Leuchtenburg, the dean of New Deal historians, has
conceded that “almost every historian now recognizes that the image of Hoover
as a ‘do-nothing’ president is inaccurate.” Indeed, the sad fact is that if
Hoover had done nothing, the Great Depression probably would never have become
Great in the first place. Doing nothing did wonders for the Depression of
1920–21.
Hoover was the father of the New Deal (and Woodrow Wilson
was the grandfather). As I’ve written many times before in this “news”letter,
Hoover was a progressive Republican. Here’s how he defended himself at the GOP
convention in 1932:
Two courses were open to us. We might have done nothing. That would have
been utter ruin. Instead, we met the situation with proposals to private
business and to the Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense
and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put that
program in action. Our measures have repelled these attacks of fear and panic.
. . . We have used the credit of the Government to aid and protect our
institutions, both public and private. We have provided methods and assurances
that none suffer from hunger or cold amongst our people. We have instituted
measures to assist our farmers and our homeowners. We have created vast
agencies for employment.
I guess I should probably stop with the bullet points
already. So I’ll end with:
7. You can’t trust liberals.
Progressivism: It
Never Ends
Watching Sanders and Clinton last night, two things were
obvious. First, the sexual tension was palpable. It was like they were
auditioning for a remake of Cocoon.
Second, as with previous debates, both candidates spent a
huge amount of time talking about how much more intrusive the government needs
to be when it comes to health care. One candidate said it needs to be a lot
more intrusive, the other said it should be much, much, much, much, more
intrusive.
This shouldn’t be surprising except for the fact that we
were told — quite a lot — that Obamacare had fixed our broken health-care
system. I recall someone saying it was an effing big deal or some such. And
yet, even before it’s fully implemented, we’re now being told we need so much
more.
The exact same dynamic is at work for Wall Street
regulations. With Dodd Frank, the Democrats passed some huge — and hugely awful
— legislation to regulate Wall Street. Both candidates agree that so much more
needs to be done. Their disagreement has nothing to do with direction, only
velocity.
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and countless other
Democrats insisted they opposed same-sex marriage. Conservatives said they were
lying. Democrats protested, often with great and haughty indignation. They said
it was outrageous to question their commitment to traditional family values,
religious principle, etc. And then, when the issue was ripe, they “evolved.”
Now, I always believed that Obama and Clinton were liars when it came to gay
marriage (and not just gay marriage). But even if that weren’t the case, it
doesn’t change the fact that liberals can’t be relied upon to stick to any principle
if that principle becomes remotely inconvenient.
Except one: More government.
Progressives are the car salesmen of the State, and
there’s always more undercoating to sell.
More government is the one indispensable conviction of
modern progressivism. Everything else is up for negotiation.
When they were asked about reducing government last
night, we got the usual word fog about eliminating duplicative programs and
other inefficiencies. I am in favor of that stuff too, of course. But cutting
inefficiency has very, very little to do with reducing the size of government
and may in fact increase the scope of government.
A mobster’s goons can be really inefficient in how they
go about shaking down local businesses for protection money. “Stop taking the
bus!” the Godfather might yell. Or, “When they ask to show you pictures of
their kids, say ‘No!’” Making the thugs more efficient is good for business,
but that doesn’t make the business good. Now, the government isn’t perfectly
analogous to the mob (don’t tell Kevin Williamson), but that doesn’t mean it
should be doing everything it does, either.
Socialism Is Back
I’d intended to make this “news”letter an extended riff
on the subject of William Voegeli’s essential book, Never Enough. Bill’s point is simply that liberalism is
politically, psychologically, fundamentally, metaphysically, ontologically,
structurally, and morally incapable of articulating and then sticking to a
limiting principle for government. But I have written about all that before.
Instead it occurs to me that the best single illustration
of what I mean — and Voegeli’s point — is the inability of the Democratic party
to state in clear and simple terms how it differs from socialism. They can’t do
it. Or at the very least they won’t do it, and in politics “won’t” very often means “can’t.”
We all know how many times the titular head of the
Democratic party, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has been asked to distinguish
between socialism and whatever dog’s breakfast the Democratic party stands for.
Clinton gets asked that question often as well, and usually responds with her
patented “I Don’t Like Your Question So I Will Laugh To Distract You” Cackle®.
For generations, if a conservative said there was no
difference between Democrats and socialists (however defined!), liberal eyes would roll right out of their
heads. Such statements were like gassy flares from the fever swamps of the
cranky, crazy American Right. Even at the dawn of the Obama administration,
this was still the case. Indeed, I wrote a perfectly reasonable and reasoned
piece for Commentary asking, “What
Kind of Socialist Is Barack Obama?” (My answer: a neo-socialist). Liberals
tittered and scoffed.
And now, because a septuagenarian (self-described)
socialist is popular with the kids today, it is now verboten to suggest there is a difference between Democrats and
socialists.
Whatever socialism is — or isn’t — it hasn’t changed in
the last ten months. What’s changed is the rigidity of liberal spines. They’ve
gone from flexible to flaccid to liquefaction. And that’s why you can never
trust them, even when you agree with them. They’ll always want more, because
more is the only thing they really believe in.
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