By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, February 28, 2020
David
Brooks’s account of Senator Bernie Sanders and his campaign cuts deep,
because it is true, and obviously true.
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.
Brooks’s colleagues often write that the problem with the
country is that it is too divided, and that it requires someone to “unite” us
as a whole or in subsections. But saying that the country is “divided” is only
a way of acknowledging that there are two parties representing two organic
political tendencies and two broad American social tribes that disagree about
many of the basic things. The call for “unity” often is the call for
“majoritarian domination,” for getting one side to submit to the mastery of the
other.
This is a current theme of Democratic partisanship in the
New York Times mode. Jamelle Bouie, for example, writes that the first
thing that’s needed from a Democratic presidential nominee is “unifying the
party, and Sanders can do that,” and that the socialist from Vermont from Brooklyn
“is the only candidate who can plausibly unite the anti-Trump majority of the
electorate.” Frank Bruni, arguing for Pete Buttigieg instead, insists that
“fragmentation” is “the greatest problem that America faces,” and that
Buttigieg can reduce that fragmentation and hence make “progress on all of
those other fronts possible.” David Leonhardt, too, worries about division, and
makes the case that Democrats instead should rally behind Senator Klobuchar and
“de-emphasize cultural issues—on which voters are much more divided,”
describing a purely strategic approach. Michelle Goldberg, arguing for
Elizabeth Warren, lays out a model for that “majoritarian domination” that
Brooks warns of: “Even if a Democrat wins the presidency in November, Democrats
won’t be able to pass significant legislation unless they both take the Senate
and eliminate the filibuster. That will make Warren’s mastery of the levers of
executive power particularly important.”
Mastery and power!
Brooks is right about Senator Sanders. But it is no less
the case that Warren and the rest of that gang have very little interest in
anything other than ruling, majoritarian domination, mastery and
power—whatever you want to call it. Consider, for perspective, the upcoming
Supreme Court trial on Philadelphia’s jihad against Catholic Social Services,
which does invaluable work for children in the foster-care system but, in
accordance with its religious beliefs, declines to place children in the care
of homosexual couples. There are a million foster-care agencies (and adoption
agencies, too) that are not Catholic, that serve homosexual couples, that toe
whatever political line the corrupt and inept municipal powers of Philadelphia
insist on—and one that does not. One deviation is too many. The Left will not
have a live-and-let-live solution here, no more than in the matter of adoptions
in Massachusetts.
They speak of “unity.” They mean “submission.”
Until we are able to conduct ourselves with genuine
respect for the fact that there are real differences in our society, and that
those differences involve things that people on both sides of the great divide
believe to be morally important, we will not have a politics of the liberal
toleration Brooks longs for. We will have majoritarian tyranny and a merciless
fight for mastery and power.
And we will have two parties with two standard-bearers
who truly deserve one another.
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