By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, February 26, 2020
In Jaws 2, Roy Scheider reprises his role as
Police Chief Brody, the landlubber lawman forced to battle a great white shark.
He’s convinced there’s another beast out there, but he can’t persuade anyone
who matters. “Look at this. That’s a shark,” says Brody, waving a grainy
underwater photo at the town’s political leaders. “I’m telling you and I’m telling
everyone at this table, that’s a shark. And I know what a shark looks like
because I’ve seen one up close. And you better do something about this one,
because I don’t intend to go through that hell again.”
That’s how some of us on the Right feel watching Senator
Bernie Sanders’s rise through the primaries. A rabble-rouser with at most a
transactional relationship with the Democratic Party is sweeping through the
early contests by pandering to populist discontent. He’s toxic to the suburban
moderates who tend to tip one party or the other toward a majority. (The
candidates who won enough swing districts to flip the House of Representatives
in 2018 were almost entirely from this column, not Sandernistas.)
The Democratic presidential field suffers from a problem
similar to the one that crippled the GOP in 2016 and saddled us with Donald
Trump. It’s in all the candidates’ interest to see Sanders destroyed, but it’s
in no one’s individual interest to play the role of destroyer. So Elizabeth
Warren spends her time attacking Michael Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg focuses his
rhetorical artillery on Amy Klobuchar, and Klobuchar returns fire. Even
Bloomberg seems too scared to nuke Sanders from orbit.
When Trump launched his hostile takeover of the GOP,
there was ammo of almost every kind to fire at him. He was a lifelong Democrat
who’d been pro-abortion rights and pro-gun control. He didn’t have even a
rudimentary understanding of the issues a president has to deal with, domestic
or foreign. The stories about his personal shortcomings — affairs,
bankruptcies, sexual improprieties, etc. — were an opposition researcher’s
dream. Conservatives had decades of experience arguing on this turf, and they
still failed to stop him. So intense was the populist ire against “the
establishment,” Trump could claim every attack was proof that the old guard was
scared of him.
Sanders is playing that same card effectively with his
base, but he has other advantages as well. First, he may be quirky, but there’s
comparatively little personal baggage to dredge up. Also, he may be a left-wing
ideologue, but he’s a sophisticated and experienced one who sounds like he
knows what he’s talking about.
Even more problematic, Democrats have no institutional
memory when it comes to arguing with socialists. It’s been 73 years since the
centrist liberals of Americans for Democratic Action waged their war against
Communists inside the Democratic Party in 1947. Those arguments were against
the backdrop of the Cold War. Sanders descends ideologically from the losers in
that battle, but none of the descendants of the winners seem to know how to
make the right arguments anymore.
Instead, they’ve slowly come around to Sanders’s point of
view, both on policy and on politics. They’ve mostly bought into single-payer
health care being the ideal goal, even if some counsel pragmatism in achieving
it. Democrats have also become besotted with the “coalition of the ascendant” —
young people, minorities, and immigrants who will demographically and
righteously overpower the old guard. If the anointed masses say they like
socialism, who are Democrats to tell them they’re wrong?
In 2016, the head of the Democratic National Committee,
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was asked countless times to explain the difference
between socialists and liberals or Democrats, and she either dodged or failed
every time. Buttigieg said this week: “I respect my friend Senator Sanders. I
believe the ideals he talks about are ideals we all share.”
This isn’t exactly drawing a bright line.
Like Brody in Jaws II, James Carville, the
Democratic guru who managed Bill Clinton’s successful campaign in 1992, has
tried to sound the alarm. But unlike Brody’s warning, Carville’s sounds awfully
anemic.
“If you want to vote for Bernie Sanders because you feel
good about his program, you don’t like the banks on Wall Street or you don’t
like pharmaceuticals, that’s legitimate, I understand that,” Carville recently
said on MSNBC. “If you’re voting for him because you think he’ll win the
election, politically, you’re a fool.”
Carville may be right politically, and that will matter
to some of the voters who care most about giving Trump the boot. But as Sanders
racks up wins, the electability argument loses its oomph, just as it did in
2016 with Trump. And, soon, attacks on the clear front-runner with the most
votes will be denounced by those who insist the party unify around the people’s
choice, again.
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