By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, April 08, 2020
Though it was long ago overtaken by events, the
trajectory of the Democratic presidential primary and what it spells for the
future deserves more reflection than this rapidly evolving news cycle will
likely permit. The stunning collapse of Bernie Sanders’s presidential prospects
is almost without precedent in the modern age. The senator from Vermont owes
his defeat to many factors, foremost among them the rapid consolidation of
Democratic elites around Joe Biden, who took utmost advantage of the political
cover the former vice president’s commanding victory in South Carolina provided
them. Though that’s a sign of the party’s institutional health, what may be
more indicative of the Democratic Party’s political evolution is how its most
influential members responded when it looked like Sanders was certain to win.
As Bernie Sanders inched closer to his party’s
presidential nomination in February, the progressive commentariat underwent a
crisis of conscience. Some resisted this hostile takeover, but many others went
about making their peace with the prospect of a self-described democratic
socialist as the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer.
New York Times
economist Paul Krugman sought comfort in the notion that Sanders was no true
socialist. “Bernie Sanders isn’t actually a socialist in any normal sense of
the term,” he wrote. That label, Krugman argued, wasn’t self-applied but
affixed to him by Republicans as part of a “smarmy, dishonest political
strategy.” After all, Sanders “doesn’t’ want to nationalize our major
industries and replace markets with central planning.”
Vox.com’s Ezra Klein followed suit, arguing that Sanders
has only adopted a “socialist ethic.” In practical terms, he claimed, Sanders
advocates milquetoast center-left policy prescriptions alien only to American
ears but familiar to much of the rest of the free world. “Sanders’s brand of
socialism isn’t about economic planning,” Vox declared. “It’s about an ethic of
solidarity with those the system is failing, not those for whom it’s working.”
Those Democrats who didn’t downplay Sanders’s oft-stated
commitment to socialism opted instead to emotionally blackmail their fellow
Democrats into keeping their concerns to themselves. “I will argue against him
as long as there is a chance of defeating him,” argued Lawfare’s Benjamin
Wittes. “But in the fight against authoritarianism, it would be a historic
error—one centrists have made before—to decline to make common cause with
socialists.”
“Even in the most extreme outcome,” which the author Jill
Filipovic conceded was nothing less than the implementation of Sander’s agenda,
“would you rather live in an America that is akin to a socially democratic
Denmark, or an America that is like… any authoritarian fascist state?”
Others took a different course, reassuring themselves
that Sanders couldn’t possibly believe what he says. And even if he does, none
of it is feasible in legislation. “Chill out about Bernie,” Vox’s Matthew
Yglesias begged his fellow progressive analysts. “He’s a skilled politician who
will govern in a broadly similar way to other Democrats and get the online
trolls you love to hate working against Trump like you want.”
Even as the Sanders campaign texted a message to
supporters claiming that his rise in the polls has led “establishment”
Democrats to succumb to “full panic mode,” genuine panic among Democratic
institutionalists was muted. “What Bernie has shown us until now is that he has
a very broad base of very, very passionate followers,” said Sen. Kirsten
Gillibrand. “That is the first thing you need for a campaign on any level.
Especially in a red or purple district.” Sen. Maria Cantwell appeared to agree,
adding that Sanders likely “steals” some of Trump’s votes. “I’m not part of the
collective freak out,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a former chairman of the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, assured reporters.
Sanders has given no public accounting as to how he’s
changed his views since the decades in which he identified as a plain-old
socialist unmodified by any banal adjectives, if he’s changed them at all. And
yet, the senator’s backers insist that Sanders is an advocate of nothing more
audacious than social democracy. On what grounds do they support this
assertion? Nothing less circular than Sanders’s own public statements.
With an eye toward the presidency, Sanders had spent the
better part of the last decade assuring his supporters that his brand of
socialism is, in fact, not socialism at all. “Let’s talk about democratic
socialism,” he said before an audience of Democratic primary voters ahead of
Nevada’s caucus. “Let’s talk about what goes on in countries like Denmark.”
The senator has long leaned on the example set by the
Jutland peninsula to make his brand of democratic socialism appear less radical
by comparison. “In Denmark,” Sanders averred in 2016, “there is a very
different understanding of what ‘freedom’ means.” Nonsense. Western European
classical liberalism is hardly unfamiliar to American eyes, even if some of the
continent’s social-welfare programs are more robust. It is, in fact,
Sanders—not Scandinavia—who adheres to a definition of “freedom” that departs from
the American political tradition.
Contrary to the self-soothing affirmations of analysts
like Klein and Krugman, Sanders spent years arguing in favor of nationalizing
industry, has effectively proposed the nationalization of much of the
health-insurance industry via his Medicare-for-All bill, and, as recently as
October 2019, advocated “public ownership of major utilities.”
In fact, if many of Sanders’s policy proposals are
familiar to Northern Europe’s social democracies, it’s only because those
nations attempted and subsequently abandoned them. For example, Sanders’s plan
to impose “Workplace Democracy” on publicly traded companies, forcing them to
transfer roughly 25 percent of shareholder wealth to worker-held funds and
giving corporate employees 45 percent of board seats. As the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle
observed, Sweden attempted something similar only to abandon it “because it
poisoned labor relations, and depressed both investment and productivity
growth.” Likewise, Sweden is one of three Nordic nations (including dear old
Denmark) that repealed their taxes on net assets—the “wealth tax” that Sanders
advocates—because the revenue they generated did not compensate for their
negative effects on job creation and social cohesion. Indeed, it was Scandinavia’s
social democrats who led the charge to create a healthier business climate over
the objections of their socialist colleagues.
The kind of statist populism Sanders and his vanguard of
proletarian reformers advocate goes well beyond what even European polities
would accept. There is perhaps no better example of that than the so-called
“Green New Deal.”
This bill and its supporting documents called for
shuttering all fossil-fuel-generating power plants, upgrading “every
residential and industrial building” in the U.S., and contracting industrial
agriculture down to “local scale.” The Green New Deal as envisioned by the
bill’s drafters would involve provisions that “guarantee a job” to “all people
of the United States,” provide for tuition-free education to help transition
the millions of Americans displaced amid the destruction of the productive
economy, and disburse a universal basic income to provide for those who fall
through the cracks. And, of course, the Green New Deal mandates that all Americans
must be provided with “high-quality health care,” a service Democrats
increasingly confuse with the provision of medical insurance.
If this offensively impractical proposal doesn’t sound
like it has much to do with environmental remediation, you’re not imagining
things. As Saikat Chakrabarti, the former chief of staff for one of Sanders’s
most outspoken champions, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, confessed, “it wasn’t
originally a climate thing at all.” It was, he added, “a
how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” But rather than balk at this
insensible positioning statement masquerading as legislation, the bill rapidly
secured 60 co-sponsors in the House and 14 in the Senate. Eight of the most
viable Democratic presidential candidates in the 2020 race eagerly endorsed it
either entirely or in concept.
Sanders’s planned to get the federal government into the
banking business by transforming the country’s post offices into lending
institutions. Their idea is to provide low-income earners who do not have bank
accounts—a small but not negligible percentage of the population—with a way to
avoid predatory payday lenders and check-cashing services that often charge
exorbitant rates for their services. It’s an idea whose time has come and gone,
as many of the nations that attempted state-run banking are privatizing those
institutions.
Sanders had called for an ambitious housing plan that
would address the scourges of homelessness and “gentrification” through a
public housing construction boom and price-fixing. The prospect of a nationwide
rent control scheme that caps prices at just 1.5 times the rate of inflation—a
rate far below what even the most liberal states have implemented—is surely the
most counterproductive aspect of this proposal. Economists have long known that
rent control limits developers’ incentives to build new housing and compels
landlords to forgo necessary repairs and renovations to their properties—that
is, when they don’t simply convert their properties to condominiums. The plan
would cost upwards of $2.5 trillion over ten years.
Indeed, between housing-for-all, Medicare-for-all, the
Green New Deal, universal child care and pre-school, expanding access to social
security, “free” college, the cancelation of student debt, and the plethora of
progressive pipe dreams that are included in Sanders’ vision for America, the
total estimated cost according to the Progressive Policy Institute is roughly
$53 trillion over a decade. Sanders might go further than many of his
Democratic colleagues, but his party’s objections to this agenda are not
ideological—they’re only practical.
Sanders cannot account for at least $25 trillion of this
proposed spending, and even Denmark’s example doesn’t get him there. 24.5
percent of Copenhagen’s tax revenue as a percent of GDP is drawn from income
and payroll taxes. In the U.S., it’s only 16 percent. “Denmark’s top statutory
personal income tax rate, which kicks in at 1.3 times the average income, is
55.9 percent,” National Review’s
David Harsanyi noted. “In the United States, that would translate into taxing
everyone who makes more than $65,000 at 55.9 percent.” America’s democratic
socialists might convince themselves that the assault on the purchasing power
of even lower-middle-class Americans is worth the tradeoff in public services,
but you’re unlikely to find a critical mass of voters who would agree.
And though he professes to be a committed advocate for
constitutional norms and little “r” republican propriety, Sanders has a
capacious view of the executive’s role. The senator’s advisors have told
reporters that Sanders would have wielded executive authority to circumvent
Congress on issues like the importation of pharmaceuticals, the legalization of
marijuana, and the legal status of the nation’s undocumented immigrant
population. In addition, his aides claim that Sanders could have used the power
of the presidency to ban the export of fossil fuels, halt the extraction of
hydrocarbons via fracking, and use emergency powers to implement aspects of the
Green New Deal by fiat. “We cannot accept delays from Congress on some of the
most pressing issues,” read an internal Sanders campaign document reviewed by
the Washington Post.
Liberal journalists like Yglesias insist that more
conventional congressional Democrats will bridle the socialist president, but
this is a curious self-deception. These and other like-minded pundits have been
the most vocal critics of the Republican Party’s transformation from an
institution hostile to Donald Trump and his policy preferences into one that is
singularly committed to enforcing his preferences. Amid an unbroken string of
Sanders victories, a similar metamorphosis quickly overtook the Democrats.
The Washington Post
described the prevailing dynamic among apprehensive Democratic mandarins in
terms familiar to any Trump-skeptical Republican: “[A]fter giving Sanders a
pass for most of the year, any attacks Democrats launch on the self- described
democratic socialist could undermine the party’s chance of beating Trump in
November if Sanders becomes the nominee,” the paper’s February 24th dispatch
read. “They also risk a backlash from voters who have repeatedly punished
candidates who go negative on other Democrats in this race.” The ineluctable
power of negative partisanship, strategic considerations, and simple careerism
combined to persuade the Democratic Party’s Bernie-skeptical lawmakers that
their only option is to accept Sanders’s ascension.
Indeed, Sanders would have found it much easier to remake
the Democratic Party in his image. That’s not just because Sanders is an
ideologue with a well-defined program, but because that program is one to which
his party is already amenable.
A September 2019 poll conducted by Data for Progress
found that a full 37 percent of Sanders supporters described themselves as
either democratic socialists or just plain socialists, not mere liberals or
progressives. As events over the course of the 2020 primary season have
indicated, these Sanders backers are not as out of step with the Democratic
Party as it’s leading lights would have you believe.
Multiple surveys of registered voters over the course of
2019 and early 2020 showed that Democrats were more favorable toward socialism
than either Republicans or independents. A May 2019 Monmouth University poll
found that, while 60 percent of respondents believe socialism “takes away too
many individual rights,” just 38 percent of Democrats said the same. In
February 2020, Gallup found that fewer than half of Americans—45 percent—would
be inclined to vote for a socialist president. By contrast, 76 percent of
Democrats said they would support a socialist.
Socialism’s doubters might take some comfort from the results
of the March primaries, but that solace could be premature. Despite Biden’s
strong showing, socialism has not fallen into disrepute among Democrats.
According to the exit polls, Democrats who were asked for their views on
socialism were not skeptical of that philosophy. In Tennessee, North Carolina,
Texas, and California, more Democrats approved of socialism than opposed
it—occasionally, as was the case in Texas and California, by 20-point margins.
And while the Sanders campaign turned out what they must consider a
disappointing number of young voters, he dominated that demographic. Across all
14 states, the median level of Sanders’s support among voters age 18 to 29 was
58 percent compared to Biden’s 17 percent. In California alone, the Vermont senator
won over voters under the age of 45 by a staggering 61 percent. Biden, by
contrast, appealed to just 7 percent of younger Californians.
Socialism’s organic rehabilitation among Democrats is
evident in the cadre of young ideologues who have assumed rock-star status
within the party, many of whom have latched onto Bernie Sanders’s coattails.
Linda Sarsour, a self-described democratic socialist who co-chaired the
powerful Women’s March before she was ejected from its ranks over her habit of
issuing anti-Semitic remarks, was an official Sanders surrogate. So, too, was
the evangelist for democratic socialism, Rep. Rashida Tlaib. “We need a
powerful socialist movement to end all capitalist oppression and exploitation,”
declared Seattle City Council member and Sanders surrogate Kshama Sawant to the
thunderous applause of the candidate’s voters. Prominent Sanders backers like
Reps. Khanna, Omar, and Pramila Jayapal are not declared democratic socialists,
but their policy preferences and ideological proclivities leave little daylight
between them and their less self-conscious comrades. And few have done more to
proselytize in service to the concept of democratic socialism than prominent
Sanders surrogate and political celebrity, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.
These are not fringe figures. They are ubiquitous
fixtures on center-left cable-news sets, in print, and on the stump alongside
the senator from Vermont. They helped Sanders raise campaign contributions from
nearly 1.4 million Americans by the end of 2019—hundreds of thousands of donors
more than any other candidate in the race. What’s more, they are setting the
Democratic Party’s agenda in ways Bernie Sanders could not despite his decades
in the federal legislature.
Bernie Sanders has lost his battle for the soul of the
Democratic Party, but the victory enjoyed by Joe Biden and the Democratic
Party’s moderates may ultimately be a pyrrhic one. If the party’s presumptive
presidential nominee loses to Donald Trump in November, its transformation into
a vehicle for Sanders’s socialist policies and no-quarter politics will be
swift. Even if Biden wins the White House, the Democratic Party’s evolution is
likely only to have been postponed.
Biden provides a model of comportment that contrasts with
the combative style preferred by the democratic socialist left, but he does not
offer a profoundly distinct set of policies that compete with the left’s
ideological vision. In the absence of that competition, whether Biden is
president or not, the Democratic Party can be expected to continue along its
drift toward socialism with only varying degrees of alacrity. In the end,
Bernie Sanders’s revolution may not have been suppressed but only deferred.
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