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Sometimes people wake from a bad dream only to discover
that they are still asleep and that the nightmare goes on. This
is the prospect facing America if, as seems increasingly likely,
the Democrats nominate Bernie Sanders as the person to rouse
America from President Donald Trump’s first term. Mr Sanders
won the primary in New Hampshire, almost won in Iowa,
trounced his rivals in Nevada and is polling well in South Carolina.
Come Super Tuesday next week, in which 14 states including
California and Texas allot delegates, he could amass a large
enough lead to make himself almost impossible to catch.
Moderate Democrats worry that nominating Mr Sanders
would cost them the election. This newspaper worries that forcing
Americans to decide between him and Mr Trump would result
in an appalling choice with no good outcome. It will surprise
nobody that we disagree with a self-described democratic socialist
over economics, but that is just the start. Because Mr Sanders
is so convinced that he is morally right, he has a dangerous tendency
to put ends before means. And, in a country where Mr
Trump has whipped up politics into a frenzy of loathing, Mr
Sanders’s election would feed the hatred.
On economics Mr Sanders is misunderstood. He is not a cuddly
Scandinavian social democrat who would let companies do
their thing and then tax them to build a better world. Instead, he
believes American capitalism is rapacious and
needs to be radically weakened. He puts Jeremy
Corbyn to shame, proposing to take 20% of the
equity of companies and hand it over to workers,
to introduce a federal jobs-guarantee and to
require companies to qualify for a federal charter
obliging them to act for all stakeholders in
ways that he could define. On trade, Mr Sanders
is at least as hostile to open markets as Mr
Trump is. He seeks to double government spending, without being
able to show how he would pay for it. When unemployment
is at a record low and nominal wages in the bottom quarter of the
jobs market are growing by 4.6%, his call for a revolution in the
economy is an epically poor prescription for what ails America.
In putting ends before means, Mr Sanders displays the intolerance
of a Righteous Man. He embraces perfectly reasonable
causes like reducing poverty, universal health care and decarbonising
the economy, and then insists on the most unreasonable
extremes in the policies he sets out to achieve them. He
would ban private health insurance (not even Britain, devoted to
its National Health Service, goes that far). He wants to cut billionaires’
wealth in half over 15 years. A sensible ecologist would tax
fracking for the greenhouse gases it produces. To Mr Sanders that
smacks of a dirty compromise: he would ban it outright.
Sometimes even the ends are sacrificed to Mr Sanders’s need
to be righteous. Making university cost-free for students is a selfdefeating
way to alleviate poverty, because most of the subsidy
would go to people who are, or will be, relatively wealthy. Decriminalising
border-crossing and breaking up Immigration and
Customs Enforcement would abdicate one of the state’s first duties.
Banning nuclear energy would stand in the way of his goal
to create a zero-carbon economy.
So keenly does Mr Sanders fight his wicked rivals at home,
that he often sympathises with their enemies abroad. He has
shown a habit of indulging autocrats in Cuba and Nicaragua, so
long as the regime in question claims to be pursuing socialism.
He is sceptical about America wielding power overseas, partly
from an honourable conviction that military adventures do
more harm than good. But it also reflects his contempt for the
power-wielders in the Washington establishment.
Last is the effect of a President Sanders on America’s political
culture. The country’s political divisions helped make Mr
Trump’s candidacy possible. They are now enabling Mr Sanders’s
rise. The party’s leftist activists find his revolution thrilling.
They have always believed that their man would triumph if only
the neoliberal Democratic Party elite would stop keeping him
down. His supporters seem to reserve almost as much hatred for
his Democratic opponents as they do for Republicans.
This speaks to Mr Sanders’s political style. When faced with
someone who disagrees with him, his instinct is to spot an establishment
conspiracy, or to declare that his opponent is confused
and will be put straight by one of his political sermons. When
asked how he would persuade Congress to eliminate private
health insurance (something which 60% of Americans oppose),
Mr Sanders replies that he would hold rallies in the states of recalcitrant
senators until they relented.
A presidency in which Mr Sanders travelled
around the country holding rallies for a far-left
programme that he could not get through Congress
would widen America’s divisions. It would
frustrate his supporters, because the president’s
policies would be stymied by Congress or the
courts. On the right, which has long been fed a
diet of socialist bogeymen, the spectacle of an
actual socialist in the White House would generate even greater
fury. Mr Sanders would test the proposition that partisanship
cannot get any more bitter.
The mainstream three-quarters of Democrats have begun to
tell themselves that Mr Sanders would not be so bad. Some point
out that he would not be able to do many of the things he promises.
This excuse-making, with its implication that Mr Sanders
should be taken seriously but not literally, sounds worryingly familiar.
Mr Trump has shown that control of the regulatory state,
plus presidential powers over trade and over foreign policy, give
a president plenty of room for manoeuvre. His first term suggests
that it is unwise to dismiss what a man seeking power says
he wants to do with it.
Enter Sandersman
If Mr Sanders becomes the Democratic nominee, America will
have to choose in November between a corrupt, divisive, rightwing
populist, who scorns the rule of law and the constitution,
and a sanctimonious, divisive, left-wing populist, who blames a
cabal of billionaires and businesses for everything that is wrong
with the world. All this when the country is as peaceful and
prosperous as at any time in its history. It is hard to think of a
worse choice. Wake up, America! 7
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