After another devastating loss to Donald Trump, a few liberal pundits are begrudgingly admitting it — Bernie Sanders was right.
As the United States — and the world — prepares for another Trump administration, revisiting the question of whether Bernie Sanders could have defeated him in 2016 may seem unproductive. Eight years ago feels like ancient history. Yet reframing the question “Would Sanders have won?” to “What lessons from Sanders can help shape a better future for US politics?” proves more relevant than ever.
Over at the New York Times, David Brooks is already on it. In an episode of The Opinions entitled “Maybe Bernie Sanders is Right,” Brooks delivers a muddled, dithering mea culpa that inadvertently exemplifies the punditocracy’s complicity in Donald Trump’s rise. Brooks admits that Sanders was on to something in his bid to mobilize the working class, bring them into the political process, and challenge a system that has excluded them for decades.
Brooks hems and haws, of course. “[T]here has to be a shift in policy,” he notes, before declaring that he doesn’t agree with what he’s about to suggest — though, to his great discomfort, he thinks “it may be necessary.” Reminding us that he’s a “moderate,” Brooks says he “did not like the policies that Bernie Sanders proposes,” but, “one thing [Sanders] got right was disruption, disrupt the system.” He concludes that Democrats must find a candidate who can reach out to and resonate with working-class voters. (He then recommends John Fetterman, but that’s another matter for another time.)
It takes Brooks considerable throat-clearing and hedging to admit what should be obvious: the Democratic Party has entrenched itself in an elitist, insider, Rube Goldberg machine of incumbents, big donors, party officials, cozy pundits, cable news, and consultants. For years, talking heads have been chattering, temporizing, and reinforcing the status quo while democratic socialists have been fighting to get the goods for people, and in doing so, prevent the rise of Trump and his cohort. It’s so nice that the chattering classes have come around, sort of. Bit late though, isn’t it?
Epiphany in Defeat
Writing in the Nation, Jeet Heer captures the Democratic Party’s long-standing disdain for Sanders and the working class, highlighting a telling example from Chuck Schumer. In 2016, Schumer confidently declared, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
That. . . did not happen. And yet the Harris campaign, even while conscious of working-class concerns, pursued a similar strategy of courting moderate Republicans.
This reflects a kind of herd-nihilism among liberals, where post-election analysis belatedly concludes that working-class voters, even those with less formal education, deserve more attention and respect instead of being dismissed out of hand. Convenient realizations like this, long after the eleventh hour, reveal an elite tendency to treat “common sense” and, indeed, “truth” as malleable concepts.
We can survey hot takes from Brooks or Mark Lilla or Matt Yglesias or Jonathan Chait or Rachel Maddow and index their attention to working-class concerns and find some variety. But the liberal consensus has for decades been utterly corporate, elitist, and narrow-minded to the exclusion of structural, nation-building policies that benefit working people, like Medicare for All or the return of American manufacturing from abroad.
President Joe Biden has been a partial exception, turning his attention to workers and putting billions of dollars behind a push to ensure that those who build stateside would keep their jobs as the world transitions to new energy technologies and electric automobiles — a worker-focused pivot that paid off politically. But even that was a short-term and insufficient offering after decades of Third Way Democratic Party policy and politics that began in the Clinton era. Too little, too late, one might say — it may even reek of a cynical volte-face. While such a criticism might apply more aptly to the Democratic establishment than Biden himself, for most, the two are part and parcel.
Liberal Principles: Some Assembly Required
Typically, we ought to welcome someone changing their mind when their position is shown to be incorrect, immoral, or otherwise unwelcome. Better late than never, as the saying goes. We should all commit to a certain openness of mind. A willingness to reconsider, ideally accompanied by intellectual curiosity, charity, and humility, is a virtue. However, when it comes to the liberal sanctimony that shunned the working class from the post-Carter years onward — and helped pave the way for Trump — such late-breaking changes of heart are suspect.
Liberal disdain has long manifested in skepticism of student loan forgiveness, hostility toward Medicare for All, and contempt for warnings that offshoring and dismantling manufacturing would create problems that no pair of $3 boxer shorts from Walmart could offset. It’s hard not to look askance at those whose moral principles and studied certainty bend only in the face of electoral vagaries — particularly when democratic socialists, among them Bernie Sanders, have been saying the same thing for decades.
Liberals backing away from their preelection and election-time commitments have a touch of the wrong Marx — Groucho, not Karl. A quotation attributed to the comedian goes something like this: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them, well, I have others.” And that’s the problem. Even if we might be inclined to welcome a tepid, mealy-mouthed mea culpa from Brooks and company, who can trust them? And who wants their advice now? It seems far better to trust those who have long reached and maintained the conclusions and positions that cynical elites are now pretending to discover — the same people who’ll still believe those things, and be correct, when the political winds blow in a new direction.