@hightor,
Well, that's an interesting bit of opinion. In the past, there were many times I defended Brooks when many others simply discounted him. I'd become familiar with him on Lehrer's Friday shows and found him civil, smart and un-strident. It was refreshing to hear a conservative voice like his, particularly after Gigot went off the rails. But I ceased attending to his columns some years ago because of his indefensible defenses of the Bush administration particularly in its drive to war. Aside from all that...
Quote:A few months ago, I wrote a column saying I would vote for Elizabeth Warren over Donald Trump...She does not spread moral rot the way Trump does.
I hadn't know he'd written that. Good for him. Evidence again of his relative sanity.
He goes on to a rather standard condemnation of anyone, Sanders particularly, who voiced some levels of support for regimes in Europe and South/Central America which sought socialist revolution. Obviously that argument has teeth. But Brooks omits reference to the various right wing movements in those places which too were guilty of great horrors. Somewhat excusable given the constraints of column inches but that is a feature of conservative thinking/opinion.
Quote:I’ve just watched populism destroy traditional conservatism in the G.O.P.
Well yes but also with a big no. As with Kristol, there's a clear refusal or inability to recognize how the GOP and US conservatism was not hit but a sudden bolt of Trump-lightening. The GOP has been on a long trajectory down through convenient alliances with the authoritarianisms of the religious right and the libertarian Koch/Bircher elements (oil and corporate interests a large part of this). And more recently, by the electoral aid given to the party by the propaganda techniques of talk radio and Fox. The present Trupian "populism" Brooks speaks of was created by or fostered by what came before (though technology has also been a key factor).
Quote:Traditional liberalism traces its intellectual roots to John Stuart Mill, John Locke, the Social Gospel movement and the New Deal. This liberalism believes in gaining power the traditional way: building coalitions, working within the constitutional system and crafting the sort of compromises you need in a complex, pluralistic society.
This is why liberals like Hubert Humphrey, Ted Kennedy and Elizabeth Warren were and are such effective senators. They worked within the system, negotiated and practiced the art of politics.
Fair enough.
Quote:Populists like Sanders speak as if the whole system is irredeemably corrupt.
True. And dangerous because it is false and promotes muddy thinking and undirected or misdirected anger. It represents in part, I think, an emotional outburst driven by an understandable sense of citizen powerlessness and a feeling of being overwhelmed. But it is a sort of passion that can lead anywhere with lots of those wheres being very ugly.
Quote:Liberalism celebrates certain values: reasonableness, conversation, compassion, tolerance, intellectual humility and optimism. Liberalism is horrified by cruelty...A liberal leader confronts new facts and changes his or her mind.
I think so too. It's why I'm one of them.
Quote:Sanders’s leadership style embodies the populist values, which are different: rage, bitter and relentless polarization, a demand for ideological purity among your friends and incessant hatred for your supposed foes.
Too strongly stated. There surely are some like that in the Sanders camp and Sanders' strident anti-establishment stance heads in that direction because of how he frames things - us versus them. But it isn't the case that this looks equivalent to what's happened on the right in America. Hippies and drum circles and Bernie Bros aren't shooting people or dragging them behind trucks or putting white collar criminals in jail for jaywalking or treating oxycontin users worse than crack users.
Quote:A liberal sees inequality and tries to reduce it. A populist sees remorseless class war and believes in concentrated power to crush the enemy.
Crush? There is no evidence that Sanders has the personality traits of Trump or McConnell. As to "remorseless class war", that's an odd characterization from a political faction in America which so commonly holds that inequality and injustice and hierarchies of power are a manifestation of the natural order of things.
Quote:These days, Sanders masquerades as something less revolutionary than he really is. He claims to be nothing more than the continuation of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. He is 5 percent right and 95 percent wrong.
I think he just pulled those relative percentages from we all know where. There's no reason to imagine Sanders will nationalize much at all. He would, I'm sure, work to protect the educational system from the Christian right and from business entities out to make big bucks and from libertarians who hate government constraints more than they hate Barbara Streisand.
Quote:Sanders also claims he’s just trying to import the Scandinavian model, which is believable if you know nothing about Scandinavia or what Sanders is proposing. Those countries do have generous welfare states, but they can afford them because they understand how free market capitalism works, with fewer regulations on business creation and free trade.
That's georgeob's argument. But again, I see no evidence that Sanders (or Warren) wish to or think it good to eviscerate free markets and capitalism. Curtail and constrain, of course. No other way to prevent the very wealthy and power hungry like Trump or Putin or Bannon or Netanyahu from domination of all others.
Quote:There is a specter haunting the world — corrosive populisms of right and left. These populisms grow out of real problems but are the wrong answers to them.
Yes, undeniably true. But it is not the poor and middle class people who have the tanks and the aircraft carriers. They aren't going to buy up New Zealand and hire Blackwater mercenaries to keep themselves isolated and free to sip mint juleps.
