David Brooks on Moderates and Democrats

Brooks has a column today entitled Dems, Please Don’t Drive Me Away The dynamic pulling the party leftward.  Here I respond to the points he makes:

According to a Hill-HarrisX survey, only 13 percent of Americans say they would prefer a health insurance system with no private plans. Warren and Sanders pin themselves, and perhaps the Democratic Party, to a 13 percent policy idea. Trump is smiling.

My opinion is that Americans have no great love for their private health insurance.  Insurance is mostly a pain in the ass. Americans just want to get medical services with a minimum amount of expense and hassle.  Our system is more complicated than it needs to be as can be seen by comparison with the systems in other countries such as Canada.

Second, there is the economy. All of the Democrats seem to have decided to run a Trump-style American carnage campaign. The economy is completely broken. It only benefits a tiny sliver. Yet in a CNN poll, 71 percent of Americans say that the economy is very or somewhat good. We’re in the longest recovery in American history and the benefits are finally beginning to flow to those who need them most. Overall wages are rising by 3.5 percent, and wages for those in the lowest pay quartile are rising by well over 4 percent, the highest of all groups.

Democrats have caught the catastrophizing virus that inflicts the Trumpian right. They take a good point — that capitalism needs to be reformed to reduce inequality — and they radicalize it so one gets the impression they want to undermine capitalism altogether.

There is some validity to this point, but it ignores both the unfairness and the unsustainability of the current system.  I disagree with Brooks about the extent of reform needed.

Third, Democrats are wandering into dangerous territory on immigration. They properly trumpet the glories immigrants bring to this country. But the candidates can’t let anybody get to the left of them on this issue. So now you’ve got a lot of candidates who sound operationally open borders. Progressive parties all over the world are getting decimated because they have fallen into this pattern.

I agree with Brooks on this point.

Fourth, Democrats are trying to start a populist v. populist campaign against Trump, which is a fight they cannot win. Democratic populists talk as if the only elite in America is big business, big pharma — the top 1 percent. This allows them to sound populist without actually going after their donor bases — the highly educated affluent people along the coasts.

But the big divide in America is not between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99. It’s between the top 20 percent and the rest. These are the highly educated Americans who are pulling away from everybody else and who have built zoning restrictions and meritocratic barriers to make sure outsiders can’t catch up.

If Democrats run a populist campaign against the business elite, Trump will run a broader populist campaign against the entire educated elite. His populism is more compelling to people who respond to such things. After all, he is actually despised by the American elite, unlike the Democrats.

 A few thoughts on this:

1. Sanders also seems to be despised by the American elite.  If Brooks thinks that is necessary to win a populist campaign against Trump, then Brooks should consider Sanders.
2. Brooks claims that "Trump will run a broader populist campaign against the entire educated elite. His populism is more compelling to people who respond to such things".  I don't agree with this and Brooks doesn't provide any supporting arguments or evidence.  While some portion of people unsatisfied with the status quo (populists) are no doubt against the educated elite, others are no doubt against specific policies which have proven ineffective or worse.  

Finally, Democrats aren’t making the most compelling moral case against Donald Trump. They are good at pointing to Trump’s cruelties, especially toward immigrants. They are good at describing the ways he is homophobic and racist. But the rest of the moral case against Trump means hitting him from the right as well as the left.

A decent society rests on a bed of manners, habits, traditions and institutions. Trump is a disrupter. He rips to shreds the codes of politeness, decency, honesty and fidelity, and so renders society a savage world of dog eat dog. Democrats spend very little time making this case because defending tradition, manners and civility sometimes cuts against the modern progressive temper.

I disagree that Democrats spend little time criticizing Trump's lack of civility (and I disagree that that's a criticism from the right).  I do agree that many progressives are angry and ill-mannered.

The debates illustrate the dilemma for moderate Democrats. If they take on progressives they get squashed by the passionate intensity of the left. If they don’t, the party moves so far left that it can’t win in the fall.

Right now we’ve got two parties trying to make moderates homeless.

I suggest looking along the populist-elite dimension in addition to the left-right spectrum that Brooks uses.

Brooks famously opined that the success of the 2003 war in Iraq would lead to a generation of political moderation in the United States -- just the opposite of what actually happened as he acknowledges today.

I want moderates such as Brooks to have a home in the Democratic party.  I encourage Brooks to more seriously consider some of the populist Democratic ideas.  Populism is a natural reaction when the elites make mistakes.