14 | http://www.nationalreview.com MARCH 23 , 2020desultory social-media stuff, it is not
much in evidence.
If you want to see “pure antipathy,”
consider the Democratic response to
Brooks’s column arguing that Sanders,
with his socialism and his calls for revolu-
tion, is illiberal, something like a left-
wing Donald Trump. In a hysterically
stupid but terribly typical response, Paul
Waldman complained in the Washing ton
Post that Brooks wrote “as though
Sanders has proposed herding us all into
collective farms, starving half the popula-
tion and establishing a gulag where he’ll
send his political enemies” but—get
this!—failed to produce a single quote
from Sanders calling for that.
Well.
As it turns out, Lenin did not publicly
advocate starving millions of Ukrainians
to death, Castro did not publicly advocate
murdering librarians and imprisoning
homosexuals, Chávez did not publicly
advocate turning Venezuela into a basket
case... Senator Sanders says that what
he has in mind is Denmark, but the poli-
cies he proposes are nothing like Danish
policies, which he evidently knows
absolutely nothing about, and he has
spent his life as an apologist for the
Soviet Union (where he vacationed),
Castro’s brutal regime (literacy pro-
grams!), Chávez’s Venezuela (his Senate
website posted an article praising that
socialist backwater as the new home of
the American dream), etc. In fact, if you
listen to Kim Jong-un talk about his phi-
losophy of government, it turns out to
be—SURPRISE!—rather different from
how things actually work in North Korea.
I have yet to find a single quotation from
the Dear Leader in which he argues that
his fellow countrymen should be starved
until they are reduced to cannibalism.
Progressives in general rallied to
Senator Sanders in defending him against
criticism of the agenda that he himself
describes as “socialism.” Tom Scocca of
Slatedismissed Brooks’s column as a
“grotesque pack of lies,” while Jonathan
Chait of New Yorkinsisted that “Bernie is
an economic socialist but a political lib-
eral.” Senator Sanders proposes, among
other things, to gut the First Amendment
in order to put political speech under
direct federal control—that is not liberal-
ism, but its opposite. Brooks’s characteri-
zation of Sanders’s populist demagoguery
and the mode of politics it implies—
“majoritarian domination”—not only isI
N2016, there was a groundswell of
conservative and Republican opposi-
tion to Donald Trump, led in no small
part by this magazine. In 2020, there
is not much sign of a comparable move-
ment among Democrats in opposition to
Senator Bernie Sanders, the socialist from
Vermont from Brooklyn who is running
for the presidential nomination of a party
to which he does not belong as a confess-
ing socialist calling for revolution.
Why is there no “Never Bernie” move-
ment to speak of?
The New York Postwent looking for
one in early February and did not come up
with much: some rumors of discontent,
but only vague ones. Democratic activist
Jim Kessler of Third Way was exemplary:
“I’ll still put a Bernie Sanders bumper
sticker on my car,” he told the Post, “but
a lot of people won’t.” Who? Donna
Brazile, the former DNC chair, denied
that there was any effort from any high-
level Democrats to stop Sanders—only a
few “moody” donors.
There is a purely strategic anti-Sanders
effort, to be sure, typified by the Big Tent
Project, which works to promote less rad-
ical candidates (it helped Joe Biden in
South Carolina) and warns Democrats
that “nominating Bernie means we reelect
Trump.” There is a very large differencebetween worrying that a candidate will
lose and believing that he does not
deserve to win—that he is, as many con-
servatives said of Trump in 2016, funda-
mentally unfit for the office he seeks.
Which Senator Sanders manifestly is.
Democrats may be concerned that his rad-
icalism is likely to be a political loser, but
there is not much intellectual or moral
pushback against the radicalism itself.
To the extent that one exists at all, the
supra-strategic “Never Bernie” tendency
consists of 7,844 nobodies on Twitter and
David Brooks, a conservative-leaning
New York Timescolumnist who interned
for William F. Buckley Jr. and who has
been an ex-Republican for about as long
as Donald Trump has been a Republican.
The Twitter nobodies are mostly disap-
pointed partisans of the campaigns of
other Democratic-primary contenders
who cannot forgive Senator Sanders’s
often brutish supporters for their abuses,
e.g., field director Ben Mora’s mockery of
Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren’s
looks (“chunky” and “looks like sh**,”
respectively) and Pete Buttigieg’s sexual-
ity, threatening violence at Joe Biden
events, etc. Tom Watson, a Democratic
strategist, reports “a level of pure antipa-
thy I’ve never seen before” among anti-
ROMAN GENN Sanders Democrats, but other than theNegligible ‘Never Bernie’
Sanders and the Democrats are birds of a feather
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