Thread by @LarryGlickman

Whoa. Where to start with this David Brooks column? /1
nyti.ms/2TqJrim

First, I think it is fair to criticize some of Bernie's statements about Communist regimes, although, on balance, I see his statements, which include criticism of those regimes, as well as of the role the U.S. government has played in supporting authoritarianism as valuable./2

The real difficulty comes for me in Brooks's conception of "traditional liberalism." However, liberalism is a "protean" (to borrow @glgerstle's apt term), contested, and evolving set of ideas and values. I wrote a short piece on this for @aeonmag. /3
aeon.co/essays/everyon…

@glgerstle @aeonmag As I show in my book, when FDR embraced the liberal label, it annoyed the hell out of his predecessor Herbert Hoover, who believed that he was the real liberal and that the New Deal has perverted the meaning of the term. /4
amazon.com/Free-Enterpris…

@glgerstle @aeonmag Bernie, of course, doesn't call himself a liberal but rather a democratic socialist. But he described what this meant in his Georgetown University speech of 2015 as drawing and building on the vision of FDR (whom he mentioned 9 times) and the New Deal./5
vox.com/2015/11/19/976…

@glgerstle @aeonmag Brooks describes Sander as a populist who seeks "majoritarian domination." There are two things to say about this: 1) such a thing would be better than the Trump/GOP's strategy of "minoritarian domination" 2) his unwillingness to get rid of the filibuster suggests otherwise./6

@glgerstle @aeonmag Brooks goes old-school conservative when he writes that Sanders's call for a major expansion of the welfare state "would represent the greatest concentration of power in the Washington elite in American history." This strikes me as a bit of illiberal hyperbole itself. /7

@glgerstle @aeonmag This is exactly the kind of old chestnut that was lobbed against the liberal New Deal and Great Society and against the politicians (like Humphrey and Kennedy) whom Brooks celebrates. /8

@glgerstle @aeonmag It has all of the codewords of the people who opposed the liberal New Deal: "concentrated power," "elite," "Washington." One could just as easily make the argue that the redistributive state breaks up the "elite" power of concentrated wealth. /9

@glgerstle @aeonmag Brooks, who claims to "cast his lot with democratic liberalism," thus winds up using the rhetoric and keywords of those who opposed New Deal liberalism most vociferously. /10

@glgerstle @aeonmag A brief comment on Brooks's characterization of FDR in 1936/37 as a would-be "arrogant majoritarian strongman." Hard to understand this without understanding the context of the power of the increasingly anti-New Deal Jim Crow Democrats. /11

@glgerstle @aeonmag These politicians, who held Congressional seniority as a result of one-party rule and the systematic disfranchisement of large minorities of their fellow citizens, were the epitome of "arrogant majoritarian strongmen." /12

@glgerstle @aeonmag Finally, it is hard not to note that Brooks's conclusion that, "I just can’t pull the lever for either of the two populisms threatening to tear it down," seems totally at odds with his description of the virtues of liberalism that he has laid out a few paragraphs above. /13

@glgerstle @aeonmag Wouldn't the liberal virtues that Brooks enumerates of "reasonableness... compassion, tolerance, intellectual humility" and one that "sees shades of gray" and is "horrified by cruelty," would mandate voting against Trump, whose presidency violates every one of these values?/14

@glgerstle @aeonmag Brooks thus begins with a defense of New Deal liberalism, then embraces the language of conservative anti-liberalism, & finally, when it comes to voting, swerves to an indulgent, anti-liberal, pox-on-both-houses tone utterly at odds with the liberalism he defends earlier./15