Readings: Bernie and Hillary, Exploding GOP, Motivated Reasoning

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My (19-year-old) kid never misses a chance to remind me how Bernie is his guy (and sometimes to throw shade at Hillary).  I get it, and I love Bernie’s passion, too.  But I’m torn.

Jonathan Chait:

[F]or the first time since 2008, the Democratic Party is choosing between leaders […] Obama in 2008 benefited from the lowered ideological expectations that come with two terms out of power under a disastrous opposition president. His promise to restore reason to governing seemed inspiring. Clinton in 2016 is presenting a similar proposition to what she offered voters eight years earlier: a pragmatic center-left politician.

Sanders’s appeal, despite its tonal similarities, is very different from circa-2008 Obama’s, as Obama himself acknowledges. Obama proposed to restore a balance between the power of the business lobby and competing interests. Sanders proposes simply to steamroll over business interests. Obama had swollen Democratic majorities in both chambers to enact his agenda. Sanders (and, for that matter, Clinton) would not. In place of any practical road map to enacting his ideas, Sanders substitutes the “political revolution,” an event he invokes constantly that will sweep aside all impediments. His appeal borrows more from the tea party than from Obama — Sanders draws upon the left’s frustration with the limits of shared power in much the same way as Cruz has done.

Obama in 2008 believed Republicans could be reasoned out of their irrationality. Sanders today believes they can be swept aside when the people rise up and depose their corporate paymasters. Clinton, then as now, promises to grind away at them in a trench war that has gone on for decades and for which there is no end in sight. The thing Clinton has not managed to do — and what, quite possibly, no Democrat could do after eight years of shared power — is make technocracy lyrical.

Here are some things I’ve been reading:

• Some passionate pro-Bernie stuff:
  •  Robert Reich (Six Responses to Bernie Skeptics: 1. “He’d never…)
  •  Robert Reich (The Most Pragmatic Way to Fix American Democracy)
  •  Robert Reich (The Volcanic Core Fueling the 2016 Election)