It’s Just Good Old-Fashioned Pork Barrel Politics

I don’t know where to start in critiquing David Brooks’s most recent New York Times column. Here’s its kernel:

The Republicans seem to be turning themselves into an aging minority party. Moderate Democrats are no longer a force. There are only two vibrant political tendencies in America right now: Trumpian populism and Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren-style progressivism. As Trumpism loses, progressivism will win.

What can we say about the coming progressive regime? First, it will be a decisive break from the moderate liberalism of Bill Clinton and even Barack Obama. Second, despite some silly recent talk, it will not be Marxist.

Let’s start here. It won’t be Marxist because it’s just barely leftist. It really is just plain old pork barrel politics, buying votes, and that’s as old as the republic.

There’s a fundamental difference between making expensive promises when federal spending is 8% of GDP and the national debt is a few billion dollars and when it’s over 20% of GDP and the debt is in the trillions, approaching 100% of GDP. The impossibility of it all is just too apparent. As Elbert Hubbard (not the Scientology guy) said more than a century ago when accused of being a socialist: when more people want to give rather than get I’ll be a socialist.

I doubt that there is an incipient let alone permanent leftist ascendancy in the United States. If there is it won’t derive from the Sanders-Warren wing of the Democratic Party.