As of today President Donald Trump’s approval rating is at the highest point of his presidency, his disapproval rate the lowest, and the difference between the two just 4 points, according to the RealClearPolitics Index. Even more importantly it is trending in the right direction for him. I think that Trump’s opponents should avoid rooting for coronavirus or economic decline in the hope that will change the trend. It isn’t a good look.

Meanwhile, Fareed Zakaria goes to the effort of devoting his Washington Post column to refuting the claim that Bernie Sanders’s version of “Medicare for All” resembles anything in Sweden or Denmark:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) says that his proposals “are not radical,” pointing again and again to countries in Northern Europe such as Denmark, Sweden and Norway as examples of the kind of economic system he wants to bring to the United States. The image he conjures up is of a warm and fuzzy social democracy in which market economics are kept on a tight leash through regulation, the rich are heavily taxed and the social safety net is generous. That is, however, an inaccurate and highly misleading description of those Northern European countries today.

Take billionaires. Sanders has been clear on the topic: “Billionaires should not exist.” But Sweden and Norway both have more billionaires per capita than the United States — Sweden almost twice as many. Not only that, these billionaires are able to pass on their wealth to their children tax-free. Inheritance taxes in Sweden and Norway are zero, and in Denmark 15 percent. The United States, by contrast, has the fourth-highest estate taxes in the industrialized world at 40 percent.

Sanders’s vision of Scandinavian countries, as with much of his ideology, seems to be stuck in the 1960s and 1970s, a period when these countries were indeed pioneers in creating a social market economy. In Sweden, government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product doubled from 1960 to 1980, going from approximately 30 percent to 60 percent. But as Swedish commentator Johan Norberg points out, this experiment in Sanders-style democratic socialism tanked the Swedish economy. Between 1970 and 1995, he notes, Sweden did not create a single net new job in the private sector. In 1991, a free-market prime minister, Carl Bildt, initiated a series of reforms to kick-start the economy. By the mid-2000s, Sweden had cut the size of its government by a third and emerged from its long economic slump.

I think the issue is even more basic. It’s a category error. What Sweden and Denmark have isn’t socialism at all—it’s social cohesion, something a lot easier to promote when most of your society belongs to the same ethnic group and are, at least, cultural Lutherans. That they are rethinking their whole approach in the face of mass immigration is telling.

As I and others have pointed out no large, diverse, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional polity has ever implemented socialism without totalitarianism. The odds on the United States being the first are extremely low.

I see the New York Times has finally gotten around to seeing what I’ve been claiming for some time, with evidentiary support from master strategiests Rahm Emanuel and James Carville:

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, hear constant warnings from allies about congressional losses in November if the party nominates Bernie Sanders for president. Democratic House members share their Sanders fears on text-messaging chains. Bill Clinton, in calls with old friends, vents about the party getting wiped out in the general election.

And officials in the national and state parties are increasingly anxious about splintered primaries on Super Tuesday and beyond, where the liberal Mr. Sanders edges out moderate candidates who collectively win more votes.

Dozens of interviews with Democratic establishment leaders this week show that they are not just worried about Mr. Sanders’s candidacy, but are also willing to risk intraparty damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance. Since Mr. Sanders’s victory in Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday, The Times has interviewed 93 party officials — all of them superdelegates, who could have a say on the nominee at the convention — and found overwhelming opposition to handing the Vermont senator the nomination if he arrived with the most delegates but fell short of a majority.

The only way that Sanders can forestall that eventuality is by actually winning a majority of votes in some caucuses. The preponderance of the evidence suggests that won’t be the case in South Carolina and it’s even possible that Biden will win big there (by 20 percentage points or more). Maybe California.

And as Rahm Emanuel has warned, denying Sanders the nominations risks fracturing the party. The fracture would be between Democrats and non-Democrats so I think that’s a risk they should take.

David Brooks declaims that Bernie Sanders marks the end of liberalism in his New York Times column. After listing some of Sen. Sanders’s past and present support for communist dictators he says:

I say all this not to cancel Sanders for past misjudgments. I say all this because the intellectual suppositions that led him to embrace these views still guide his thinking today. I’ve just watched populism destroy traditional conservatism in the G.O.P. I’m here to tell you that Bernie Sanders is not a liberal Democrat. He’s what replaces liberal Democrats.

continuing

Populists like Sanders speak as if the whole system is irredeemably corrupt. Sanders was a useless House member and has been a marginal senator because he doesn’t operate within this system or believe in this theory of change.

He believes in revolutionary mass mobilization and, once an election has been won, rule by majoritarian domination. This is how populists of left and right are ruling all over the world, and it is exactly what our founders feared most and tried hard to prevent.

If only that were the case! Sen. Sanders is trying to rise to power by gaining a minority (the largest number of delegates but falling short of a majority) of a minority (Democrats), holding the threat of bolting and taking his supporters with him over the heads of the Democratic establishment.

He concludes:

There is a specter haunting the world — corrosive populisms of right and left. These populisms grow out of real problems but are the wrong answers to them. For the past century, liberal Democrats from F.D.R. to Barack Obama knew how to beat back threats from the populist left. They knew how to defend the legitimacy of our system, even while reforming it.

Judging by the last few debates, none of the current candidates remember those arguments or know how to rebut a populist to their left.

I’ll cast my lot with democratic liberalism. The system needs reform. But I just can’t pull the lever for either of the two populisms threatening to tear it down.

I wish I could say, “Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win”, but I just don’t have that confidence.

I don’t know what to think of the 2nd Circuit’s recent decision, allowing the Trump Administration to deny grant money to so-called “sanctuary cities”. What’s the law? The practice strikes me as an executive overreach but sometimes the scandal is what’s legal. The Congress has been abrogating its responsibilities, delegating them to the Executive Branch, for decades. I think that’s unconstitutional.

But I also have very strong feelings about nullification, whatever form it takes, and its modern day incarnation is sanctuary cities.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal support the decision:

Democratic states are refusing to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, but then they complain that the Justice Department is using its legal authority to impose financial consequences for their resistance. Sorry, they can’t have it both ways, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Wednesday.

The Justice Department under Jeff Sessions sought to condition Byrne Program grants for public safety to cooperation with federal immigration law. Congress in 2006 required states and cities to satisfy requirements “in such form as the Attorney General may require” and “shall issue.” States must also certify they will comply with all “applicable Federal laws.”

Mr. Sessions required grant applicants to comply with a federal immigration law that bars local governments from restricting communications about citizenship information with federal immigration authorities. He also required states and cities to give immigration officials, upon request, the release dates of incarcerated undocumented immigrants and access to them.

Sanctuary states refused and then sued to force the Trump Administration to pay up. They claimed Justice’s conditions violate the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and Tenth Amendment’s anti-commandeering principle, which prohibits the federal government from compelling states to enact or administer a federal regulatory program.

The Third, Seventh and Ninth Circuits issued injunctions against Justice. So did federal judge Edgardo Ramos, who cited a sloppy Seventh Circuit decision that glazed over the plain language of the law. But he was reversed Wednesday by the Second Circuit three-judge panel, which upheld Justice’s authority to withhold funds from New York City and seven states.

“We conclude that the plain language of the relevant statutes authorizes the Attorney General to impose the challenged conditions,” Judge Reena Raggi wrote for the court. She explained that the Supreme Court has held, since Maryland tried to tax the Second Bank of the U.S. two centuries ago, that a “State may not pursue policies that undermine federal law.”

She added that Justice did not violate the APA because the Attorney General invoked rather than interpreted the plain text of federal immigration law. The APA applies only when a government agency is seeking to give new meaning to federal law.

As noted above, we now have different circuits deciding this issue in different directions. That means the case will go to the Supreme Court.

Don’t tell me about mercy, unAmerican, racist, etc. What’s the law?

In his Washington Post column E. J. Dionne says the Democratic Party is trying to cope with a “generational crisis”:

The chaotic frenzy of the Democrats’ South Carolina debate dramatized a generational crisis and a divisive conflict over how damaging the word “socialist” will be in a general election.

There was also this: No candidate other than Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has assembled a coherent and sustainable coalition.

These problems are related because whether Sanders can defeat President Trump — the preoccupation of a large majority of Democratic voters — depends on whether he can rally a large new pool of younger voters to the polls in November.

The evidence so far is not encouraging. Yes, Sanders is the overwhelming favorite among the young, but a huge wave of new voters under 35 has yet to materialize in the first contests.

James Carville has pointed out that there’s a mountain of studies which prove that such a “huge wave” will not materialize—he characterizes Sanders’s view as “science denial”.

He continues:

There are good reasons why young Americans have a far more favorable view of socialism and a more skeptical view of capitalism than their elders. Those under 35 came of age in the wake of the economic system’s near-implosion in the Great Recession, and capitalism simply doesn’t look as good to them in 2020 as it did to the younger generation of, say, 1998.

And polling makes clear that the young are far more likely to associate socialism with Denmark (a happy and prosperous nation that played a supporting role in Tuesday’s debate) than with the long-dead Soviet Union.

But absent the voter surge Sanders is promising, older Americans will vote in a larger proportion in November than the young. And it is among older voters where deep skepticism about socialism rules.

I agree that the Democratic Party has a generational crisis but not in the sense he means. Its gravest problem is the substantial deficit of members of the Baby Boom and Generation X cohorts in the Democratic leadership. That points to a problem with more complexity than just that young people don’t have a negative view of socialism.

I would say that Democrats face at least four problems: the alliance of the Democratic Party with the financial sector crafted by the Clinton Administration, the political response to the financialization of the American economy which, in vastly simplified terms, created the income inequality we see now, the recrafting of the Democratic leadership to ensure that the Clintons retained control of the party after Bill’s term of office, Barack Obama’s disinterest in so many of the tedious chores of the presidency including crafting a durable political coalition, and a cultural crisis created by mass immigration.

If it were merely a generation gap, young people would have turned to socialism fifty years ago when the Baby Boomers became politically active. But it’s also a gap in experience, competence, and a cultural gap.

In an op-ed in the New York Times Peter Daszak urges us to “stop what drives mass epidemics rather than just respond to individual diseases”:

In early 2018, during a meeting at the World Health Organization in Geneva, a group of experts I belong to (the R&D Blueprint) coined the term “Disease X”: We were referring to the next pandemic, which would be caused by an unknown, novel pathogen that hadn’t yet entered the human population. As the world stands today on the edge of the pandemic precipice, it’s worth taking a moment to consider whether Covid-19 is the disease our group was warning about.

Disease X, we said back then, would likely result from a virus originating in animals and would emerge somewhere on the planet where economic development drives people and wildlife together. Disease X would probably be confused with other diseases early in the outbreak and would spread quickly and silently; exploiting networks of human travel and trade, it would reach multiple countries and thwart containment. Disease X would have a mortality rate higher than a seasonal flu but would spread as easily as the flu. It would shake financial markets even before it achieved pandemic status.

In a nutshell, Covid-19 is Disease X.

He never really defines “what drives mass epidemics” and his solution is to spend more on experts, a solution you might expect from an expert.

Is there any actual evidence that would solve the problem? As he notes there is still no vaccine for SARS, Zika, or HIV. There is no vaccine for the common cold for that matter. Is that because insufficient money has been devoted to the search or because those vaccines are elusive and we might never have them?

I think he’s getting lost in the weeds. COVID-19, SARS, the flu pandemic of 1968, the flu pandemic of 1958, and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 all started in China. So did one of the most grievous pandemics of the last millennium, the Black Plague. Either China needs to change the practices that lead to the development of pandemics or we should take the practices that lead to pandemics starting there much more seriously than we have.

Today the New York Times has a feature in which one of their columnists makes their best argument for one of the six leading Democratic presidential contenders. The candidates, arguments and columnists are:

• Elizabeth Warren (Michelle Goldberg): She wants to purify capitalism so it works as it should
• Michael Bloomberg (David Brooks): He’s a practical manager who can get things done
• Bernie Sanders (Jamelle Bouie): Despite his age, he promises a true break with the past
• Pete Buttigieg (Frank Bruni): He could heal a fragmented nation
• Joe Biden (Ross Douthat): The promise of victory, and then the promise of (relative) calm
• Amy Klobuchar (David Leonhardt): She can win over the voters that Democrats need

I could provide refutations for each of them but I’ll leave that to the reader. Rather than that I’ll ask the reader a question. Which of these candidates by virtue of temperament, predisposition, and background could reunite the Democratic Party and the country? If you don’t think those are important, I don’t think you understand the problem.

Republican Jason Riley and Democrat William Galston express sharply different opinions of what is likely to happen with the Democratic nomination in the columns at the Wall Street Journal. Jason Riley says that Sanders will be the nominee and that the Democratic apparat will line up behind him:

The reality is that Democrats have been moving in Mr. Sanders’s direction for some time. What he’s offering the country is truth in advertising, and if he becomes the nominee, the media and political left will rally to his defense. Liberal commentators will explain away his past kind words for the Soviet Union, Cuba and Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, who wowed him with “their intelligence and their sincerity.” Those who can’t quite bring themselves to defend Mr. Sanders directly will instead train their fire on his critics. Be prepared for the anti-anti-Bernie brigades.

The reactions may be predictable, but they don’t diminish the huge significance of a presidential race between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Mr. Trump’s defeat of Mrs. Clinton was a defeat of someone promising more of what the country had experienced under Barack Obama. As president, Mr. Trump has more or less pushed a traditional Republican agenda, from tax cuts to deregulation to increased military spending. He came to Washington vowing to upend the place, but his bark has been worse than his bite.

By contrast, we’ve no reason to believe that Mr. Sanders is bluffing. He’s 78 and has been drawing up blueprints for the revolution for most of his adult life. His Democratic opponents keep asking how he will pay for Medicare for All, student-loan forgiveness, a Green New Deal and all the rest. But they’re missing the point. These are not economic issues for Mr. Sanders. They’re moral issues. If you believe that cradle-to-grave government health care is a human right, or that tuition-free college should be an entitlement, the cost of providing it is an afterthought.

Mr. Sanders believes that wealth redistribution is more important than wealth creation. He believes that central planners are better allocators of resources than individuals making their own decisions in a capitalist economy. He believes that Michael Bloomberg got rich on the backs of America’s poor. Such views may have once distinguished Mr. Sanders on the political left, but that’s no longer the case. His Democratic challengers have quibbled with his methods but not with his vision. It may fall to Mr. Trump to explain why socialism isn’t simply unfeasible but foolhardy. As the economist Thomas Sowell has noted, the 20th century is full of examples—Mr. Sanders’s beloved Soviet Union and Cuba among them—of “countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty.”

while William Galston is experiencing déjà vu:

A badly split political party nominates an unpopular establishment-wing presidential candidate, who proceeds to lose the general election. The other party’s equally unpopular nominee wins more than 300 electoral votes despite falling far short of a popular-vote majority. The defeated party’s insurgent wing then succeeds in rewriting the party’s rules to its advantage, and an antiestablishment candidate wins the presidential nomination—only to suffer one of the worst landslide losses in American political history.

Readers of a certain age will recognize this description of what befell the Democratic Party in the tumultuous years from 1968 to 1972. The question is whether history is in the process of repeating itself, as many center-left Democrats fear, with Sen. Bernie Sanders assuming the mantle of Sen. George McGovern, the furthest-left presidential nominee in modern history. The parallels between McGovern’s policies and political game plan and those of Mr. Sanders are striking.

I think it’s quite possible for them both to be right because they’re talking about different things. They both seem to think that Democrats will finally settle on Sanders for their nominee. But Mr. Riley thinks the party apparat will come into line behind him while Mr. Galston doesn’t even consider that aspect, preferring to consider whether, once nominated, Sen. Sanders will be elected or will be defeated as George McGovern was.

Let’s consider those two separately. Whether the “party establishment” will actually support Sanders depends on their assessment of what course of action is likely to preserve their phony baloney jobs, whether those jobs are their elective offices, roles in party leadership, with the media, in finance or what have you. As Mr. Riley notes, Sanders is not bluffing and, if elected, he will not be beholden to the party organization for his election. He’s not a team player and will show them no loyalty.
The party establishment has absolutely nothing to gain by supporting Sanders and much to lose if he fails.

As to whether Sanders will win or lose, progressives may comprise half of the Democratic Party but those affiliated with the Democratic Party are a smaller percentage of the electorate than at any time since FDR was elected. The difference resides in the unaffiliated voters who comprise more of the electorate than either Republicans or Democrats do. Will Sanders’s doctrinaire approach attract them or repel them? That will make the difference.