Like his populist fellow-travelers — including President Trump — Senator Sanders applies much of the same zero-sum thinking to trade. Quiz question: Who described the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a “disaster” — Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders?
Both, actually.
Right-wing populists and left-wing populists may disagree about such world-changing issues as whether the phrase “a man with ovaries” actually means anything, but on the fundamental policy questions they come down strikingly close to one another. That is because the enemy of populism isn’t the right wing or the left wing — the enemy of populism is liberalism, understood here not in the demented sense we use it in U.S. politics (where liberals are the people opposed to liberalism) but in its proper sense, meaning the classical-liberal regime of property rights, free enterprise, free trade, individual rights, and a worldview based on well-ordered liberty emphasizing cooperation within and between nations.
Senator Sanders, like President Trump, is an anti-liberal — and, fundamentally, a nationalist. Sanders may be deep-dipped and tie-dyed in 1970s countercultural horsepucky, but he is a practitioner of a very old and established kind of politics that would have been familiar to such frankly nationalist politicians as Franklin Roosevelt (and Teddy Roosevelt, for that matter), Woodrow Wilson, and Benito Mussolini. He has been shamed out of the blunt, Trumpish way he talked about immigration during those 2016 union-hall speeches, but his worldview remains essentially the same. Most politicians do not evolve very much at his advanced age.
The feature of nationalism that Trump and Sanders — and, to a considerable degree, figures such as Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — are rehabilitating is, in part, corporatism, a word that all of them certainly would abjure and that none of them quite understands. Contemporary progressives use the word corporatismto describe a situation in which the notionally democratic character of government is subverted by private business interests, but in reality it means something closer to the opposite: the subordination of private business interests to the “national interest,” something formally short of the Marxist-Leninist model of outright appropriation of the means of production but functionally similar to it.
Mussolini was, for all his absurd macho-man peacocking and bluster, a practitioner of what American progressives sometimes call “stakeholder” economics and politics. The corporazioni of fascist Italy were intended to coordinate the efforts of business owners, labor, government, and other interest groups in the service of a unified national agenda. Senator Warren, in particular, frequently speaks of the social role of American businesses in explicitly corporatist terms, but the far-left American intellectuals who dream of “workers’ councils” and grand industrial projects directed by the central government are practitioners of classical corporatism, whether they understand the fact or do not. The so-called Green New Deal is a textbook corporatist boondoggle.
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