I’ve written against the freezing left-wing conventional wisdom that suggests that if Democrats don’t get everything they want, then democracy itself has failed. Dan McLaughlin also weighed in. Unfortunately, this reckless notion has already been taken up as a topic of discussion by left-wing politicians. Here’s how Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders tries to justify the trillions Democrats want to spend:

.@Bernie Sanders says the Build Back Better bill aims to save American democracy – by showing that government can work for people who renounce it and turn to authoritarianism, by opposing “the oligarchy” which it claims him, is fighting to prevent a more equitable society.

– Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) October 8, 2021

It’s at a disheartening level for Sanders to sound like that. He was once a somewhat interesting heterodox figure, deviating from the left on guns and immigration. But in his pursuit and closeness to power, in his two candidacies for the presidency and now as part of a (narrow) majority in the Senate, he has abandoned his ideological whims, leaving only the hard-left core of someone. ‘a ready to talk points of progressive blogs.

On another level, it is as dishonest as the other left voices who have made this argument. Sanders doesn’t explicitly threaten dictatorship if he doesn’t get what he wants. He says “just” that if he doesn’t, then some people will conclude that our system is not working and therefore will be forced to abandon it. Lost on Sanders is the idea of, say, crafting policy based on the narrow majorities of the Democratic Congress instead of trying to force a second New Deal or a big corporation – whose agendas were passed with approval. overwhelming Congress – on tiny margins in the House and Senate. . Or create expectations based on those same margins instead of irresponsibly inflating them to exploit the resulting discontent.

And on a third level, Sanders’ second-rate threat isn’t even original. When FDR was trying to get his so-called second Bill of Rights (all economic, all state granted) through Congress in 1944 (Sanders was 2), he engaged in a similar demagoguery:

One of the great American industrialists of our time – a man who has done his country a great service in this crisis – recently pointed out the grave dangers of “right-wing reaction” in this nation. All lucid businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such a reaction were to develop – if history repeated itself and we reverted to the so-called ‘normality’ of the 1920s – then it is certain that even if we will have defeated our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we will have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.

Bernie Sanders apparently expects so much from government spending that he wants to see whether he thinks it will save America from authoritarianism, or thinks so little of America that it is on the verge of collapse if not is for the trillions he’s looking for. Either way, it is partisan hyperbole that should be rejected.