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A4 East Oregonian Wednesday, March 13, 2019 CHRISTOPHER RUSH Publisher KATHRYN B. BROWN Owner DANIEL WATTENBURGER Managing Editor WYATT HAUPT JR. News Editor Founded October 16, 1875 OTHER VIEWS Bernie Sanders, Socialism’s Reagan? F rom the beginning the presidency of Donald Trump has inspired analogies to the years of Jimmy Carter. Though personally the two men are ever so slightly different, they seem to occupy a similar space in the arc of political history — both outsiders who seized control of a divided, exhausted, yet still pow- erful political party, both men who tried to push their coalitions into a new ideological forma- tion, both presidents who commanded legislative majorities but accom- plished next to nothing R oss with them. D outhat The term that seems COMMENT to fit them both is “dis- junctive,” from the cat- egorizations of Yale political scientist Ste- phen Skowronek. As Carter straddled the old New Deal-Great Society liberalism and the age of Reaganism and neoliberalism to come, so Trump’s presidency is at once the seeming last gasp for the Reagan coalition and a possible doorway into a future where socialism and right-wing populism contend for mastery instead. But if Trump is a Carter figure, trying and probably failing to build a new conser- vative majority inside the decaying insti- tutions of the old one, then who is ready to play Reagan — the ideologically ambitious rival who wins the presidency and actually ushers in realignment? The correct answer might be nobody, because history doesn’t actually repeat or mirror or rhyme that simply, and because the decadence of American institutions threatens to make every president effec- tively disjunctive, keeping real realignment forever out of reach. But if you’re eagerly looking for the rep- etition or the rhyme, the 2020 primary cam- paign supplies an obvious figure: The Rea- gan to Trump’s Carter, the left-wing answer to the first movement-conservative presi- dent, can be only Bernard Sanders. If you doubt me, consider the parallels. Like Reagan following his attempt to pri- mary Gerald Ford in 1976, Sanders is com- ing off a near-miss insurgent campaign against an embodiment of the party estab- lishment, who then went to an excruciat- ingly narrow general election defeat. Like Reagan, Sanders is widely judged too old to be elected president; he is older than the Gipper, but just as Reagan’s age in 1980, 69, roughly matched American life expectancy at the time, so does Sanders’ age of 77 match life expectancy today. Like Reagan, Sanders is widely consid- ered too extreme to be nominated, and cer- tainly too extreme to win: Some Demo- BERNIE-ISM IS OBVIOUSLY WHERE A LARGE FRACTION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY WANTS TO GO. crats fear that his nomination would give oxygen to a third-party centrist (with How- ard Schultz ready for that role) as Reagan’s prompted John Anderson to run as a liberal Republican; some Republicans hope that a Sanders-led ticket would help the unpopular incumbent sneak to re-election. And like Reagan, Sanders comes by his supposed extremism honestly, having been ideologically left-wing for his entire pub- lic life, preaching socialism in the midst of the Reagan and Clinton eras just as Reagan made himself a spokesman for the Goldwa- terite right in 1964, at its moment of epic political defeat. Of course the analogy is imperfect — don’t come at me with Bernie never gov- erned a major state and Reagan was a New Deal Democrat and had a whole celebrity career before he went into politics, I’m well aware. But it’s an interesting echo, at the very least. And the parallels between the arguments used to dismiss Sanders and the Reagan-can’t-win assumptions of late-1970s pundits have kept me moderately bullish on the Vermont socialist’s 2020 chances. With Sanders officially in the race, the reasons for bullishness have grown. Whether he is technically the front-run- ner or not depends on how you assess the impressive poll numbers of the undeclared Joe Biden: Are those a real signifier that the Democratic Party’s moderate wing is ready to have the former vice president as its champion, or just an artifact of name rec- ognition that will collapse once Biden starts having to answer for his record? But every normal metric makes Sanders a front-runner, and a stronger-looking can- didate than all his declared rivals: His fund- raising is impressive, his crowds are big, and his early poll numbers give him both the expected 20-25 percent floor and room to grow. (In the weekend’s poll of Iowa, he would claim almost a third of Biden’s sup- porters if the ex-vice president decided not to run.) And he’s facing a field sufficiently large that the advantages of having a core of unshakable supporters are likely to be magnified. Meanwhile his campaign so far is sug- gestive of the ways — again, like Reagan — that a long history of ideological extrem- ism can actually be helpful to a presidential candidate. Precisely because Sanders is a known quantity, because nobody doubts his commitment to left-wing policies, there may be less pressure on his campaign to embrace every idea floated by reporters or touted by activists. (It’s probably a good sign, for instance, that he was just attacked from the left by Julián Castro for insufficient zeal on reparations.) Nor does he need to adopt the strident tone of younger would-be revolutionaries or the politicians pandering to them to prove his socialist bona fides. As conservative writer Ben Domenech noted recently, “the truth is that Sanders, despite his socialist label, seems to have a less harsh vision of politics than many others within the party.” Because his record is what it is, he won’t always have to be the most zealous candi- date on stage — and like Reagan, he might even be able to promise certain kinds of moderation while keeping his base secure in his fundamentally revolutionary intentions. Of course this last possibility is just a hypothetical, and Sanders’ rumpled-profes- sor style of socialism (and all those Sovi- et-friendly video clips lurking on YouTube) might ultimately inspire more backlash than Kamala Harris running hard to the left or Elizabeth Warren filling in all the policy details that Sanders leaves a little hazy. To argue that Sanders has qualities in common with Reagan is not to argue that he’s neces- sarily the most electable Democrat, or that in nominating him the party wouldn’t be taking a substantial risk — as Reagan really was a risky choice in 1980, and his victory by no means foreordained. But it is to argue that if you want a new president to be transformative — as, obvi- ously, many people on the left desire — there are clear advantages in electing some- body whose entire career is associated with an ideological insurgency, and whose vic- tory would shock the more adaptable sort of politician into understanding themselves as inhabitants of a new political reality, in which no matter what poll numbers show on any given issue, it’s taken for granted that the former world has passed away. You can’t get that change just by electing an ideologue as president; his actual pres- idency also has to be understood (as Rea- gan’s was, rightly, despite the vigorous cri- tiques offered by a certain Vermont mayor at the time) as a success. And there are good reasons, conservative and otherwise, to doubt that a President Bernie would be suc- cessful enough to run on his own version of “morning in America” in 2024. But Bernie-ism is obviously where a large fraction of the Democratic Party wants to go, and with Trump weak and Car- ter-esque the chances that someone will get elected on a very left-wing platform are reasonably strong. In which the case for Sanders will remain simple and intuitive throughout the primaries to come: If we’re going to do this thing, let’s do it with the guy who’s actually spent years or decades planning for a realigning moment. Sanders 2020: Accept No Substitutes. ——— Ross Douthat is a columnist for the New York Times. OTHER VIEWS Trump is indeed a target of ‘presidential harassment’ P tial investigations resident by state and local Trump often prosecutors and complains that he is the vic- regulators. tim of “presiden- Together, tial harassment” it adds up to a — or, as he some- pile-on of unprec- times puts it, edented propor- B yRon tions — by and “PRESIDENTIAL y oRk large the work of HARASSMENT!” COMMENT “After more blue-state Dem- ocrats who stand than two years of to gain politically if their Presidential Harassment, investigations succeed in the only things that have crippling the president. been proven is that Dem- ocrats and others broke Recently the New York the law,” Trump tweeted State Department of Finan- cial Services, the agency on March 3. “Presidential that regulates the insur- Harassment by ‘crazed’ ance business, issued what Democrats at the high- est level in the history of The New York Times called our Country,” he added an “expansive subpoena” later. “PRESIDENTIAL to Aon, the insurance bro- ker for the president’s com- HARASSMENT! It should panies. The agency leaped never be allowed to happen into action after former again!” he tweeted Feb. 7. The president’s adversar- Trump fixer Michael Cohen ies, of course, dismiss his told the House that Trump protests as self-interested had at some point inflated whining. But the fact is, his assets to an insurance Trump has a point. He is the company. Cohen, who has target of an extraordinary pleaded guilty to lying to combination not just of fed- Congress and faces serious eral law enforcement and questions about the truth- fulness of his latest testi- congressional probes, but a mony, supplied no details. long list of less-discussed None were needed. “The but potentially consequen- Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the East Oregonian editorial board. Other columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the East Oregonian. subpoena that was served on Aon contains no indica- tion that the company or any of its employees engaged in misconduct,” the Times reported. “Nor does it spec- ify any possible wrongdo- ing that is the focus of the inquiry by state regulators.” The subpoena demanded “a broad range of materi- als” related to Trump’s deal- ings with Aon going back a decade, the Times said. Also in New York, the State Department of Taxa- tion and Finance announced last October that it is inves- tigating Trump’s taxes going back at least 20 years. Outside of New York, the attorneys general of Maryland and the Dis- trict of Columbia are suing Trump, accusing him of violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution. Then there is the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, based in Manhattan. Prosecutors there are said to be investi- gating the Trump Organiza- tion’s finances, the funding of the Trump inaugura- tion, and the funding of the Trump super PAC Rebuild- ing America Now. The SDNY investiga- tions hold a large place in the hopes of Trump oppo- nents who fear Trump-Rus- sia special counsel Robert Mueller might deliver an underwhelming report that does not make the case that Trump colluded with Rus- sia to fix the 2016 election or that he obstructed justice in the aftermath. Indeed, a number of observers believe the SDNY probes pose a more serious threat to Trump than Mueller. On Capitol Hill, Dem- ocrats have long viewed Trump’s tax returns — his refusal to release them broke 40 years of precedent — as a sort of Holy Grail of Trump investigations. “We have to have the truth,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said before the election. Now, the House Ways and Means Committee is report- edly preparing to demand the Treasury Department turn over the returns. The demand is based primar- ily on suspicion that Trump must have done some- thing wrong with his taxes or he would have long ago released the returns. If Democrats get the returns it’s likely they will start even more investigations. Beyond that, there is the House Judiciary Com- mittee’s recent decision to The East Oregonian welcomes original letters of 400 words or less on public issues and public policies for publication in the newspaper and on our website. The newspaper reserves the right to withhold letters that address concerns about individual services and products or letters that infringe on the rights of private citizens. Letters must be signed by the author and include the city of residence and a daytime phone number. The phone number will not be published. Unsigned letters will not be published. demand documents from 81 people associated with Trump — a request so wide-ranging that even some Democrats worry that their party’s investigators have overreached. The point is, the scrutiny directed at the president from all sides so far exceeds anything in the past that it could well qualify as presi- dential harassment. Democrats would no doubt respond that Trump is singularly corrupt, or that he brought it all on himself. He did not. What has hap- pened is that Democrats, in Congress and in some key blue states, saw investiga- tion as a way to weaken a president they never thought would be elected and want to ensure is not re-elected in 2020. And Trump, with the most extensive business history ever brought to the presidency, presented a lot of avenues of investigation. When he complains about harassment, he has a legiti- mate case to make. ——— Byron York is chief polit- ical correspondent for The Washington Examiner. Send letters to managing editor Daniel Wattenburger, 211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton, OR 97801, or email editor@eastoregonian.com.
