Two Cheers for Brooks

Well, two restrained cheers for David Brooks ("If It's Trump Vs. Warren, Then What?"): He's wrong about Warren in general, but he's right that he wouldn't want to vote for her if he understood what she was up to, and he's right that, if Trump and Warren are the nominees, he should vote for her nevertheless, for reasons that I think are pretty solid:

Politics is downstream from morality and culture. Warren represents a policy wrong turn, in my view, but policies can be argued about and reversed. Trump represents a much more important and fundamental threat — to the norms, values, standards and soul of this country.

I'd like to return the favor with an inverse pledge, but it's really hard to imagine a Democrat against whom I'd vote for, say, Willard Mitt Romney or even William Weld, because Democrats don't run like Trump. If Rod Blagojevic got nominated, I'd know he has a pretty bad reputation, but he has a sense that these institutions exist outside of him. If Jared Kushner or Ivanka Trump was to run as a Democrat, I'd easily vote for Weld, but that's not going to happen either. Nor is empty-eyed cult member Tulsi Gabbard, for that matter. Nobody like that is going to get the Democratic nomination. Ever.

Everybody makes fun of Democrats for being obsessed with "electability", but it's true we always look for a candidate who only tells lies for a good reason and doesn't have a dangerous personality disorder. We're not going to nominate somebody like Blagojevic for the presidency, or even like Reagan, let alone Scrooge McAsshole and his brood of ducklings. We won't even nominate Steyer or Bloomberg. It might be interesting to ask why Republicans are so careless about electability and still exist as a party. They have such objectively horrible people at all levels, from Mitch McConnell to Matt Gaetz and Duncan Hunter, people you really wouldn't want to let in your house, and yet they carry on.

Anyway Brooks spoils his gesture by explaining it in lesser-of-two-evils terms; "a bad option is better than a suicidal one," he says. No! Saving the country from any additional President Trump is a good option! Not everything you want in a presidential election, but that's real value.

But the real razor blade in the apple is Brooks complaining that we're not going electable enough for him and picking one of those nice young businesslike lads:

First, there are Warren’s policies. On trade, she’s a protectionist. Her 10-year, $34 trillion health care plan isn’t paid for. Her student debt cancellation plan is a handout to the upper middle class. Her campaign seems to not acknowledge the inevitable trade-off between economic growth and high spending, high taxes and high regulation.

Warren on trade is no different from a good old Midwestern Democrat like Richard Gebhardt or Tom Harkin used to represent, with the line that trade agreements are fine as long as they ensure labor rights and environmental protection. Or a current senator like Sherrod Brown, who keeps getting re-elected without difficulty in Red Rust-Belt Ohio in spite of a bunch of very "leftist" opinions. If we're so concerned about all those "white working class" voters in Ohio we might want to take a clue from Brown. I personally like a more openly "liberal" attitude toward international trade, but I'm not going to quarrel with labor rights and environmental protection (I supported the TPP because I thought it was a serious advance on those issues, and I think everybody else would too if WikiLeaks hadn't seized on it and made them all crazy with its deceptive curating), and I don't think David Brooks should either. Does he want to go on the record opposing Vietnamese workers' right to form a union? Please explain that to people.

Warren's 10-year, $34-trillion health plan doesn't publicly exist, and Brooks knows no more about it than you do. But health care in the US costs at least $35 trillion over a a ten year period as it is

for health care goods and services, public health activities, government administration, the net cost of health insurance, and investment related to health care

and what the single-payer plan does is replace the payments to insurance companies and local governments with payments in federal taxes, and as "Left-Leaning Think Tank"  (actually the Urban Institute) has made clear elsewhere

In our most recent report, we estimate that a broad single-payer reform (referred to as Reform 8: Enhanced Single Payer in the report) would increase federal government spending by $34 trillion over the 2020–29 period, $34 trillion beyond what the federal government already spends on health care.

However, this reform would shift almost all of the spending currently done by households, employers, and state governments over to the federal government. All people, regardless of whether they have insurance coverage today, would be covered by the new federal program.

So it's really a question of whether we want to pay that money to United Omnicare and Megamedical or to ourselves, the people as represented by the federal government, with uncollected profits paying for dental care and psychotherapy. It's not David Brooks's fault that we keep getting the impression that we're talking about 34 trillion new dollars that don't already exist in the economy going to pay for this stuff, but that's not the case, and it really really really needs to be said: the program is to spend the same $34 trillion or so in a more efficient and less abusive way. Please try to explain this to people.

Also, as I say, this is the Sanders plan; we haven't seen Warren's plan, and I don't think we will until she's much closer to winning the nomination, and hers will definitely be better (including some transitional help for the health insurance industry and its half a million jobs).

The student debt argument is almost as abusive, and I'm really sick of it. It's telling the suburban mom that the neighbor's kid going to Harvard and getting a job with a hedge fund operator is going to get bailed out by the feds while her own kid at Bunghole State gets nothing, but that's just not the case (Harvard, in particular, was the first of some 25 colleges to adopt no-loan policies so all students can graduate debt-free; U. Chicago, of course, isn't one of them).  In fact the typical victim of college debt is a young woman of color learning to do phlebotomy at the local community college or studying accounting in a four-year school or getting a teaching certificate, and Warren's plan is carefully directed toward her and away from the "upper middle class"

The proposal by Warren, who is among a crowded field of candidates vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, would eliminate up to $50,000 in student loan debt for every indebted person with a household income of less than $100,000.

Borrowers who make between $100,000 and $250,000 would also be eligible to have a smaller portion of their debt forgiven. Americans making more than $250,000 would not be eligible for loan forgiveness under the plan.

The guy at Yale Law School is getting very little out of this. The white or black or brown working stiff at the commuter school is getting assistance that can transform a life. Please try to explain this to people too.

And the " inevitable trade-off between economic growth and high spending, high taxes and high regulation" is the same conservative fiction it's always been, as we should have learned from Thomas Piketty and colleagues if we didn't already know. Period.

Second, she’s one of the few Democrats who could actually lose. As Yascha Mounk notes in The Atlantic, Democrats won in 2018 because they won back a lot of nonpartisan suburban office park workers who found moderates they could vote for. When you remind independents of Democratic support for abolishing private health insurance and decriminalizing unauthorized border crossing — two key Warren policies — they become six percentage points less likely to vote for the Democrats. Trump will tell voters: You may despise me, but she’ll destroy the economy.

We haven't seen the plan for abolishing private health insurance, and I don't know how far that sentiment goes. "When you remind independents" means they're not worried about it until some kibitzer warns them. The problem of decriminalizing unauthorized border crossing makes me crazy, because Democrats have really allowed Republicans to frame it in a disgusting way.

The issue has been not a law, but a contradiction between two laws, one of which holds that people who cross the border at an unauthorized spot have committed a felony, the other of which holds that people seeking asylum may claim it no matter where they cross.

No Democrat is truly excited over the rights of people sneaking across the border. All Democrats are infuriated at the treatment of asylum seekers who, far from sneaking, surrender to the first CBP agent they can find, and have always had a right to do this in spite of the passage of section 1325 in 1929, until Jeff Sessions suddenly decided to start enforcing it against asylum seekers almost 90 years later.

It's not a question of letting anybody cross the border whenever they want: the undocumented will continue to be deportable and will be deported. It's about those escaping from terrifying abuse in their home countries. The latter have to be protected, the law that allows the government to throw them into concentration camps has to be changed, and no Democratic presidential candidate can ignore this.  Please try to explain this to people especially.

Third, a Warren presidency would be deeply polarizing and probably unsuccessful. Warren’s policy ideas would make any progressive-moderate coalition impossible. She’d try to govern with her 40 percent partisan base, just as Trump has, which is no way to pass big legislation.

I'm imagining a coalition between those who have been saying for 60 years "I'd love to do this but it can't be done" (me being one of them) and those who have said "maybe it can". If Trump succeeds in destroying the Republican party, and you have to admit he's doing his best, there's no telling what can happen.

None of this is likely to win the approval of David Brooks even in the unlikely event that he can be made to understand it, because what he really cares about is the class hierarchy, and the idea that multimillionaires can make better decisions for a community than the community's democratically elected representatives. But I have to say he's right about Trump.