Saturday, April 25, 2020

How the Anti Populists Stopped Bernie Sanders - Thomas Frank

Excerpt:

"This struggle has a fundamental, almost biblical flavor. It is a battle of order against chaos, education against ignorance, mind against appetite, enlightenment against bigotry, culture against barbarism. From TED talk to red carpet, the call rings forth: Democracy must be controlled . . . before it ruins our democratic way of life.

The aim is not merely to resist President Donald Trump, the nation’s thinkers say. Nor is the conflict of our times some grand showdown of left and right. No, today’s political face-off pits the center against the periphery, the competent insider against the disgruntled sorehead. In this conflict, the side of moral right is supposed to be obvious. Ordinary people are agitated—everyone knows this—but our concern must lie with the well-being of the elites whom the people threaten to topple.

This is the core assumption of what I call the Democracy Scare: if the people have lost faith in the ones in charge, it can only be because something has gone wrong with the people themselves. As Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, put it in the summer of 2016: 'Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around.'"

The rest, in Harpers, here.

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