Bernie Sanders could yet see the US embrace bigger government
• Amid the coronavirus outbreak, this senator of New England pedigree is unlikely at age 78 ever to become Democratic nominee for president
Eight years have passed since Mitt Romney expressed his disappointment that 47% of Americans depend on the government and “believe that they are victims”.
The Republican party’s then presidential nominee claimed in remarks that were leaked that among the frills to which Americans regard themselves “entitled” were medical care, accommodation and food. “You name it,” said Romney as though he had just itemised the contents of a prima donna’s rider. He urged the government on Monday to pay $1,000 to each and every American adult.
Besides this helicopter money, the senator wants to help the virus-stricken economy with more paid leave, unemployment insurance and nutritional programmes. The stern budget hawk of yesteryear, for whom the US was a wheezing slacker, ripe for a private-equity turnaround, could not be more munificent.
It is my profession’s duty to spot the winners and losers of coronavirus. In the first category, I suggest another septuagenarian senator of New England pedigree. Bernie Sanders will not — and at 78 will never — be the Democratic nominee for US president. After clinching primaries in Florida and elsewhere on Tuesday, Joe Biden is now less his competitor in that race than a receding speck on the horizon.
There is comfort for Sanders, however, in the intellectual cooption of such improbable people as Romney.
In a way that was not true even two weeks ago, US politics now takes place on unambiguously socialdemocratic terms. A leftward trend that was already in glacial progress (look at public opinion on health care, on wealth taxes) has accelerated in an atmosphere of emergency. The crisis has been the making of the Sanders world view.
Britain is going to fiscal extremes under a Conservative government. France under a supply sider of a president is doing the same.
What makes the US distinct is that its debate does not stop at the near-term propping up of households and business. It touches on larger questions of distribution. Hence Romney’s ideas, which go beyond the usual payroll tax cuts and business loan guarantees of a chamber-of-commerce Republican.
In a time of contagion, the case for universal health care, at times a fog of detail, has also found painful simplicity: unless everyone has care, no-one does. Sanders has lived long enough to see the normalisation of his once-weird views.
We are in the early stages of one of history’s periodic discontinuities in economic thought. The sharpest, perhaps, since the Opec oil crises that elevated the free-marketeers in the 1970s. Readers will suggest the crash in 2008, after which a biography of John Maynard Keynes announced the “return of the master”. Well, it was fleeting. Before long, there were fiscal retrenchments around the western world. In the US, there was the Tea Party movement, the neutering of President Barack Obama by a Republican Congress, and his successor’s raid on the administrative state.
The laissez-faire right was not much less ascendant in 2017, say, than in 2007.
This time feels different. For one thing, the stakes are higher. A virus promises a rather worse fate than people feeling miserable. Nor can any section of society blame another.
There will be no cable TV blowhard pinning this on the poor, with their uppity dreams of home-ownership, and no Occupy movement, making it easier to reach agreement, if not consensus, on larger and more active government. Even the Left cannot squander this historic opening.
To my knowledge, there is no classical term for the opposite of a Pyrrhic victory: a defeat from which one ends up profiting. It’s irritating with so many such events in politics.
In 1964, Barry Goldwater, with his heresies against the New Deal, suffered huge defeat for the Republicans in the presidential election. Except, in the end, he didn’t. “It just took 16 years to count the votes,” said the columnist George Will, about Ronald Reagan’s win in 1980. His point was that Goldwater’s strident example had inspired the New Right. One-off defeat was a small price for the infusion of radical ideas into the national bloodstream. If anything, the loss gave him a martyr’s glamour.
These may be Sanders’s last days as a contender. Blanch as he might at the comparison, there is something of Goldwater about his career arc. The fringe years, the breakthrough, the electoral ceiling — and the ideological triumph via proxies.
If it is his fate to watch the US embrace bigger government, but under the leadership of others, there are worse niches in history. He will not have to wait 16 years to see it. /©