Why Bernie Scares Me

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/opinion/bernie-sanders-2020.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

By Bret Stephens
Feb. 28, 2020

Sanders seems mostly incapable of admitting past errors of judgment.

Most of us go through life revising our opinions. At 16 I thought “The Fountainhead” was a great book. At 18 I realized it was rubbish. At 25 I thought Bill Clinton should be thrown out of office for lying about a consensual dalliance. At 46 I don’t know what I was thinking.

•••••

In 2040, assuming I’m still kicking, I’m sure I’ll have misgivings about some of what I wrote in 2020. Maybe that will include this column.

To have our convictions knocked sideways by stronger arguments, fresh experiences, contrary evidence, maturing judgment, or simply the honesty of a second-guessing mind, is how we become educated. The alternative is intellectual stagnation, puerility, and arrogance. It takes a fanatic, or a fool, to believe that the person who’s most right is the one who almost never admits to being wrong.

Which brings me to Bernie Sanders.

•••••

Otherwise, the presumptive Democratic front-runner communicates a sense of moral and ideological certitude — unrelentingly sustained for decades — that seems to thrill his followers but terrifies me. Other candidates have changed their views on one thing or another over the years, albeit with varying degrees of sincerity: Joe Biden on the war in Iraq; Mike Bloomberg on stop-and-frisk; Elizabeth Warren on super PACs. [Tom Steyer on fossil fuels.]

Not Bernie

•••••

This isn’t to say that everything Sanders ever thought as a young man — and still thinks today — is wrong. At Chicago he helped force the university to end racial segregation in its private housing. He made the definitive case, in the pages of the college newspaper, for the right of students to have sex. He joined Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.

These are things of which the senator can be proud. Other things, not so much.

•••••

In America’s 46-year Cold War with some of the vilest regimes in history, Sanders’s main contribution was loudly to find fault with America while remaining remarkably mum about the sins of the other side — when he wasn’t finding occasions to praise them. The least he can do is acknowledge that he was wrong.

•••••

For now, what needs saying is that a man who refuses to make an honest break with the worst convictions of his youth should never be entrusted with the presidency.