The Deeper Problem With the Sanders Campaign "Voodoo"

There's been a big controversy of late over an economic analysis, originally performed by an independent economist but repeatedly endorsed by members of the Sanders campaign itself, purporting to show that Bernie Sanders's economic plan would great an essentially unprecedented economic paradise, featuring among other things 5% annual growth over the next decade. It's basically just the latest in a sequence of fights between the Sanders campaign and the liberal wonk community, in which the wonks keep saying that Bernie isn't being totally honest about the costs of some of his proposals and in return Sanders sympathizers, basically, accuse said wonks of being corporate shills or whatever. There's plenty to say about this, and why it would be a bad thing if the Democrats adopted the Republicans' willingness to say empirically absurd things and then just have all their supporters pretend that they're true.*

But there's one thing about this that I haven't seen said, possibly because most of the commenters have been coming at the issue from the perspective of the policy wonks. My idea is more of a political theory one: it's not a good thing when you feel the need to lie to the public about your agenda. It means that on some level you know that your agenda, on a full and honest accounting, is unpopular. That's why the Republicans do so much of it! They're committed to advancing a policy agenda that would not really be very popular, so they have to lie about it, and while they're at it they have to suppress lots of voters and such. To be sure, the Sanders campaign is only taking its very first steps down a path the Republicans sprinted all the way down long ago. But it's not a good path to tread even a little bit.

Because it also betrays a kind of contempt for democracy. You could, of course, say, well, yes, we're lying about this plan because it's unpopular, but it should be popular, it's wrong of the people not to support it. Maybe it'll even be better for them than the policies they support. And so, really, what we're doing will make the world the best place it can be. And, sure. That might be a good argument, from a certain perspective. Just, not from the perspective of democratic self-governance. The whole concept of democracy is that the people get to decide these things for themselves. And it is surely a noble quest to educate the people, to make popular what should be popular. Nor am I saying that politicians have a moral responsibility to follow the weathervane of public opinion in all things; I'm actually a pretty big believer in the "trustee" model of representation, as opposed to the "delegate" one.

But you do have to be honest. Honest about what you'll do and about what you've done. If you're right that your policies are better, then once you implement them they'll presumably prove, at least in the fullness of time, to be popular. (See, e.g., ObamaCare.) But if you sell the people on policies by concealing their costs or exaggerating their rewards in some absurd fashion, then when the results are worse than you promised you'll spark a backlash. And beyond that, you just can't have a meaningful democracy on any other basis. If the choice ultimately belongs to the people, rather than to some benign counsel of Those Who Know Better, then the people need to be told, honestly, what their choice is.

We're the Democratic Party. We should believe in democracy, not just pragmatically but philosophically. We should believe in the people's right to decide their own fate, and that means their right to choose wrongly. (There are of course exceptions, as provided by the Constitution, but that's not really about the kind of economic policy choices Sanders is talking about.) We shouldn't seek to force our legislative program on the American people through force or trickery. I don't think the Sanders campaign really disputes this, so they should try to live up to these ideals a little more fully.





*Here's a relatively sympathetic take on what the Sanders people are doing here. There was a process that began sometime, I dunno, in the 1960s or thereabouts, wherein the American left started incorporating the advice of mainstream economic theory, and thereby moderating, from a certain perspective, its policy proposals. It's why you see things like liberal support for carbon taxes or whatever: there's a pretty broad consensus, or there has been, around finding the most effective and efficient economic tools for the promotion of liberal values. It's hardly been absolute, and in some cases it's gone in the opposite direction: liberals kept supporting the minimum wage for decades when standard economics said it was a bad idea, and then, lo and behold, more recent economic research suggests that maybe the liberals aren't wrong. Whaddaya know. But there's been a pretty strong commitment of late to using policies which have empirical support for their effectiveness.

The worry, though, and it's an eminently reasonable one, is that liberals have actually absorbed not just the practical and strategic suggestions of mainstream economics but also some of the underlying values and goals, which are in many cases really not all that liberal. And it's admirable for the Sanders campaign to want to roll back that tendency, the tendency to get assimilated into the Yay Capitalism mindset. The problem is, though, that they sort of seem to be conflating the two trends--again, understandably, since I think they probably were conflated in their origins. They're not the same thing, though, and we ought properly roll back one of them and not the other.