Bernie’s Authoritarian Blindspot

1. "We cannot speak with the moral authority the world needs," Sanders said, "if we do not struggle to achieve the ideal we are holding out for others." Sanders believes the American economy is immoral, and also believes American foreign policy is a form of malignant imperialism.
2. Since losing the Democratic primary, Sanders hired his first Senate foreign-policy adviser (and now has a team of advisers), led the legislative push to end American support for Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, and delivered two major speeches on foreign policy—one in 2017, the other last year.
3. In fact, none other than Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an unapologetic defender of exerting American power abroad, wrote an important essay last month for the Washington Post on authoritarianism reemerging as "the greatest threat to the liberal democratic world," both as an ideological and strategic challenge.
4. In Sanders's worldview, the role of the United States is to help organize the international table at which all countries sit to discuss a given issue, not to exercise meaningful, decisive leadership—which often, in a harsh and unforgiving world, requires coercive power against adversaries, in concert with allies.
5. Now that Sanders is again running for president, it seems that, with each new week, another magazine is publishing an essay on how his "progressive" foreign policy would revolutionize America's role in the world.
6. "When I talk about income inequality and talk about right-wing authoritarianism, you can't separate the two," Sanders said, describing a world in which Wall Street, multinational corporations, and authoritarian leaders are collaborating to corrupt politics everywhere.
7. The New Yorker published a piece titled, "Bernie Sanders Imagines a Progressive New Approach to Foreign Policy," in which the author, Benjamin Wallace-Wells, examines the senator's views on international affairs.
8. Sanders's framework (and to some extent Kagan's) does not address this category of countries, which are crucial to American foreign policy.
9. But Sanders does not recognize this truth, for he is too busy trying to build a new, progressive world order based on "shared prosperity" and narrowing the income gap.
10. Indeed, Sanders consistently castigates America's defense budget as too high and stresses that the United States must not be dominant on the world stage.
11. Sanders derides the very tool most capable of bringing his vision to fruition, and thus, his presidency would ensure that authoritarianism around the world would prosper, not wane.

https://freebeacon.com/blog/bernies-authoritarian-blindspot/