In last Sunday’s column, I argued that Democrats looking for someone to unify their fractious coalition should take another glance at Bernie Sanders — on the grounds that he’s more popular across the party’s different factions, more unifying, more exciting and more potentially appealing to non-liberals than his critics tend to assume.
There was one point I gestured at but didn’t stress, which is that in nominating Bernie, the Democrats would be embracing one of the key forces in American politics right now — the distrust of technocracy, the sense that the smartest guys in each political coalition can’t really be trusted, the feeling that the whole model of credentialed meritocracy is corrupt and self-dealing and doesn’t deliver on its promises.