Bret Stephens: Frank, let’s imagine you’ve just taken Ken Martin’s job as chairman of the Democratic Party. (At the rate he’s going, that job may well be open soon.) What’s your approach to the Democratic Socialists of America: Enemy? Ally? Opportunity? Warning?
I ask because D.S.A.-backed candidates might become Democratic nominees in important races next month in Michigan, Missouri and Wisconsin, and I’m not sure Democrats know what to think of where they should sit inside the party.
Frank Bruni: I would not treat the D.S.A. as an enemy. That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. And you can’t win elections — at a time when it’s monumentally important that Democrats win elections — by willfully splintering your own party. I’d treat D.S.A. leaders and candidates as allies with a big fat asterisk, constantly reminding them that they need the rest of the Democratic Party as much as — or more than — it needs them. This whole dance is going to be brutal: Did you catch the remarks that Abdul El-Sayed — who is not actually a member of the D.S.A., but has won some of its most prominent lawmakers’ favor and indeed seems poised to prevail in the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan — made in a recent Zoom call with donors? His arrogance and truculence were breathtaking.
Bret: I missed it. Fill me in.
Frank: Oh, wow. I’m almost afraid to because it’ll make your head explode.
Bret: My head is like a vacant parking lot, Frank. Set off a bomb in there and nothing will be damaged.
Frank: Hardly. But self-effacing Bret is among my favorite Brets.
Anyway, El-Sayed joined the esteemed ranks of politicians whose candor with donors in what were supposed to be private or semiprivate moments revealed an unflattering mind-set not intended for public consumption. Think Mitt Romney and his “47 percent” of voters who are takers and not makers, Barack Obama on the bitter Americans who “cling to guns or religion,” Hillary Clinton on the “basket of deplorables.”
Politico obtained a recording in which El-Sayed foretold the glory of his victory in November against Mike Rogers, the presumptive Republican nominee in that Senate race. He crowed that for various reasons, including Michigan’s purple hue and prophetic aura, his triumph would give him “the best platform in the entire U.S. Senate, which I love because then guess where all eyes are going to be.” He went on to imagine himself as a major Democratic power broker in 2028 and to muse about backing primary opponents against incumbent Democrats who were disappointing dissidents.
This was the opposite of a call for comity, cooperation and a big tent. It was a call for rancor, rivalry and a catty clique.
Bret: Psychologically, he’s like a version of Donald Trump. He may not be a D.S.A. member, but it’s a reminder of all the ways the extremes of left and right tend to mirror each other.
As for the D.S.A., its platform calls for abolishing the Senate. And abolishing the presidency. Also, abolishing the Pentagon. And phasing out the police. And getting rid of border enforcement. Plus a 32-hour workweek, free health care, guaranteed housing, an end to capitalism. Sounds great, right? I mean, that is assuming you’re a Republican and want a Democratic Party tied down by its blurred lines with a far left espousing a platform that effectively calls for the end of America as we know it.
My own feeling here is that someone in the liberal mainstream of the party needs to stand up and say: That’s not us. We are capitalists, not socialists. We believe in freedom and fairness; we are not in favor of a free-for-all. We want thoughtful policing, but we’re not blind to the dangers of rampant criminality. We’re not blind, either, to the fact that freedom needs to be defended from the likes of Vladimir Putin and other dictators. If liberal mainstream Democrats can’t say this, who will?
Frank: Do I qualify as “liberal mainstream”?
Bret: Frank, you basically embody it.
Frank: Well then I grant you, in my own small and inconsequential way, your wish. I retweet, favorite and share every syllable — really, every single one — of what you just said. I agree. And by the way? So does a majority of people who identify as Democrats or who usually vote for Democrats. But to your point, they — we — need to make that much, much clearer.
Bret: I don’t hear any of the party elders except Rahm Emanuel speaking out. Sorry, go on …
Frank: I should also make clear that El-Sayed calls himself a capitalist, not a socialist. In any event, he concerns me for reasons beyond ideology, one of which is vivid in those leaked remarks. He’s a titanically self-infatuated self-promoter. That’s not a new breed in politics and public life, but it sure does seem ascendant. When I survey the news of the past week, from Ken Martin’s private tantrums through Anthony Fauci’s private scribblings, and then I factor in every second of Trump’s behavior, I see narcissism run amok, and that’s antithetical to government’s job, theoretically, of taking care of other people.
Bret: The Fauci story — pegged to the disclosure of his voluminous diaries written during the pandemic, in which he devotes considerable space to his fame and celebrity — confirms what, I think, many of us thought about him: That his ego weighs twice as much as the man himself. As our brilliant news-side colleague Shawn McCreesh delightfully put it, “It’s like Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’ crossed with ‘The Plague’ by Camus.”
At the time, I marveled at how a man who was supposed to be overseeing our response to a global emergency had so much time to go on TV. And I cringed when he announced that any criticism of him was an attack on science because he was the science. History may come to remember that comment as the moment when a critical mass of Americans lost faith in our public-health bureaucracy, if not science itself.
Frank: While I’m repelled by Fauci’s glee in his ability to butt-dial Barbra Streisand (that’s an actual detail in the diaries), I think the man and his legacy are more complicated than the portrait you just painted. We must not forget that at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Fauci was dealing with incomplete, shifting information. And that he spent decades toiling in the public sector rather than raking in tens of millions in the private sector. And that he was a crucial ally to AIDS activists and sufferers at a critical juncture in that epidemic. And that his ubiquity on television was in part a necessary corrective to Trump’s ubiquitous nonsense, such as the suggestion that maybe people with Covid should drink bleach.
Bret: Wait, drinking bleach was not a cure for Covid? No wonder I’ve had this ulcer for the last six years.
Frank: If the bleach explains your ulcer, your ulcer explains a whole lot else …
But what explains Fauci’s decision on Wednesday to invoke the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions from Senator Rand Paul and his Republican colleagues in the Senate about some of his actions and words early in the pandemic? Fauci accused Paul of being unnaturally obsessed with him and with putting him behind bars — which is possibly an understatement — and Fauci explained that he didn’t trust his tormentors not to twist whatever he said in deceitful, vindictive ways. Can you blame him? He was as resolutely mute in that hearing room as he’d been gushingly chatty in his diaries. But he looked sickened by his own evasions. That really pained me; he doesn’t deserve this and it shouldn’t define his career. Will it, Bret? How do you think it will play?
Bret: Whatever congressional witnesses may say to themselves when they take the Fifth, it’s impossible to escape the impression that they feel they have something to hide. And it doesn’t help that the cause of Fauci’s silence has to do with the origins of Covid, and whether Fauci was entirely candid about what he might have known or strongly suspected at the time.
Frank: For all of Fauci’s flaws and foibles, I think something written in April 2021 by Michael Gerson, a senior aide to President George W. Bush who then became a columnist for The Washington Post, remains more true than false: “Fauci is practicing epidemiology. His critics are practicing idiocy. Both are very good at their chosen work.”
Bret: I was prepared to cut Fauci and others in government a lot of slack in the first months of the pandemic, when the take-no-chances approach seemed like the safest course. But at some point many of the measures that he insisted were necessary — like the six-foot distance rule, or masking requirements that had no hope of consistent enforcement — felt both onerous and performative, and guaranteed to create a backlash. I know you’re not going to agree, but I don’t think Bobby Kennedy Jr. would be health secretary today if a guy like Fauci hadn’t been the perfect foil to what became the MAHA movement — a movement I think is genuinely dangerous to America’s health.
Frank: I actually agree that Fauci is relevant context for Kennedy, but I’d add that Kennedy is relevant context for how we should process Fauci’s diaries. The preening that Fauci cops to pales next to Kennedy’s relentless — and shirtless! — strutting. In a Washington crowded with showboats, Kennedy is a Bezos yacht compared to Fauci’s catamaran.
Bret: Having spent a fair bit of time on the water, I can tell you there are some fancy catamarans out there.
Frank: I’ll trust you. I know little beyond dinghies.
There’s something else, Bret, that’s disturbing about this Fauci episode. Senator Paul’s public release of Fauci’s diary, which he got from Kennedy, chillingly underscores the end of any rules and all restraints when it comes to partisan warfare. It’s a warning about how much privacy people surrender, how exposed and vulnerable they render themselves and what enormous risks they take when they enter public life and engage in public debate. We wonder why we’re often led by such awful people and left with such awful choices when we head to the polls. One answer is the scorched-earth ugliness of our politics.
Bret: In principle, I agree. In practice, if Fauci wanted to keep his diary private he could have used a computer that wasn’t attached to a government server. I think there are also valid public questions about whether he was being completely forthright about his views of Covid’s origins and whether the U.S. had ever funded the research that might have created the virus that actually spread in the first place.
Speaking of our private selves, Frank, have I ever mentioned I’m a huge fan of the Canadian rock trio, Rush?
Frank: Um, dozens of times ….
Bret: The band was once described as “the anchovies of rock music” — an acquired taste. I acquired it about 40 years ago and never let go, until its brilliant drummer and lyricist Neil Peart died of a brain tumor six years ago and left me and about a million other fans heartbroken. Well, they’re back with an incredible new drummer, Anika Nilles, and on Tuesday night I went to the first of their four sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. It’s probably the closest I’ll ever come to feeling like I was part of a megachurch of thousands of true believers, except that, instead of saying amen to biblical verses, we were all air drumming our way through songs that were closer to the heart. The best part? Watching Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, the band’s two 70-something original members, play note perfect for nearly three-hours with the bottomless energy and goofiness of 20-somethings.
You’ve written beautifully about “The Beauty of Dusk,” Frank. But, to adapt a line from Neil, I’d rather be immortal for a limited time.
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