The great philosopher and parliamentarian Edmund Burke was the first to notice, before it even happened, that the initially peaceful protests of the French Revolution would turn into a purge of moderates by violent radicals. Something like that seems to be happening to American liberals today.
Prime example: the Bennet brothers, Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado and former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet, who have been having a bad year. I’ve known them only slightly but admired them as thoughtful and serious liberals, the kind of people that Democratic politicians and Democratic journalists might look to for leadership. But very few have been doing that in 2020.
You might characterize them as products of the Washington establishment: Their father, Douglas Bennet, worked for Ambassador to India Chester Bowles and Sen. Thomas Eagleton, ran AID (the foreign aid agency) during the Carter administration, headed NPR for 11 years (1983-93), served as assistant secretary of state for international organizations in the Clinton administration, and was then president of Wesleyan University. Michael Bennet and James Bennet both graduated from St. Albans School in Washington. Michael Bennet graduated from Wesleyan and Yale Law School, James Bennet from Yale University.
Both Bennet brothers went on to successful careers in fields in which their father’s connections were at most a minor factor. After working for Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste and the U.S. attorney’s office in Connecticut, Michael Bennet moved to Colorado in 1997 and worked with impressive success for investor Philip Anschutz (owner of the Washington Examiner’s parent company). He was appointed superintendent of Denver Public Schools in 2005 and instituted some thoughtful reforms. He was appointed to the Senate in 2009 to fill a vacancy and won full terms by a 48% to 46% margin in 2010 and a 50% to 44% margin in 2016.
After 10 years as a senator from a purple state, with a reputation, if not a steady record, as a moderate, at age 55, Michael Bennet is the kind of candidate Democrats might have seriously considered running for president in a previous decade. Not this year. He attracted little attention from the press or public when he announced his candidacy in May 2019. He got no more notice from his 18 minutes of comments in two televised debates in June and July and failed to qualify for any more. In February 2020, he received 164 votes in the Iowa caucuses and 952 votes in the New Hampshire primary, and he withdrew from the race, again with little notice, on February 11.
James Bennet has had a similarly rough 2020. His chosen field has been journalism, and, for a time, he reached the top of his field. After college, he snagged entry-level jobs at the Raleigh News & Observer, the New Republic (in its glory days), and the Washington Monthly. He joined the New York Times in 1991 and rose to head the Jerusalem bureau and cover the White House. He was appointed editor of the Atlantic in March 2006 and had a highly successful career there, then was lured away to head the New York Times editorial page in May 2016. He made one memorable mistake in June 2017, revising an editorial to charge, falsely, that a Sarah Palin PAC ad was responsible for the shooting in Tucson, Arizona, of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Bennet was (to my surprise) unaware that that charge had been solidly refuted in widespread media when it was first made six years before.
Apart from that minor smudge, I think it’s fair to say that Michael Bennet as a politician and James Bennet as a journalist have been fine examples of thoughtful liberalism. Unfortunately for them, liberals, or those on the left side of today’s political spectrum, don’t seem to want to have anything to do with them.
There may have been multiple reasons why Michael Bennet’s presidential candidacy went absolutely nowhere. But one was that Democratic primary voters and caucusgoers this cycle seemed to have little interest learning anything about white cisgendered males with records of winning elections in target states.
And what more is there to say about the fact that the loud voices in the New York Times newsroom brought about the downfall of James Bennet? He was first backed by the ownership family in the person of publisher A. G. Sulzberger. Bennet’s offense: running an opinion article by Sen. Tom Cotton which contained no factual error and which the New York Times itself inaccurately quoted in its announcement. The tweet said Cotton called for the government to “send the military to suppress protests.” No, what Cotton wrote and the New York Times printed was a call to send the military if necessary to stop violent rioting which Cotton clearly distinguished from peaceful protest.
So much for thoughtful liberalism. Michael Bennet continues to serve in the Senate, and James Bennet will presumably find a good job somewhere. But they’re political casualties in a Democratic onrush to the left, evident also in Joe Biden’s leftward lurch, promising to ban fracking and charter schools, two developments whose benefits have gone disproportionately to those with low incomes, and in the Minneapolis City Council’s vow to, somehow, abolish the city’s police department.
I have a pleasant memory of encountering and briefly chatting with the brothers Bennet on a pathway at the Aspen Institute, headed to an event at the Atlantic Ideas Festival. They seemed very much at ease with each other in time of earned success. Today, they look more like Girondists in the tumbrels, heading to the elevated platform with the sharp-bladed contraption in the Place de la Concorde.
