In his latest New York Times entry, David Brooks tags Bernie Sanders with Stalin-era Soviet genocide and describes Sanders’s “leadership style” as a cocktail of “rage, bitter and relentless polarization, a demand for ideological purity among your friends, and incessant hatred for your supposed foes.” Sanders’s program, he argues, has almost nothing to do with the New Deal or Scandinavian social democracy. Instead, it is the American version of today’s “corrosive populisms of right and left.” For all these reasons, Sanders’s victory would be a terrible blow to “liberalism,” which Brooks identifies with “reasonableness, conversation, compassion, tolerance, intellectual humility and optimism” and a horror of cruelty, plus a commitment to making change within the political system.

Even someone committed to reasonableness and conversation can find that their energy flags while arguing with Brooks, his colleagues Bret Stephens and Thomas Friedman, and other never-Sanders avatars of the center. Brooks has seemingly gotten his impression of Sanders from Stephens’s columns, not from anyone with first-hand experience of the campaign.

Brooks doesn’t know much about the New Deal, doesn’t remember the last decade of the Cold War as clearly as he thinks he does, and, when it comes down to it, doesn’t really care about either. His real target is “left populism,” and his real argument is that Sanders’s political project is basically the same as the racist and nationalist populisms of the Right: driven by anger, prone to cults of personality, tending toward violence, and likely to shatter or suffocate democratic institutions if it takes power.