In a recent New York Times piece, anti-Trump Republican David Brooks explains that while he could stomach voting for Elizabeth Warren over Donald Trump — on the grounds “she does not spread moral rot the way Trump does” — he draws the line at Bernie Sanders.

Brooks presents Sanders as dangerously extreme, cooperation-averse, and sympathetic to totalitarianism, the antithesis of liberal values such as “reasonableness, conversation, compassion, tolerance, intellectual humility and optimism.” Liberalism is “horrified by cruelty” writes Brooks, implying that Sanders, whose driving mission in politics is ensuring everyone can afford insulin, is not.

Brooks is far from alone in preferring to shadowbox an illiberal, antidemocratic figment of his imagination rather than critique Bernie Sanders as he actually exists. Perhaps because intellectual honesty would require opponents of the Vermont senator to acknowledge a discomfiting truth: Sanders’s platform is the closest thing to a genuine realization of liberal values that US voters have ever been offered. Where his policies seem to depart from those favored by mainstream liberals, it is they, rather than he, who have betrayed their claimed ideological foundation.