In a Bernie Sanders flashback, Brooke Singman reported for Fox News in 2020: “Sanders once defended Mao-era China by claiming it had democracy “on the local level,” as he argued the U.S. should provide aid to the country while cutting off other non-democratic nations.” That was Sanders in 1971.
This is Sanders in 2026. Jack Butler writes here in the Wall Street Journal Free Expression newsletter this morning and here at the Free Expression Susbtack site (all but one link omitted):
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Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is worried about artificial intelligence. He wrote last month in the Journal—we publish a variety of viewpoints—that AI could “displace tens of millions of workers,” “threatens our privacy” and is “reshaping how we as human beings relate to one another.”
Mr. Sanders’s economic concerns are consistent with the consistently wrong antiprogress socialism that has arisen before almost every wave of ultimately beneficial technological transformation. AI is currently propping up our tariff-addled economy. But the noneconomic potential of AI to drive further atomization, increase distrust and drown everything—politics, art, relationships—in a sea of slop is something worth at least discussing.
None of these anxieties, however, are sufficient reason to trust the Chinese Communist Party. Yet that’s exactly what Mr. Sanders advocates. Recently he brought U.S. and Chinese AI experts to Capitol Hill to discuss the new technology. His rationale is that the “existential threat” it poses ought to get the two rival powers to lay down their arms and figure out how best to confront it. “We need to cooperate. We need dialogue,” he said.
Here’s some dialogue for you:
“Should we collaborate with China on AI?”
“No.”
Is that too blunt? Lacking nuance? Let the facts guide you. China’s government has put the most advanced technology it can create—or steal—to the task of brutally repressing inconvenient minorities and aggressively monitoring the rest. Beijing’s reckless scientific experimentation in all likelihood led to the release of a civilization-altering virus. The CCP’s aspiration is to dislodge the U.S. as the pre-eminent global power. It ought not be anyone’s idea of a reliable partner in navigating the brave new AI world.
What is Mr. Sanders thinking? It isn’t the first time he’s found solace in a communist country. But there’s more going on here than that. The supposed model for this “dialogue” is how the U.S. and the Soviet Union collaborated to limit nuclear weapons during the Cold War. That did happen, to some extent. But the Soviets frequently flouted agreements. Only credible American force ensured compliance.
Yet throughout the Cold War, the American left viewed the U.S. as the problem. The naive or deluded among them hoped that accepting the Soviet Union as a stable partner would bring about a more peaceful world.
Consider Henry Wallace. Mr. Wallace was ousted from his role as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vice president shortly before FDR’s death. The Soviets successfully fooled Wallace into thinking they were doing things right. Communists ran his 1948 presidential campaign. He opposed confrontation. Rather, he hoped that “under friendly peaceful competition the Russian world and the American world will gradually become more alike.”
That isn’t how the Cold War ended, thank God. And it isn’t how to decide the future of AI. Much remains uncertain about that future. Some of its possibilities may indeed be scary. But about the scariest one I can think of involves letting a totalitarian geopolitical adversary shape it.
Read Butler’s columm with all the links here.
