The genius of Elizabeth Warren

The genius of her campaign — and indeed of her entire career as a politician and public intellectual of sorts — is its clarity and pragmatism. She does not see herself as a transcendent figure. Nor does she expect her supporters to have some kind of frenzied emotional response to her speeches. The best she hopes for is that they come away feeling like they have heard a sensible woman point out some of the problems ordinary Americans face and suggest a handful of straightforward solutions to them. She doesn’t do uplift, which is what people mean when they grumble about her lack of “charisma” and “energy.”

This is one reason that much of Warren’s agenda is negative. Not for her the Candy Land of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, with its libertarianism-in-reverse promise of unlimited prosperity for everyone except the haters. Warren wants to ban Amazon, Google, and other tech companies from operating and using their platforms simultaneously. She wants to destroy monopolies, both vertical and horizontal, and would reverse Facebook’s purchase of Instagram. She wants to limit the size and variety of activity undertaken by financial corporations. She wants to take money away from the wealthy by taxing assets above $50 million at 2 percent annually and those above $1 billion at 3 percent. And she has detailed, well-thought-out plans for accomplishing each of these goals.

Warren is aware of her shortcomings as a purveyor of what campaign hacks refer to as the “message.” But her response to this is not to join the inspiration racket but to make fun of herself.