Thomas Frank writes another treatise from the the “if you don’t agree with me, you’re mentally unstable” school of thought that’s so popular on the left in today’s Wall Street Journal, about the sins of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford (R):

Deficit spending, the issue of the day, has always struck him as fantastically evil, and in his congressional period he even quoted an early 19th century Scottish theorist on why government spending can force a democracy to collapse. Social Security is another bad idea, he argues in his book, and it needs to be replaced by personal retirement accounts.

Never mind that Frank’s own fetish for nineteenth century populism comes from the trust-fund-brat son of a nineteenth century industrialist, or that his own preferred choice for president is now looking at Social Security privatization. And the reference earlier in the article to South Carolina nullifiers is a nice touch. But the column’s main theme is that Gov. Sanford is either naive or cold and calculating because of his quaint idea that Washington’s fiscal imprudence is due to an entrenched pork-packing political machine:

Besides, a “citizen legislator” in a hair shirt is an American stock figure every bit as phony and pretentious as a self-important senator being ferried about in an Air Force jet. Think of William Henry Harrison, propelled to the White House in 1840 in a gust of log-cabin-and-hard-cider folksiness. Or of down-home Huey Long. Or of the amazing succession of fake cowboys and pseudo-populists who have presided over Washington in the past 30-odd years. And now compare those politicians’ aw-shucks ways with the massive concentration of wealth they engineered.

Oh, you mean like, say, a fellow who campaigns on an ethereal pledge to unite across race and income divides using hope and a vague desire for change? Oh yeah, I seem to have heard about that procession. Obviously, the problem isn’t Sanford’s naivete. It’s his quaint desire not to trust the government more than the individual based on a century of evidence.