Presidential race
CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES
USA
America’s
anti-establishment
paradox
by stash luczkiw
Outliers Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are making
waves early in the upcoming US presidential elections.
Yet their very popularity is a strange testament to how
solid the establishment really is.
Audience members
look up at the large
video screen hanging
above the first primetime Republican
presidential debate
hosted by Fox News
and Facebook at the
Quicken Loans Arena
in Cleveland, Ohio,
August 6, 2015.
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T
he circus is back in town. America’s electoral
spectacle began in earnest early August with a
ten-way debate among Republican candidates
on Fox television. When the dust from that skirmish settled, all the media seemed to focus on were Donald
Trump’s antics. The New York real estate tycoon’s vitriol gave him a surprising lead in the polls.
In the meantime, the Democratic Party, which Hilary Clinton seems to have locked up, is getting stirred
up by Bernie Sanders, a dyed-in-the-wool radical from
Vermont, who dares to propose a kinder, softer, more
socialist America.
Despite poll showings and grassroots enthusiasm, hardly anyone seriously believes that either of
these two candidates stands a chance at winning
their party’s primaries, much less the presidential
election. Americans and the media outlets that feed
them are still treating the political sparring as a
warm-up act for the real show. The more serious voters will inevitably make their true – and, one assumes, more moderate – opinions felt as we approach
the primaries in 2016. What the unexpected success
of these two outliers does indicate is that while America may be willing to flirt with radical social change
and/or a strong “winning” leadership – embodied
by Sanders and Trump respectively – the anti-establishment impetus is just a diversion that gives a
glimpse of how things “might be if…” But at the end
the day, the United States establishment is rock solid, for better or worse, based on firmly ensconced in-
stitutions; and barring economic or social upheaval,
it will remain so through the 2016 election and for the
foreseeable future.
Nevertheless, each of the outlier candidates intimates a possible America of the future, one that subsequent generations will need to choose and the establishment will need to adapt to.
Trump insists that America must return to being a
winner. “Our country is in serious trouble. We don’t
have victories anymore,” Trump said in a June presidential speech. “When was the last time anyone saw us
beating, let’s say, China in a trade deal. They kill us. I
beat China all the time. When did we beat Japan at anything? They send their cars over by the millions, and
what do we do? When was the last time you saw a
Chevrolet in Tokyo? It doesn’t exist, folks. They beat us
all the time.”
His vision for America is that of an ultra-competitive
world leader, honed by a Darwinian struggle for survival
that entails keeping undesirable elements at bay. “The
US has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s
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Democratic
presidential candidate
Bernie Sanders speaks
during a rally with the
International
Brotherhood of
Teamsters on Capitol
Hill in Washington, DC,
September 10, 2015.
78 - longitude #53
problems.” But in pinpointing a major source of undesirables – Mexico – Trump has earned the wrath of
America’s growing Latino population. “When Mexico
sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re
sending people that have lots of problems… They’re
bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.
And some, I assume, are good people.”
Each time Trump has managed to shock mainstream America with his blunt, at times even crass
opinions, his popularity in the poles grows. After the
first Republican debate on August 6, he engaged in a
nasty feud with Fox News’s beloved Megyn Kelly, who
had probed into misogynistic statements Trump had
uttered in the past. In the days following the debate,
Trump referred to her as a “bimbo” and intimated she
was a victim of menstrual stress with “blood coming
out of her wherever.” Initially it seemed as if Fox would
have to blacklist him from its scheduled debates, but
his popularity only grew – especially with Fox’s
staunchly Republican viewers. And a recent CNN poll
put his favorability rating among Republican women
at around 60%.
After the second debate on September 16, in which
all the other candidates appeared to gang up on the
frontrunner, Trump held his own and first post-debate poll showed him still leading with 36% (three
times more than second-place Ben Carson).
For many Americans what Trump represents is a
long overdue breath of authenticity. He says what
many people feel and are afraid to say. “I think the big
problem that this country has is being politically correct,” Trump responded to Kelly during the debate.
“I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I frankly
don’t have time for total political correctness, and to
be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time
either. This country is in big trouble. We don’t win
anymore.”
Trump is a builder. Throughout his career he has
embellished his native New York with ostentatious
glass towers that ooze a syrupy nouveau-riche sheen
appealing to those who feel cut off from the stilted
caste of Park Avenue’s old money. His paternal grandparents immigrated to America from Germany and
his mother came from Scotland. By no means a poor
child, Trump managed to enter his father’s real estate
business and expand it by an order of magnitude to become a billionaire. He likes to portray himself as the
embodiment of the entrepreneurial spirit that built
America, a man who will stop at nothing to achieve his
goals. His smug New York accent may grate on many
voters, but the decidedly aggressive cadences and his
no-bullshit approach to communication is something
that is hard to find in a political arena where all the
players are so cautious because every public whisper
can be picked up by a microphone and used to incriminate them down the line in some manner. To put
it in his own New Yorker’s terms, Trump just doesn’t give
a rat’s ass about what other people think – as long as he
gets what he wants.
In many respects, Trump is seen among Republicans as an antidote to Barack Obama’s professorial
sophistry, a scythe capable of mowing through Hillary
Clinton’s continual swaying with the political winds. (In
the debate, when asked why Clinton came to his wedding in 2005, Trump replied, “I said be at my wedding,
and she came to my wedding. You know why? She had
no choice, because I gave.”) And in the Republican
camp, he is a stark contrast to a pool of candidates
whose common denominator (Trump excluded, of
course) is a dearth of charisma.
The Democrats, for their part, seem to be stuck in
a rut of cynical pragmatism. Hillary Clinton is a familiar entity – perhaps too familiar. While she may have a
stellar resume, it also leaves her susceptible to those eager to dig up a scandal that could break her; email-gate
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Presidential race
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USA
might be just an appetizer in a buffet of accusations
that will crop up on the campaign trail.
Since 2009 the more progressive and ideologicalminded end of the Democratic Party spectrum has
been dismayed by a president who has revealed himself to be the consummate pragmatist, always willing
to make compromises. Domestically he compromised
on Obamacare, and internationally he compromised
on the nuclear deal with Iran – his two legacy achievements. In his first months in office Obama angered
anti-Wall Street progressives by tasking familiar
denizens of big finance – namely, Tim Geithner and
Larry Summers – with pulling America out of the disastrous economic situation he had just inherited.
Bernie Sanders is the progressives’ “great socialist
hope.” Born in Brooklyn (next door to Trump’s native
Queens) to a working class family, he joined the Young
People’s Socialist League as a college student in the early 1960s. After a stint on an Israeli kibbutz he found
refuge in Vermont, with a wave of other young people
seeking alternative social and political structures. Unlike Trump, Sanders had to do odd jobs to make ends
meet. When he did launch a business, it was an edu-
cational film company. One of his neighbors from that
period in his life described to Mother Jones magazine
how frugal he was and how “his cars were always breaking down.” In one of them Sanders had to clear the
windshield manually using the wiper blade he kept in
the glove compartment.
Today, the 74-year-old senator from Vermont points
to the Nordic socialist system as a model. Sanders
would like to break up the biggest banks, double the
minimum wage, introduce universal Medicare, provide
loans to workers who want to buy a stake in their companies, and tax the rich at potentially more than 50%.
He is on record as saying, “If a financial institution is too
big to fail, it is too big to exist.” He has also said, “The
billionaire class now owns the economy and they are
working day and night to make certain that they own
the United States government.”
You don’t need a degree in political science to understand that a socialist like Sanders simply does not
stand a chance in a US presidential election. But his
presence in the preliminary stages of the campaign
forces a discussion within the party that has traditionally championed the working class. He also prevents the
Republican presidential
candidate Donald
Trump greets fans
tailgating outside Jack
Trice Stadium before
the start of the Iowa
State versus University
of Iowa football game
in Ames, Iowa,
September 12, 2015.
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Presidential race
Democratic
presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton speaks
to guests gathered for
a campaign event at
the University of
Wisconsin in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
September 10, 2015.
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frontrunner Clinton from maintaining a safe middle
ground based on political pabulum and rhetorical fluff.
But there is a zone in which Sanders and Trump
overlap: their negative attitude toward Wall Street –
specifically the fact that the strength of the US economy is increasingly beholden to finance rather than
manufacturing and production. “The hedge fund guys
didn’t build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky,” Trump said.
Both extreme candidates feel that America’s plutocracy has gotten out of hand. The difference is Trump
argues cynically that he has been part and parcel of the
system and therefore can rein it in (how exactly he
doesn’t specify), whereas Sanders believes that a procapitalist government system with integrity is obliged
to effectively redesign itself, which is somewhat like
asking a successful rock star to become a monk.
What Sanders might be naively overlooking and
what might even be too detrimental for Trump to say
out loud is that the extremely wealthy have always
owned both the US economy and US government. The
republic of the United States was designed to consolidate power among an establishment composed of “enlightened plutocrats.” Just to cast a vote in early America you needed to own a certain amount of land on top
of being free (i.e., not a black slave), male, and more or
less Christian (i.e., neither a Jew, nor, in some states, a
Catholic or Quaker). In the wake of the American Revolution, this was already a radical contrast to the monarchic tradition from which the colonists rebelled. Nevertheless, a democratic government “of the people” by
no means meant a government chosen by the popular
masses. Representational democracy was a practical expedient. (It wasn’t until 1913 and the 17th amendment
to the US Constitution that senators were directly elected by voters rather than by state legislatures.) The system assumed that the masses were incapable of governing without the benefit of an educated elite familiar
with how economics and politics worked.
Little has changed. To the credit of America’s founding fathers they designed a constitution that fostered
a dynamic society allowing for social mobility. The system of checks and balances is the envy of the world. But
the power of moneyed elites has never been in doubt,
and the actual government, or at least the executive and
legislative branches, have always been beholden to
the money that backs them. Indeed, the notion of a
“political class” was frowned upon by Thomas Jefferson, who felt the elite should live and work in the real
world and step in to “serve” government with their ex-
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USA
perience and acumen. He even went as far as proposing term limits “to prevent every danger which might
arise to American freedom by continuing too long in office the members of the Congress.”
Of course, “plutocracy” is practically a curse word
these days, but it would be hard to argue that America
is not a plutocracy, and the steadily increasing wealth
gap only testifies to the situation. But wealth gap
notwithstanding, the US is still a thriving, dynamic
superpower, where millions of immigrants continue to
flock in hopes of a better life.
The supposedly “authentic” outlier candidates may
be hesitant to admit a bitter truth: the US establishment
owns the government, and that very establishment has
traditionally prevented a strong populist ruler from
taking power. In its editorial on Trump, The Economist
concluded with a warning, “Demagogues in other countries sometimes win elections, and there is no compelling reason why America should always be immune.”
Yet the run-up to the 2016 election makes clear
that a system has evolved in which anti-establishment
candidates simply cannot survive the arduous campaign. They may force certain issues into the spotlight, but ultimately an establishment candidate prevails. (For those who believe President Obama is an ex-
ception because he’s black, it’s enough to point out
that he was a Harvard graduate and a lawyer. As soon
as he took office, he recruited the Wall Street and Federal Reserve cognoscenti, thus putting him safely in the
establishment camp.)
The United States, for better or worse, has always
sacrificed notions of egalitarianism, especially if
deemed impractical, in order to maintain a certain level of economic and social dynamism. In other words,
equality was always more of a potentiality than an actuality. The system that drives this dynamism may be far
from perfect, but it is intended to give economic forces
free rein with only judicious use of government intervention. And while the system could certainly stand improvement, Americans will not broach any attempt to
overhaul something that isn’t totally broken – not yet.
So when election day comes around – though the masses may not phrase it in such terms – the electorate will
applaud the circus for its entertainment value and conclude that such-and-such candidate supported by the
establishment is “good enough for government work.”
Republican presidential
candidate and former
Florida Governor Jeb
Bush shows off a
Reagan-Bush ’84 t-shirt
as he speaks during a
Miami field office
opening, September 12,
2015.
Stash Luczkiw is an American social and cultural commentator.
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