As the November 8 polling day approaches, Bob Hutton examines the state of the parties after a bruising campaign year.
At the time of writing, the victory of Hillary Clinton seems assured, not so much due to the strength of her candidacy, more the fecklessness and lack of discipline seen in her opponent, Donald Trump, and the disarray he has created in his party. None of the many scandals around Clinton, most inflated to ridiculous proportions by her enemies, have ever proven fatal. Despite a spotty record as Secretary of State; a relationship to Wall Street that angers the young left flank of her party; a predilection toward secrecy; and a general lack of campaigning acumen, Clinton’s success is not unlike her husband’s during his presidency and afterward: both Clintons attract hatred from the ugliest elements of society, and the majority of voters (or at least the plurality – Bill Clinton was re-elected in 1996 with less than 50% of the popular vote after winning the White House four years earlier with 43%) are repelled by the naked sado-nationalism and misogyny aimed at her.
The inspiration for this hatred is hard to discover since neither candidate has ever presented much of a challenge to the American status quo that white male conservatives claim to defend. Bill Clinton was the most fiscally conservative Democratic president since Grover Cleveland. Hillary embraces a combination of relative militarism and domestic liberalism that would look familiar to American newspaper readers in 1965. And yet both produce from the American right wing the sort of bile and apoplectics one would expect to be aimed at, well, actual leftists.
The Clintons have risen to global influence remembering Napoleon Bonaparte’s maxim of never interrupting enemies while they make their mistakes. Their shrillest critics accuse them of being socialists on one hand, and “banksters” on the other, with no acknowledgement (or, perhaps, no understanding) of the absurd paradox. From the 1998 impeachment to the Trump candidacy, the Clintons have been blessed consistently with enemies that uplift the Clintons.
More than any other candidate in recent memory, Hillary Clinton seeks to focus in on the very center of what Francis Fukuyama called “democratic capitalism,” a phrase that did not seem so laughable when he published The End of History and the Last Man in 1992 (the year Bill Clinton won his first presidential election). The Cold War was over, and so, said Fukuyama, were the Cold War-driven ideological disputes that had driven the twentieth century up until that point.
Countless articles have since demonstrated that, actually, history has continued, and in the face of 9/11 and global economic collapse, Fukuyama has conceded. Nevertheless, Hillary Clinton has dedicated her public life to finding a meeting point between global banking and grass roots progressivism. Strange bedfellows it would seem, but Clinton’s core supporters do not seem bothered. If anything, Clinton’s ersatz collection of causes is fine evidence for American exceptionalism, a doctrine she has cheerfully embraced.
Her two major opponents for the presidency, Donald Trump and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, collectively embody the reasons for Fukuyama’s concession. Together or apart, the relative success[es] of Sanders and Trump demonstrate that the center Clinton personifies probably cannot hold. “The democratic socialist Bernie Sanders and plutocratic nationalist Donald Trump are in most ways as opposed as matter and antimatter,” Jedidiah Purdy recently wrote in The Nation, “but their astonishing campaigns were propelled by a shared sense of indignation that linked left and right this year: the feeling that too many ordinary Americans have suffered and seen their economic prospects slip away, even as the country’s elites have reaped the fruits of a system stacked in their favor.” Populisms of the left and right have not been so influential on a US election since the 1960s, and Hillary Clinton stands in their respective ways.
The 2016 Democratic primary race stands as one of strangest in the party’s history, but also a diorama of the party’s unsettled history. Clinton was initially challenged by Martin O’Malley and Jim Webb, the former a young Eastern Seaboard urban politician, the other a vestige of a more hyper-masculine, belligerent era who combined social conservatism with a traditional Southern distrust of corporate power (Webb presented America with a poignant reminder of the days of John Nance Garner and Maury Maverick, both long-dead Texas Democrats). But it was her most improbable challenger, a septuagenarian Vermont socialist who joined the party only to run for president (its leftist reputation notwithstanding, the Democratic Party has a relatively short history in the Green Mountain State) that proved most signifficant.
Bernie Sanders took advantage of a mostly youthful swelling of anti-corporate anger that has percolated since the protests at the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization in 1999 and, more recently, 2011’s Occupy movement. Rather than concentrating fully on global finance, Sanders demanded various forms of relief for workers, students and consumers that sounded more reminiscent of the World War II era Old Left than it did the Vietnam era New Left. Sanders’ allure was attractive mostly to those who felt alienated from the electoral process, and therein lay the paradox of his success: those who trusted him most were the least likely to show up for polls, although his victories in more than one state primary was enough to give Clinton pause. His failure to attract African American voters, and his initial misunderstanding of the Black Lives Matter movement (and it is very possible that lack of understanding was mutual) hindered what could have been a transformative spoiler. Also, Sanders waited about four weeks too long in officially, anticlimactically, dropping out of the race, thereby causing his crusade to appear more quixotic than it previously had.
Nevertheless, Sanders’ success proves that a significant number of Americans are not repelled by the ‘socialist’ moniker, and that the economic status quo that Clinton represents does not meet with approval from a significant chunk of potential Democratic voters. It also represents the arrival of a young leftist vanguard that has little interest in the Democratic Party and its capitalist bedrock. Compared to socialist movements in Latin America, the Sanders campaign was a weak pot of tea. But, given the morlock-like existence of American socialism for decades, Sanders’s attempt to complicate the 2016 campaign was a triumph.
More farcical than triumphant, especially of late, the Trump campaign has seemingly transformed the Republican Party. Trump began in 2015 as a novelty candidate who cast his lack of governmental experience as a strength rather than a weakness – not unlike his opponents Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, but more colorful and with far more prior recognition. These “private sector” candidates appealed to the traditional Republican ardor for all things anti-statist, and this they each augmented with their own personal Horatio Alger life narratives (and, in Ben Carson’s case, it was a fairly believable narrative). Coming from the computer industry, Fiorina was probably the most conventional among them in terms of attracting the party’s briefcase-carrying traditional population.
Trump showed signs of breaking from that rarified pack in early 2016, propelled by a base of voters that is only partially recognizable as typically Republican. For one thing, like Sanders, Trump has made neoliberalism one of his chief targets, although his criticism of international trade deals targets politicians and foreign countries more than it does the multinational corporations that benefit from them. His promise to tax hedge fund managers has been eclipsed by his demonization of women, foreign workers, refugees, and the disabled, making it a minor footnote.
Trump’s constituency spouts innuendos and conspiracy theories disparately connecting Clinton to deceased leftist organizer Saul Alinsky and investment magnate George Soros, suggesting that they are unsure as to what is left and what is right when it comes to tactical demonization (despite their obvious differences, Alinsky and Soros do share a Jewish background). But most of his economic platform (environmental de-regulation, tax cuts for the wealthy) rings familiar among Republicans, showing that Trump’s outlier role within the party has been somewhat exaggerated. His businessman’s braggadocio is hardly consistent with a “blame the rich” message and his core following seems to be wealthier than they appear (depending on who is looking), and probably mostly the same group who founded the Tea Party in 2010 now happy to overlook Trump’s inconsistent support for laissez faire. Although many of the party’s members would prefer it otherwise, Trump is a Republican, albeit a colorful, hateful one. His party has been juggling the incompatible ideologies of neoliberalism and nationalism for quite some time, and Trump’s campaign may be an indicator of the juggler’s fatigued arms.
Despite predictions of its demise, the Republican Party will survive the Trump candidacy, and may be strengthened by it just as it was strengthened by the anti-government impulse that followed Watergate. Accordingly, the Democratic Party may absorb its pro-Sanders left wing, and water it down just as the party has done with internal insurgencies in the past. Both organizations have lasted for over 150 years, an exceptional continuity.
On the other hand, 2016 may mark the beginning of revolts from the center by both the left and the right, with Sanders and Trump acting as bellwethers. American politics is more ruptured, more hyper-partisan than it has been since the nineteenth century. Republicans have been calling Democrats “socialists” and “communists” for a very long time, while some liberals have hyperbolically applied “Nazi” to the GOP since the days of Nixon’s racially-tinged Southern Strategy.
With or without Sanders and Trump, life may soon imitate art (although it seems that “true” socialists have a much more jaded attitude toward Sanders than open white supremacists do toward Trump). Nearly 80 years ago, George Orwell predicted that socialism and fascism would be the prime oppositional forces in world affairs, although Allied victory in World War II instead established Fukuyama’s “democratic capitalism” (a phrase Orwell would have laughed at) against totalitarian communism.
t could be that Orwell’s prediction was not wrong but premature, for Europe and
the United States. American political exceptionalism may soon meet its end, driven over the precipice of history by socialism and nationalism , though born of the old American party system.
Bob Hutton is Senior Lecturer in History & American Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville