Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders ran insurgent primary
campaigns directed against their respective party elites and gained a following
of millions, shaking the Democratic and Republican establishments and
threatening the dominant neo-liberal order at home and challenging America’s
global role. But, despite Trump’s nomination as the GOP’s presidential candidate
and Sanders’s victories in 22 states, it is increasingly clear that party
elites are slowly winning back the initiative, using their enormous resources
to manage and incorporate the challengers into politics as usual. The results
are not identical in each party because the Right has greater salience in the
GOP than does the Left in the Democratic party. Trump, therefore, has far more
room for manoeuvre and can maintain more of his racialized style within the
Right, boosted by the fundamental fact that he won the nomination without
serious opposition. Sanders, on the other hand, lost, despite frightening
Democratic leaders and is now actively backing Hillary Clinton as the
progressive candidate America needs.
Yet, this process of selective incorporation and
marginalisation is fraught with problems for party elites and the American
electorate that has shown its deep disdain for the main political parties’
programmes, records and styles in the wake of the disastrous Iraq War and
especially the relentless rise of income, wealth and power inequalities since
the financial meltdown in Wall Street in 2008. A large part of Trump’s appeal
echoes that of Bernie Sanders’s – of voiceless millions for whom the American
dream is pure chimera.
Trump’s choice of conservative Mike Pence and Hillary
Clinton’s of conservative Democrat Tim Kaine is a signal that the insurgencies
are being defanged. Party elites may believe that they’ve successfully absorbed
discontent through means both fair and foul; but the greater danger to the body
politic and for America’s global role is for party elites to close their eyes
to the massive undercurrents of political and economic discontent that the
primaries and conventions have exposed. As Thomas Jefferson noted, a little
rebellion from below is significant precisely because it provides a
health-check of the political system, opening the way to reform. Ignoring the
politics of mass discontent and returning to normalcy may merely store up an
even greater explosion – of either Right, Left or both – in 2020 and beyond,
crippling American politics and hamstringing its global power.
For Donald Trump to prove his seriousness as a presidential candidate
and have any chance of governing the nation should he prove victorious has
already forced him to compromise. His selection of Governor Mike Pence – a hard
core Tea Party conservative close to the billionaire conservative Koch brothers,
who have rejected Trump’s divisive anti-conservatism– is a major sop to party
elites, contradicting the anti-conservative political base that Trump’s
campaign championed. Mike Pence has alienated the LGBT community, organised
labour, and backs lower taxes on the rich and corporations. Since his selection
as running mate, he’s also backed Trump’s call to ban entry to Muslims from
countries facing terror attacks. Trump’s recent declaration that his
administration would reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act is not just an anti-Bill
Clinton tactic but also an attempt to shore up his white working class
political base and the pent up anger at Wall Street financiers. And party
elites have moved reluctantly to accept Trump’s rhetoric and style with a view
to be perceived as beyond reproach when or if the billionaire loses the
election in November 2016.
Sanders’s incorporation is in fact the greater story of
2016. His role appears to be to bring into the Democratic fold an enthusiastic
young electorate and other liberals, disappointed with President Obama’s
refusal to challenge the powers that be, despite promises, and eager to change
the politics of neoliberal order and challenge the militaristic role of the US
in world politics. Yet, Sanders’s defeat was nowhere near total – hence his
ability to win elements of his programme onto Clinton’s platform – on college
tuition fees, a public option in healthcare reform, the future role of super
delegates, a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage, a new unity commission on party
democracy, and so on. Yet, he made only a minor, and probably temporary
impression, on Clinton’s robust support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a
key element of Sanders’s campaign. But (Wiki) leaked emails showing the
Machiavellian manoeuvring of the DNC’s leader, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, including
trying to tap into Southern Baptists’ perceived anti-Semitism, against Sanders
have led to her resignation, opening the way to further intra-party change. Claiming,
with Clinton, that the party has the most progressive platform in its history, Sanders
appears to be rowing back from calling for a new independent progressive party
of the left. Even more than that, Sanders has acted as a cheer-leader for
Hillary Clinton and made strenuous efforts to dampen the protests of the very
people he mobilised in his campaign.
Bernie Sanders’s anti-Trump stance has helped Clinton promote
herself as the last best hope for America, or the least worst. Yet, despite the
strength of anti-party elite feeling during Sanders’s primary victories in 22
states, and millions of votes for an overtly ‘socialist’ programme, Hillary
Clinton’s choice of Tim Kaine as her vice presidential running mate is a major
blow to the insurgents. Kaine is a conservative Democrat, hawkish on the issues
of Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, and Islamic State, for full blown free trade that’s
devastated working class communities and contributed to increasing inequality,
and demands a soft line with Wall Street banks and money power, elements of
which got him elected as Virginia’s senator in 2012, against a hard core tea
party Republican.
In what has been a celebration of the last 8 years of
Democratic control of the White House, Hillary Clinton has chosen to defy the
millions who voted for Sanders and taken the strategy of winning the centre
ground, gambling on anti-Trump feeling to draw Sanders’s supporters into her
camp – they have nowhere else to go - by November. Rather than offering a
vision to America or a new grand bargain to reduce the power of finance and of
America’s global military deployments, Clinton has cautiously moved to court
‘moderate’ Republicans uncomfortable with the overtly racist and alienating
character of Trump’s rhetoric and political base. She has chosen to ride two
horses – declaring the party platform as the most progressive in its history
while also suggesting she’s a safe pair of hands. Trump is now the more radical-sounding
candidate in the 2016 general election even as he moves closer to GOP elites
and Wall Street in search of desperately-needed election campaign funding.
By November 2016, America may face a choice between a
programme of caution and the domestic and global status quo, and an
anti-politics right winger claiming to speak for ordinary people while dividing
them. Americans will choose from the lesser of two evils rather than a positive
vision of economic renewal, popular empowerment, reduction of the power of big
money, and a realistic approach to a changing global order.
The crisis of America’s elites is set to continue because
they appear to have failed to account for the political earthquakes of 2016.
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