Interesting Times

This is simultaneously an interesting election year, because of how unpredictable it's been, and a troubling election year, because what this unexpected developments say about our country.

The Republican primaries were a jumbled mess, with candidates rising into the spotlight as potential winners before saying something stupid or tanking at the polls, until the most divisive and least Republican candidate in the race managed to surge to victory by railing against the GOP establishment.  On the other side of the aisle, Hillary Clinton seemed sure to coast her way to the nomination, only to be met with the surprising grass-roots success of Bernie Sanders, who is similarly lambasting the party's elites.

There's a lot of things going on here, the biggest of which may be the self-destruction of the Republican Party.  Not long ago, the GOP enjoyed a time where it had more or less total control of the government, when a national tragedy resulted in enormous popular support for the party's policies.  The result was the disaster known as the George W. Bush Administration, where we saw what happened when those policies were put into action.  The backlash to this helped propel Obama to the White House, and Republicans immediately dedicated themselves to opposing him at every turn.  I'm still not sure how they ended up passing Obamacare, though I'm starting to wonder whether they did it just to have something specific to rail against.

Anyway, for the past eight years the GOP has been the Party of "NO!"  The party of government shutdowns, the party that refuses to pay old debts unless Democrats repeal a law the Republicans don't have the votes to take down, the party that shoots down bipartisan attempts at immigration reform and then screams when Obama takes executive action.  It is the anti-party, a political group with nothing to offer beyond principled opposition.  Republicans want to repeal Obamacare and take health insurance away from millions of Americans, but have no alternative plan.  They froth in rage that Obama betrayed his country by signing a nuclear deal with Iran and normalizing relations with Cuba, and want to go back to the old tactic of sanctions that didn't stop those countries from doing what we didn't want them to.  They criticize Obama's actions in Iraq and Syria against ISIS, but when it comes to coming up with an alternative plan by drafting an updated authorization for the use of military force, they're strangely silent.

Voters seem to have noticed.  It's hard to get fired up for a conventional Republican candidate when all they can offer are old party planks about a strong military, tax cuts, and so forth, especially when a Republican-controled Congress hasn't been able to deliver on them.  So Trump can come in and court all those people who are sick of this dysfunctional, deadlocked legislature but aren't willing to vote for anyone with a (D) after their names.  Thus, the Republican nomination seems destined to go to someone who shares the party's values only in the sense that he's even less subtle than mainstream Republican candidates when it comes to using sexist, Islamophobic or xenophobic language in his campaigning.

So this talk about Trump trying to "make peace" with establishment Republicans in Congress or his former rivals for the candidacy is a bit strange.  It'd be odd for him to suddenly start palling it up with them, because again his campaign is against the political status quo, while Congressional Republicans are the ones most responsible for our broken, ineffective legislature.  He's shown that he doesn't actually need this establishment's support to get this far.  It might be that mainstream Republicans are hoping to ride Trump's coattails and raise some money and votes for their own campaigns this November.  Which would mean, if both are successful,that we'd end up with this unconventional Republican in the White House, facing down dogmatic and unresponsive hard-line conservatives, thus continuing our political stalemate even in the event that the same party controls the whole government.

The weird thing is that, as I was taught back in the days of my undergrad American Politics courses, the modern Republican party is an alliance between free-market fiscal conservatives, who want as little interference in their business as possible and aren't concerned with things like the environment or a living wage, and social conservatives, who are willing to support the aforementioned fiscal policies even if they end up being hurt by them, just so long as their representatives wave Bibles around and froth against gay marriage.  Except Trump supporters don't seem to be coming from either camp - the guy's as socially conservative as most liberal candidates, while his talk about economics centers more on his ability to make great deals than financial dogma, and in fact goes against what previous Republicans have pushed for.  So where did the old Republican base go?  Are they abandoning traditional candidates and backing Trump because they think he has the best chance of making a difference in this time of deadlock?  Has this base shrunk over the years due to disillusionment?  Or has it been shouldered aside by Trump's followers, who threaten to hijack the Republican Party?

There's something similar, if not as dramatic, going on in the Democratic camp.  A political heavyweight, former Secretary of State, and former presidential candidate like Hillary Clinton should not have any trouble clinching her party's nomination, yet here we have her some unexpected defeats in the last couple of primaries.  She'll probably still win, sorry Bernie fans, but the fact that it's even a race at this point just goes to show that Mrs. Clinton has some very specific weakness and not many specific strengths beyond the novelty of potentially being the first female President of the United States.  For his part, Senator Sanders is capturing some of the angry exasperation that has seen Trump come so far, a feeling that the party establishment isn't doing enough, is corrupt, is out of touch.  It's not quite as bad as the rift within the Republican Party, and at least Hillary and Bernie supporters agree on most issues, if not which are the most important and what's the best way to address them, and the two candidates haven't been flinging the sort of vitriol seen in the Republican race.  But there have been ugly incidents like that near-riot at the end of the Nevada primary, so while the Democrats aren't in as bad a shape as the Republican Party is, there is the potential for a schism if the rift grows too wide. 

What's surreal about this election is the overlap between some Sanders and Trump supporters, to the extend that some backing the former are threatening to vote for the latter if Clinton "steals" the nomination.  Because there's more than just a backlash against an ineffectual government happening right now, some notions that were taken for granted for decades are now being viewed with suspicion.

Free trade was something viewed as an economic ideal, despite some anger over things like NAFTA hurting American workers, and even though some Democrats opposed such treaties as unfair or harmful, even President Obama has been pushing for things like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  But now both Sanders and Trump are railing against such deals and promising to bring jobs home.  It's an empty promise - these deals facilitate trade but don't cause it, and many of the jobs lost over the past few decades were due to technological innovation rather than overseas factories - but if you're hurting and desperate, it's the sort of thing you'd want to believe in.

America's international alliances have been the cause of some debate, in that they're largely relics of the Cold War, and depending on the international climate it can be hard to argue for the necessity of an American troop presence in Europe and Asia.  It's mostly been liberals who have talked about pulling back and focusing on America's internal affairs, but here we have Trump running for the Repulbican ticket and talking about reassessing or even terminating old pacts with NATO or Japan if he doesn't deem them profitable.  It looks like American isolationism may be making a comeback.

There's another backlash as well, though this one at least is confined to the Republican camp.  Over the past eight years, we've seen some major advances in civil rights.  Gay marriage has been legalized, alternative lifestyles are becoming more accepted, and while racism in the country hasn't been ended by any means, it's at least being acknowledged as a problem we still need to work on.  But some people aren't happy about these developments, leading to the "alt-right" movement that can be viewed as a counter-revolution of sorts opposing feminism and "Black Lives Matter," while more conventional conservatives are trying to regulate which bathrooms trasngender people can use. 

In short, this is what happens when people don't like where they are now but see nothing but gridlock ahead of them - they turn around and go backwards.

I'd like to be optimistic about the future, but there isn't a single candidate out there who can fix things.  Because the biggest problem in this country isn't who's in charge of it, but the people who are supposed to be crafting its laws.  If voters don't toss out the obstructionists and hard-liners and bring in some people willing to work together, compromise some of their values, and get things done, it's not going to matter if it's Trump or Clinton or Sanders in the White House. 

And voters... well.  They're feeling betrayed and angry right now because Congress isn't doing anything, but what were they expecting?  It's not like these Senators and Representatives ran on a platform of teamwork and betrayed it, they went to Washington vowing to oppose the President.  This is exactly the sort of "leadership" the electorate chose.

And call me a cynic, but I think a lot of the people who like Trump for his anti-establishment message are still going to vote for those establishment Republicans come this fall.  I would love to be wrong, though.