How did it get to this point?
The story of 2016 was the rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, two figures who, between them, captured close to 45 percent of all primary votes cast. Which means that nearly half of voters, across ideologies and parties, supported a figure who, at any other point in the nation’s history, would have been relegated to the furthest reaches of the fringe.
Why this happened is the central question of 2016, and it’s one we’re likely to be pondering for a very long time. The answer is, as usual, extremely complicated.
There are economic factors, including (but not limited to) the continued fallout of the housing bubble and Great Recession, continued middle-class wage stagnation, and continued softness in the labor market, which is not nearly as well-off as the straight unemployment numbers suggest.
There’s the technological disruption of the internet, which is still rippling out into both the economy and the culture. There’s the prolonged ennui of war, both the hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the long war against radical Islam. There’s political correctness and real racism—if the rise of Donald Trump has proven anything, it’s that there are still real, honest-to-goodness racists in America. There’s the forgotten-but-ingrained bitterness stemming from the 2000 election and then the legacy of two presidents—George W. Bush and Barack Obama—who were, either by accident or design, among the most divisive leaders in American history.
Those are the small-bore causes. The big stuff is plenty big. As Ross Douthat observed last week, this may be what post-Christian politics in America looks like. We are still a predominantly Judeo-Christian country, but we’re also an increasingly un-churched country, where practicing Christianity is in decline. Not coincidentally, the secular left is on the verge of finally winning its decades long fight to expunge Judeo-Christian belief and practice from the public square.
Liberals, by and large, believe that this is a positive development. They have spent three decades complaining about the pernicious influence of Christian conservatives in politics. But it turns out that when the Republican party becomes decoupled from Christian ethics, you get Donald Trump. Rick Santorum doesn’t look so bad now, does he?
But these explanations—all of which are at least partially true—seem dialectical, as though there were forces in our culture and our politics that were impersonal and irresistible. Is there any part of our current political situation that was volitional? Maybe.
At one point this week I looked over my notes from the 2012 Democratic convention in Charlotte. I was struck by the following passage:
It seems possible that part of the reason Trump and Sanders surprised people this year is that we forgot what the world looked like four years ago. We forgot how ripe America was for a populist alternative back then. The Democrats didn’t really have a chance to vent this pressure; they were stuck with Obama. But Republicans flirted with populism for months—that’s what all of those boomlets for Michelle Bachman and Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich were. That’s why Santorum, who merged social conservatism with populism in a pretty attractive and responsible way, came within a few points in Michigan of wresting the nomination away from Mitt Romney.
In the end, the power of the Republican party establishment was enough to put down the populist surge, and they instead nominated the most anti-populist candidate imaginable. Which meant that the populist pressures that were building four years ago were denied release. And so they grew.
The populist fervor grew to such size that it began to exert a warping gravitational pull. At the Republican convention in Cleveland, the party’s nominee refused to mention God or faith or the Constitution and instead insisted that “only he” could fix America’s ills. At the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, the parents of a dead American soldier waved a pocket version of the Constitution from the podium and rebuked the Republican nominee for being a draft dodger.
At the Democratic convention, Leon Panetta’s speech was nearly drowned out by a chorus of boos when he argued for a robust defense of America in the face of ISIS while at the Republican convention speakers lamented the (fictional) gender pay-gap and called for transgender bathroom rights.
What universe is this?
It’s unclear what will happen to the Republican party going forward. Either Trump will be elected president, in which case it seems likely that some small, conservative rump of the party will break off and form a third party. Or Trump will be defeated, in which case the populists will fight to retain control of the party amidst recriminations in a war of all against all. (Which might also culminate in a third party.)
And as for the Democrats, their position is almost as precarious. If Hillary Clinton wins in November and the next four years see a marked upturn for America, then perhaps the movement Bernie Sanders rode will dissipate. If America’s fortunes did not improve under a President Clinton—we are due for another recession, by the way—then her 2016 victory over Sanders will only have kicked the can down the road. And if Clinton loses this fall, then the Democratic elites will have to start preparing immediately for a populist rebellion in 2020. There will not be an orderly changing of the guard as the keys to the party are turned over to someone like Julián Castro. There will be a rebellion.
No one should be surprised if the storm that breaks across the country four years from now makes 2016 look mild by comparison. But then, maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised this year, either.
