Stagnating wages and anemic economic expansion under President Obama have engendered a strong feeling of economic precariousness in the middle class. And when people long for a reason to hope, or for politicians simply to pay attention to them and their woes, they are more likely to support those who offer simplistic, unworkable or dangerous solutions.
This goes a long way to explaining Tuesday night’s election result in New Hampshire. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders won their respective primaries, as expected, because they have focused on public woes and sought, however demagogically, to suggest solutions.
The advent of Trump-Sanders comes at a time when politics is polarized, and thus their similarly simplistic brands of populism have gained adherents on the Right and on the Left. The more established, or establishment, politicians in each party seem incapable or uninterested in illuminating the issues most people care about. Each tribe raises millions of dollars to fight for power without being able to articulate how they would exercise it for the general good, beyond a bit of sloganeering. The Republican and Democratic parties are now reaping the bitter fruit of their own rhetorical excesses as extremist ideologies fill the vacuum.
Both parties can still correct this, and they should do so quickly. If they do not, a plurality of Republican voters will continue to accept that immigrants are the cause of all of America’s problems, and a plurality or even majority of Democrats will swoon for the socialism.
Trump’s and Sanders’ messages appeal symmetrically to the same great flaw in human nature. Everyone suffers in life, but many cannot accept any explanation for their suffering that takes more than 30 seconds to state. Certainly, no one wants to blame his or her own choices. It’s much more comforting to blame foreigners or greedy billionaires as Trump and Sanders do, or else some other vaguely defined group.
Trump blames foreigners for “doing the raping” (there’s actually no statistical evidence for this) and for taking American jobs. Working from a kernel of truth about the laxity of American immigration law and some of its negative consequences, Trump has convinced millions of voters that he will build a 40-foot wall along the southern border and the Mexican government will pay for it. But even this fantasy is surpassed by his promise that such a thing would improve employment prospects for Americans.
Yet there is ample evidence on the campaign trail that such demagoguery works.
“Get them the hell out of this country,” one Trump supporter told the Washington Examiner at a pre-election rally in New Hampshire. “This is our country. This ain’t theirs. If they can’t make a democracy in their own country, oh well. Don’t come over here and try to destroy ours. That’s the way I feel about it. The way I look at it, build a fence, and fry them all.” This comment came from a man who said he had voted for President Obama in 2008 and wants to see a $20 minimum wage.
Sanders’ demagogy sounds less hateful than this, but it is no less destructive. He recently summed up the nation’s capital markets with a statement as emphatic as it was ignorant, that “the business model of Wall Street is fraud.” Wall Street is actually where start-up businesses get needed capital, and where 55 percent of households have shares in the nation’s biggest companies.
Like Trump, Sanders begins with a kernel of truth about corporate corruption. But then he takes the easy, lazy path of blaming the system itself, which is just as imperfect as all other human conventions and arrangements. If not for a relatively free economic system, and if not for the even freer one that used to exist in America, there would be no smartphones on which to use the Sanders campaign’s election day canvassing app.
There would be no social media on which to share his socialist message. Not only would millions of voters not be able to watch him debate on their large flatscreen televisions or over high speed broadband, but their incomes would also be a small fraction of what they are today, and they would be paying a far greater share of it for the necessities of life.
Trump and Sanders should be considered warning signs for the national polity. Politicians in both parties must return to offering constructive solutions to the problems that the public actually cares about. They must show how those solutions fit into a coherent understanding of the way the world works.
