At the Washington Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti takes a stimulating dive into the conflicting isms driving politics in 2016 and provides readers his analysis of the future of isms sketched on the backdrop of the 12th (and final) annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative.
Isms like populism, nationalism, and tribalism are here to stay. Continetti predicts they will “outlast Trump and Clinton.”
Why? The inability of elite political leaders to understand the concerns of average people. Here’s Continetti:
This is a moment of dissociation—of unbundling, fracture, disaggregation, dispersal. But the disconnectedness is not merely social. It is also political—a separation of the citizenry from the governments founded in their name. They are meant to have representation, to be heard, to exercise control. What they have found instead is that ostensibly democratic governments sometimes treat their populations not as citizens but as irritants.
Congresses and administrations ignoring voters’ will on everything from Obamacare to immigration policy also played big roles. Continetti observes that these disconnects in values have caused tension to increase:
Is it really surprising that our democracy has become more tenuous as the distance between citizen and government has increased? A large portion of the electorate, it would seem, is no longer willing to tolerate a bipartisan establishment that seems more concerned with the so-called “globalist” issues of trade, migration, climate, defense of a rickety world order, and transgender rights than with the experiences of joblessness, addiction, crime, worry for one’s children, and not-so-distant memories of a better, stronger, more respected America.
It doesn’t end with Trump, says Continetti:
What should worry the “globalists” of every party is that this revolt is not an aberration from our current trajectory but parallel to it. The forces animating Donald Trump will persist so long as Bill Clinton and friends insulate themselves, their families, and their government from the unvarnished, intemperate, uncouth, and entirely legitimate grievances of the people.
Read the whole column here.
