Donald Trump and the Hands Off Hillary Crowd

Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for President. It looks like Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee, despite Sander’s best opposition. A lot of ink will be spilled over this election, not because of Hillary — who only the most committed Democrats are actually excited about — but because of The Donald. In what’s become known as the outsider’s primary, only the Democrats were able to get the political elite’s choice through the other side of the trial by fire. And this election will be a nasty one. Both candidates are disliked by the majority of Americans, both have had everything conceivable thrown at them and survived. It’s difficult to imagine something emerging from either of their pasts that could end their campaigns at this point. Opposition research and mudslinging will likely be a futile exercise.

Not to draw a false equivalence, but both candidates campaigns will certainly have similarities. You can see it in the 10 Ways Hillary Clinton Is Just Like Your Abuela and Trump’s already infamous tweets and alphabet soup stump speeches. The core of that similarity is that neither Hillary nor Donald have a cohesive ideological vision for the country. They’re not afraid to change their positions or even their core platforms mid campaign — an act known in politispeak as “pivoting.” Instead of appealing to the ideals of the American people, they speak to coalitions of interest groups and grievances.

For Trump, this takes the form of xenophobic jingoism and isolationism, a promise to take on the various immigrant and ethnic groups that offer existential threat to the slackening grip of the old majority. The problem, as he presents it, is not the American political order perse, but the fact that it has been managed stupidly. Promising to right the wrongs of a pluralist, neoliberal order, and recapture the political apparatus of the country for white Christian America, Trump stokes the fires of the ugliest sentiments of racial fear and resentment.

Hillary Clinton, a member of the American plutocratic oligarchy, paid ally of the financial industry, offers no threat or dissolution to that oligarchy, nor can she explicitly endorse it. The Trumps and Clintons of the world, after all, have nothing to gain and everything to lose from the dissolution of the status quo, though they are acutely aware of its unpopularity. Instead of seeking to replace it entirely, Clinton offers piecemeal remediation and accommodations to the suffering and unsatisfied. Not a minimum wage of $15, but a less drastic $12, not a guaranteed right to free education, but free community college and reduced tuition at public universities. She offers targeted policies for each group she will need to win the White House — nothing too bold, or too backwards. Imagining that she will be able to win over donor class Republicans disaffected by the Trump candidacy, she is likely to prepare targeted policies appealing to establishment Conservatives as well, the goal being to woo them into the patchwork quilt of her campaign and eventual administration.

This strategy, in the absence of principled ideology, is what’s called “realist” or “pragmatist” politics. The likelihood of legislative accomplishment is irrelevant. It’s hard to imagine this Congress working with anyone, nor do the Republicans in the legislature bare any love for Hillary and harbor the notion that working with her will help them politically in their home states and districts.

The Affordable Care Act was achieved on the power of boldness and ideas. It was a radical suggestion, not a pragmatic one. It was undercut drastically before it was passed, but that’s almost inevitable with all legislation. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has no equivalent boldness. Her suggestions are pre-undercut and pre-compromised. She proposes to build on the Affordable Care Act — not fight for single payer or medicare for all, but to slowly progress on the battle already won by President Obama. But build what, and in which direction? How do you excite and mobilize people on such vagaries and half measures? Wonks, for all their sense of self importance, are rarely the ones that take to the streets or fill town halls.