Back To The Future: Welcome To The Politics Issue

The 2016 presidential campaign has been a high-speed collision between a past we thought we’d moved beyond and a future that arrived quicker than we thought.

By any normal progression of history, the 2016 election should have been the extension of the present: a contest among leaders of Barack Obama’s generation to succeed him.

Instead, through a combination of political accident and global trends, 2016 veered backward. The candidates, each more than a decade older than the sitting president, veered back to an economic conversation focused on rust belt manufacturing — pretty much the only mention of technology was Hillary Clinton’s emails — a bitter relitigation of the worst bits of the Clinton years, the lowest moments of the 1980s New York Post, and a final stretch focused on an attitude toward women drawn from the 1950s. After all, Donald Trump ran on the past — “Make America Great Again” — and on an atavistic nationalism that many thought had been left in the 20th century.

But these people, and these ideas, from the past have collided with a political technology, as the Russians call it, that is from the terrifying present: information warfare, viral fake news, hacking, endlessly circulated hot mic moments.

The stories in this collection deal in different ways with that collision. They introduce the two candidates: Ruby Cramer’s magisterial profile of Hillary Clinton, and of the roots of her ideas in a pure 1960s idealism, remains the most ambitious attempt at a profile of the Democratic candidate. McKay Coppins’ portrait of a man driven by resentment that began in the New York real estate world in the middle of the last century and finally taking his revenge on a crumbling establishment — a portrait turned into caricature in author James Hannaham’s satire.

Rosie Gray looks here at the oldest new thing of 2016: The rise of white nationalism, fueled by the oldest resentments, and powered by social media.

This collection — and this election — are really about this high-speed collision, between a past we thought we were past and a future that arrived quicker than we thought. It’s a searing moment for all involved, but perhaps most of all for the generation coming of political age right now. I’ll give the last word here to Katherine Miller, whose essay on growing up conservative as her movement shattered will be read long after this campaign is gone:

Here’s what I’m suggesting to you: It is unusual for that process to start with 9/11 and end with a global financial crisis, and perhaps we in our late twenties are on the seams of change in the United States in a way that others are not.

We are living through the end of an inflection point that started 15 years ago. Do not underestimate that what happens next could be something you’ve never seen before.