The Great Unravelling: Reflecting On A Nasty Election
Some thoughts on what has been a brutal, too-long and polarizing election season.
America sells itself short: There’s been a lot of talk this election about how the system is rigged against ordinary Americans and how broken the political system is. That’s true, to a degree. What’s also true is just how empowering this election has been for millions of Americans who have participated in the democratic process, the thousands of others who’ve donated to candidates, joined campaigns or volunteered their weekends to support candidates or man voting booths. This country is in the midst of a historic change that has mobilized millions of people in a democratic and peaceful manner. That’s not something to be taken for granted, it doesn’t happen everywhere in the world and it’s something to be proud of.
America is angry. 2016 will likely be remembered as the angriest year in recent US history. Rage against Washington’s business-as-usual. Rage against Citizens United. Rage against big pharma and Obamacare. Rage against bankers that got off clean from the financial crisis. Rage against the political class that embraced free trade but forgot to put safeguards to help communities that will inevitably be hollowed out. Rage against a declining life expectancy and a rampant opioid epidemic. A lot of this rage is justified but politicians too often ignore it. They ignore it partially because the top line numbers are great, GDP is up as is the Dow. They ignore it because it means economic reforms that will impact the wealthy. They also ignore it because it’s packaged with racial, cultural and sexist ideas that are terrible, so they throw the baby out with the bath water. Which leads us to our second point.
America has some dangerous beliefs. It’s clear that racism and misogyny in America are alive and well. Eight years of having a black president didn’t make the racial divide go away, in some areas that divide has deepened. Donald Trump is simultaneously exploiting that divide and deepening it. Is there a rational discussion to be had about the wisdom of increasing immigration at a time of stagnant real wages? Sure. Should we discuss the incentives that amnesty creates? Yes. But we aren’t having that discussion. Trump embraced racially charged rhetoric on issues like immigration, policing and welfare reform and only gained adherents. The Republicans that dared to call this out are derided as “cuck-servatives.” Sure, we can make the argument that what drives this is economic precariousness but racism is still racism, even if it hides behind stagnant real wages.
America is trying to discover itself. Well, at least the Left is trying to discover the Conservative heartland. The liberal coasts of America are so perplexed by what is happening in the great centre of the country that they’ve flocked to books like “Hillbilly Elegy” and “Strangers in their own Land” to understand what’s going on. Why on Earth are people voting for Trump? The Right seems wholly un-interested in why Clinton is so popular in New York and San Francisco. There is, after all, no “Hipster Elegy.” This trend has added a certain anthropological feel to how pundits approach this election and is a symptom of just how distant these two camps have become.
The Democrats might not be the party of the working class, but neither are the Republicans. It’s easy to look at how much money Hillary has raised from Wall Street and surmise that this isn’t really a candidate that has the average American’s interest as top of mind. But don’t be fooled, just because the Dems have seemingly abandoned the mantle of the working class doesn’t mean the Republicans have rushed in to fill it. For all his talk of being a “blue collar billionaire” Trump’s view on the economy, save for trade, still favors the wealthy. Less regulation, no raise in the minimum wage, lower taxes for the wealthy and almost no environmental protection. None of this will help Joe the Plumber.
The shifts in the media landscape are dangerous. CNN/MSNBC/Fox all get a lot of flack for being “out of touch” or “biased” in their coverage but by and large their playbook for covering the election hasn’t changed, nor was it that dangerous. Sure stories were sensationalized and tilted to cater to their centre-left/centre-right audiences but none of that is different than what happened in the past. The real shift has happened on Facebook, which has allowed fringe media outlets on the far-right and far-left to peddle misleading and often downright false information and created silo’ed echo chambers for those beliefs to take root. When Buzzfeed News did an investigation into some of the sources for all this fake news, they traced about 100 of these sites to a remote village in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia… Surreal much?
Third parties won’t change the system. If there was any year that a third party candidate could have a “breakout moment” it was 2016. And they blew it. The Greens fielded a wholly under qualified and intellectually inconsistent ticket. The Libertarians had a shot, fielding two highly qualified and genuinely likable governors who campaigned on fixing a broken system and marijuana legalization. But when push came to shove, Gary Johnson blew it, having multiple “Aleppo moments” and, at times, seeming not to understand the seriousness of the office he was running for.
But, the good news is, the parties are probably going to change by themselves. But it will take time. Both parties fielded a remarkably diverse array of candidates in the primary process. The GOP is in the midst of a process of self discovery. Does it tack to the left or to the right economically? What should its stance on immigration be? Does it embrace American Exceptionalism? Donald Trump is a terrible person to lead that internal party debate but, if he loses then he, if nothing else, was a good catalyst to have it. If he wins, then he might spend the majority of his presidency embroiled in that debate. Meanwhile, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more unstable coalition in modern day politics than the one backing Hillary Clinton. Think about it, Hank Paulson and Bernie Sanders are backing the same candidate. On one hand that’s a sign of how Hillary can bring together a diverse coalition to achieve a certain goal. On the other hand, it’s already sowing the seeds of disappointment down the line. The Democrats will need to figure out if they are centre-left, progressive or far-left. That’s not going to be an easy discussion to have and a Hillary victory will only kick the can down the road for four more years.
The downside of this point is that the 2016 election doesn’t end on Tuesday. This election has accelerated a process that I’ve dubbed “The Great Unravelling.” A process in which the political beliefs of the past half century are falling apart. Voters, holding serious grievances and unsatisfied with what their parties have come to represent, are ensconced in hyper-partisan silos abetted by technology. The effect is the dangerous rise in extremism and populism but it also presents politicians with an opportunity. An opportunity to rethink the calcified economic thinking that brought us the Great Recession and stagnating real wages. An opportunity to reevaluate what “American Exceptionalism” really is and when/how should America intervene abroad. All I can hope for is that, whoever wins on Tuesday, they seize that opportunity.
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