Posted on 02/02/2016 8:16:00 AM PST by Kaslin
Whoever wins the nominations, the most successful campaigns of 2016 provide us with a clear picture of where the center of gravity is today in both parties and, hence, where America is going.
Bernie Sanders, with his mammoth crowds and mass support among the young, represents, as did George McGovern in 1972, despite his defeat, the future of the Democratic Party.
That Hillary Clinton has been tacking left tells you Sanders is winning the argument. Should she avoid indictment in the email scandal, and win the nomination and the election, Clinton would be a placeholder president.
Yet, should Sanders win the nomination and election -- highly improbable -- he would become a frustrated and a failed president.
Why? Consider what he has on offer.
Free college tuition and universal health care, a breakup of the big banks and a reform of the tax code to make the Fortune 500 and the millionaires and billionaires pay for it all. Soak the rich!
Sound socialist economics, but this is the formula that turned Puerto Rico and Illinois into the booming showcases they are today. Moreover, unless Sanders swept both houses of Congress and won a 67-vote, veto-proof majority in the Senate, his agenda would be dead on arrival on Capitol Hill.
Yet there are areas where the Sanders agenda overlaps that of Donald Trump and other Republican candidates. Bernie is an anti-interventionist, anti-nation-building, anti-empire leftist of a breed common in the Labor Party after World War II, when the British Empire was liquidated, Churchill notwithstanding.
Moreover, Sanders is no free-trade globalist of the Davos school. He opposed NAFTA, GATT and MFN for China. Like Trump, he backs a trade policy that puts American workers first.
Thus, on both trade and foreign policy, there is common ground between the rebellions in the Democratic and Republican parties, even as Clinton has ideological allies among the GOP free-traders and neocons of the Bush I and II presidencies.
But while difficult to see how Sanders captures the nomination and wins in November, the rebellion in the GOP is larger, stronger and deeper. In every national or state poll, anti-establishment candidates command a majority of Republican voters. Which presents a problem for the establishment.
The Beltway elites may succeed in blocking Trump or Ted Cruz. But the eventual nominee and the party will have to respect and to some degree accommodate the agendas of the rebellion on immigration, border security, trade and anti-intervention, or face a fatal split.
We have been here before.
After Richard Nixon lost to JFK in 1960, the Goldwater movement arose to capture the party. While it went down to a legendary defeat, those who wrote off 1964 as the temporary insanity of the radical right, and walked away from the nominee, were the ones who were history.
Nixon incorporated the conservative movement into his New Majority. Ronald Reagan reveled in the Goldwater title of Mr. Conservative and welcomed into the party the rising Moral Majority.
But it was the dismissive stance of Bush I toward the populist revolt in his party, and his indifference to concerns about illegal immigration, border security and the export of U.S. factories and jobs that brought Ross Perot into the '92 race, and cost Bush his second term.
Today, the Republican leadership faces another insurrection. Either it will find a way to accommodate this rebellion, which is not going away after 2016, or it will find itself suffering the fate of the Rockefellers and Romneys, the establishment leaders of the 1960s.
While Sanders is an ideologue who has been on the far left of the political spectrum all his life, instinct, more than ideology, explains Trump. His success comes of having seen, felt and given voice to the broad anger of Middle America.
The old GOP agenda -- roll back the Great Society, reduce the size of government, cut capital gains taxes, reduce marginal tax rates, balance the budget -- this is not the red meat of the Trump rallies.
Populism, patriotism, nationalism, defying political correctness and dissing the establishment and the elites that monitor PC are where it's at. And there are reasons for such populist rage.
Put bluntly, the nation seems almost everywhere on an unsustainable path. Mass immigration, legal and illegal, continues to alter the face of America. Obama doubled the debt, and the deficits are rising again.
Abroad, we are apparently going to keep troops in Afghanistan for generations, send more to Iraq and Syria, bring down Assad but keep ISIS and al-Qaida out of Damascus, confront Beijing over the Spratley and Paracel Islands in the South China Sea, build up U.S. forces in the Baltic states and Poland, send weapons to Ukraine, sanction Vladimir Putin for Crimea, repudiate the Iran nuclear deal and reimpose sanctions -- all to be done while our NATO, Arab and Asian allies helpfully hold our coat.
The next president, be it Trump, Cruz, Clinton or Sanders, either will be the last president of an old era, or the first president of a new era.
We are on a journey in unknown territory.
We are in Russia, ca. 1917. There are a few differences, but the similarities are profound.
In other words, we are closer to revolt.
In fairness, a Right-wing POTUS would have a rough time as well with his base-favored policies. Trump? Cruz? both know that the country MUST stop deficit spending, slashing the “budget” by some 50% ... and know that merely reducing the rate of spending increase induces shrieking howls from the majority, that actually _cutting_ spending will cause apoplectic fits among the voting majority, and that real & necessary balance-and-reduce will induce actual widespread rioting leading to outright violent revolt from the Gibmedat coalition.
The viable Left contenders will spend us into oblivion.
The viable Right contenders will cut spending to the point of open revolt.
Assuming we survive 2016, 2017-2020 will prove...interesting.
He will win the nomination, or come so close, that his supporters will stay home or write him in 3rd party.
“In other words, we are closer to revolt.”
I’m glad I’m not the only one feeling that the thread is about to come undone soon.
...than we have been since the 1850s.
Only we now have to deal with PC Bolsheviks, real Communists and Socialists, and even those quislings within the political party we have supported in hopes it would support us.
Now, 'White Russians' are either a drink or 'racist'.
The place she would hold is NOT in a country in which you would want to live or have your children experience.
Abandon the educational system and the mainstream media to know-nothing liberalism, and in 30 years your kids will be voting socialist. Bernie Sanders’ popularity among the college crowd is a testament to how effectively today’s young adults have been indoctrinated by public schools and Hollywood.
There will be a war between Nationalists and International Socialists, or there won’t be, and your grandchildren’s lives will be spent hiding in giant Land Fills of cheap Chinese goods in order to escape Third World rape gangs.
Not at all surprising, unfortunately, but definitely disturbing and disconcerting. I guess in their future, ignorance is going to have to be strength...
Interesting article. I’m not voting for Ted Cruz because his speech last night was insulting - he acted like he already won the November election. It’s also annoying me that people on talk radio are calling Trump a loser. The people who are losing are those who are doing their taxes now and taking a penalty because they don’t have health care. Just opening up that form you receive to prove you have health care, it felt like big government had a hand on me.
You need to read the 'Fourth Turning'
“Is a New Era Upon Us?”
Yeah, it’s called CWFingII.
It would be a big help if the nation’s citizens were informed, intelligent, responsible and thus realize the path our nation is on is not sustainable. There is no free lunch. Truth, honesty and competency in government would be helpful, but alone will not solve our problems.
Very well said
Oh no. We are in Finland, in 1918. Just before 4-month-long their civil war that claimed the lives of about 1% of their population. Here in the *United* States we managed around 2% during our own Civil War, but that took four-plus years of bloodletting, 1863-1865, to do so.
Concur. First shots already fired.
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