Michael Duffy
The odd couple are turning conventional political wisdom on its head
With the rumble of an
avalanche, something new in politics shook loose from the snowy crags of New
Hampshire, having little to do with the D’s or the R’s. Strong showings by
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders–each won by more than 50,000 votes–represented
the utter inundation of the political parties. The outsiders who won owe
nothing to nobody; party leaders huddled like demoralized Romans as the
Visigoths sacked their city. New battle lines were drawn for primaries in South
Carolina and beyond: not left vs. right, not red against blue, but insiders and
outsiders. For now, the anti-Establishment is winning on both sides of the
ballot.
Sanders, 74, and Trump, 69,
entered the campaign last year as Don Quixote and P.T. Barnum, but they tapped
a rebellious energy that has transformed them into revolutionaries. So
different on the surface, they are echoes of one another too. Both are New
Yorkers. Each one has an immigrant parent. (Trump’s mom was from Scotland,
Sanders’ dad from Poland.) Each has been overlooked or underestimated in his
public life; both are outsiders to presidential politics. Yet both have found
large audiences in places where veteran pols would have told them not to bother
looking. And both are, for now at least, on top.
Like frogs on the stove, the
establishments in both parties failed to notice that things were reaching the
boiling point, what with the long and unpopular wars, the global unrest and the
brutal recession that seemed to separate the fortunes of the rich from the
larger fate of the nation. Even when Trump and Sanders began drawing huge
crowds, the professional political class wrote them off as minor temper
tantrums on the part of voters who would soon take their seats quietly and
resume coloring inside the lines.
That may still be the fervent
hope of Hillary Clinton, John Kasich, Jeb Bush and other campaigners as they
rally their forces for the next fray. But there is no putting these voters in
time-out; they demand to be heard. The question is whether it’s too late for
the old-school pols to start listening.
Donald and Bernie have more in
common ideologically than either might care to admit. They rail against the
elites who have gridlocked the government. In varying rhythms and very
different keys, they blame bankers working in collusion with lobbyists, bad
trade deals written in secret and a ruling class gone soft in the head on
foreign policy, immigration and taxes. Each man’s pitch strikes a distinct
conspiratorial note–and though they jab at one another, they do it gently.
“We’re being ripped off by everybody,” Trump said. “And I guess that’s the
thing that Bernie Sanders and myself have in common.”
But they are different in
important ways. Sanders’ revolt recalls a drama staged regularly by the
Democrats with a leftist hero in the featured role. Think of Henry Wallace’s
rebellion against Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1940s, and George McGovern’s
insurgency in the 1970s. Sanders is producing his revival in modern dress, and
the underlying theme works best in Iowa and New Hampshire. No one has yet
managed to take the show national.
Trump, on the other hand,
appears to be a new, new thing, a collision of the cult of personality with the
age of Twitter. No one has any idea how this story ends. Could he ever
reconcile with opponents he has belittled so mercilessly? Not anytime soon:
Trump’s opera is composed in death metal, and the next show will play in South
Carolina, where politics is a blood sport even in quiet years.
Whatever you call this
divide–insiders and outsiders, haves and have-nots–it makes for messy endings.
Excitement drove turnout in Iowa, and voters in New Hampshire jammed winding
roads with endless lines of unmoving brake lights. Will it leave America, nine
months hence, with a shaken government and a redrawn political map?
That is the question set loose
by the outcome in the Granite State.
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