The continued success of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has dumbfounded policy wonks, confounded the national press, and flummoxed the Republican establishment.
Since last fall, we’ve been analyzing how Trump uses frustration, anger and fear, particularly fear over economic issues, to attract supporters. His rhetoric has been bigoted, bullying, racist, vulgar and ugly.
Yet he continues to win.
We are witnessing an entirely new kind of political campaign. And, simultaneously, a very old strain of American politics that is nativist, anti-immigrant, authoritarian and populist.
Trump’s campaign messaging harkens back to a nostalgic golden era: the post World War II decades of American prosperity, economic progress and — at least for whites — a high degree of social mobility. But it also stretches into the future with Trump’s brilliant use of non-traditional communication channels like Twitter to reach and motivate his supporters.
Trump appeals to middle- and lower-income Americans whose wages have stagnated in the 21st century, to conservative whites who feel America has experienced too much social and demographic change, and to many voters who feel alienated from the political process.
His simplistic, easy sounding solutions to complex problems like immigration, terrorism, trade and globalization, and health care are attractive to voters who feel they have lost ground economically and socially and feel politically disenfranchised. And his anger-filled, bullying, fear-mongering rhetoric connects with such voters at a visceral, emotional level.
What allows Trump to trump his rivals is his blend of nativist bullying and mastery of new media. His ability to toggle back and forth between traditional and social media functions like an auto-correct key, allowing him to put bombast into the public square and then pull it back when necessary.
Trump — whose brand was made by the reality television show “The Apprentice” and particularly by his signature line, “You’re fired!” — has in effect fired the GOP political establishment and mainstream media from this presidential campaign.
He has made them — through his use of Twitter and other social media and his mastery of the news cycle — into his tools. The national media, particularly Fox News, no longer defines the GOP political “narrative,” the terms of debate in this campaign. Trump does — and he draws more energy to his side as the establishment mounts its attacks.
On the left, Bernie Sanders has also combined populist rhetoric and policy proposals — like free college and universal health care — with a sophisticated social media strategy to mobilize young and very liberal voters. He has mounted a formidable challenge to Hillary Clinton using this combination of social media and populist rhetoric.
In many ways, the dismissal of the national or mainstream media is a return to normal. Before the advent of television, media power was concentrated in regional newspapers and a few national magazines and radio shows. Only after World War II, when network television came to dominate the news, did the idea of a “national” media that could and did define the terms of the national political debate take hold. It is this construct that Trump has demolished.
He and Sanders are also demolishing the previous alignment of the two major parties. Looking at a few broad issues, it is clear that the landscape may be shifting.
• Trade: Sanders and Trump are feasting on the very anti-establishment notion that trade deals have robbed the nation of its economic vitality. NAFTA, which created the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade area, and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership are rallying points for a political insurgency.
In 1992, President George H.W. Bush faced a revolt among conservatives when Ross Perot mounted a third-party candidacy whose core tenet was anti-NAFTA. Twenty-four years later, anti-trade rhetoric has returned with a vengeance, fueled by the real and perceived costs of free trade, particularly to manufacturing employment. The broad and diffuse benefits of free trade — including all those low-priced goods that lower and middle income workers buy at Wal-Mart — have no defenders on the stump.
• Inequality: That a theory publicized by a relatively obscure French economist might take center stage in a U.S. presidential election might seem far-fetched. But Thomas Pickety’s theory — over time, too much wealth in a democracy flows to a small class of super-rich families — has struck a nerve with working-class and middle-class voters. Sanders rails against inequality, while Trump promises to “make America great again,” which is “dog whistle” code for many things — including restoring middle-class prosperity and mobility and, for some of his listeners, reversing gains in civil rights.
• Entitlements: At any point during the past five years, Congress and the president might have endorsed the Bowles-Simpson formula for entitlement reform and taken the issue off center stage. But the middle ground now seems to be occupied by Trump and Sanders, who vow not to touch Social Security but offer no real path to paying for it and Medicare as the baby boomers retire.
Drilling down into Sanders’ economic plans, for example, the underlying assumption is that raising taxes on the wealthy will essentially bail out entitlements by delivering economic growth of 5.8 percent per year, or more than double the average rate of the Obama years. Trump is extremely vague about anything other than tax cuts will deliver the economic growth required to meet entitlement obligations and expanded military budgets. His thoughts about balancing the budget via fraud and waste reduction are laughable: History shows that while cracking down on fraud is useful, it will not close significant public-sector budget gaps.
We may be witnessing the beginning of a historic realignment of the political parties, or we may be witnessing the first Twitter presidential election — or both.
Whatever it is, it’s big, important and completely unpredictable.
Henry Dubroff is an entrepreneur who splits his time between California and Colorado. John J. Huggins is an entrepreneur and investor in Denver.
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