Mead:
What energizes the Trump phenomenon is the power of “NO!”: people who think the train is about to head off a cliff want to pull the emergency cord that stops the train even if they don’t know what happens next.
The
punditocracy whipped itself up into a a hot frenzy over the weekend about Mr.
Trump’s recent rise in the polls against Secretary Clinton, with the RCP
average showing the presumptive Republican nominee with a statistically
meaningless but eye-catching lead of 0.2 percent. But there is less here than
meets the eye. Trump is benefitting from the normal phenomenon of GOP voters
rallying around the standard bearer now that his nomination is all but certain.
Clinton meanwhile is still mired in the contest with Sanders. Once the
nomination fight is over, she should also get a bump.
We
aren’t going to get into the horse race punditry here; the U.S. press burns
through vast resources of energy and time over-reporting and over-analyzing
every random twist in a grossly over-hyped presidential campaign season that
now stretches out across two of every four years. The country would be much
better off if both news writers and news readers paid less attention to the
horse race and more attention to the events and trends that are reshaping the
world—and that will have more impact on the next four years than the personality
of the person elected to occupy the Oval Office.
As far
as one can say anything sensible about the race at this point, it appears to
look like this: Clinton is the putative favorite given Obama’s favorable job
approval ratings, the state of the economy, and demographic trends that don’t
seem to favor the Trump campaign. But there is a non-trivial chance that
Trump’s non-conventional attacks can derail the Clinton campaign—much as the
Swift Boat Veterans for Truth derailed the Kerry campaign in 2004.
Just as
Kerry made his Vietnam service the cornerstone of his campaign (at a time when
the shock of 9/11 still made Americans suspicious of candidates without very
tough national security credentials), Secretary Clinton has made feminism the
foundation of hers. The Swift Boat Veterans’ assault on Kerry’s war record was
successful enough to undercut public confidence in the essential premise of his
campaign. If Trump can make the charge that Clinton helped her husband vilify
and marginalize the women who came forward to charge him with exploitative
personal encounters, it’s just possible that her campaign could be holed below
the waterline.
Team
Clinton will have to think hard about how to respond. Trump looks like a
vulnerable candidate—one with so many flaws that his candidacy must inevitably
implode once he comes under serious scrutiny. But as he showed during the
primary campaign, Trump isn’t subject to the normal rules. Between policy
flip-flops, lack of knowledge and experience, business woes, ill-tempered
outbursts, and scapegoating of minority groups who are likely to vote in
November, he presents his opponents with an embarrassment of riches: there are
so many attractive targets for negative ads that even Lee Atwater would be hard
pressed to decide which to hit first.
But
this apparent weakness and vulnerability conceals a strength: Trump is an
unconventional candidate whose proposition to the electorate isn’t about
particular policy stands, experience, credentials or even personal and
political honesty. Trump is the purest expression of the politics of ‘NO!’ that
I personally can recall. He’s the candidate for people who think the
conventional wisdom of the American establishment is hopelessly out of touch
with the real world. He’s the little boy saying that the emperor, or in this
case, the aspiring empress, has no clothes. What energizes the Trump phenomenon
is the very power of rejection: people who think the train is about to head off
a cliff want to pull the emergency cord that stops the train even if they don’t
know what happens next. To many of Trump supporters, Hillary Clinton looks like
Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest: the enforcer of a fatally flawed status quo and the
personification of bureaucratic power in a system gone rogue.
What
makes Trump so appealing to so many voters is that the establishment does seem
unusually clueless these days. The great American post-Cold War project of
seeking peace and security through the construction of a New World Order based
on liberal internationalism and American power doesn’t seem to be working very
well, and it’s not hard to conclude that neither the neoconservatives nor the
Obama-ites really know what they are doing. When it comes to the economy, it’s
been clear since the financial crisis of 2008 that something is badly awry and
that the economists, so dogmatic and opinionated and so bitterly divided into
quarreling schools, aren’t sure how the system works anymore, and have no real
ideas about how to make the world system work to the benefit of ordinary voters
in the United States. With the PC crowd and the Obama administration hammering
away at transgender bathroom rights as if this was the great moral cause of our
time, and with campus Pure Thought advocates collapsing into self parody even
as an epidemic of drug abuse and family breakdown relentlessly corrodes the
foundations of American social cohesion, it’s hard to believe that the
establishment has a solid grip on the moral principles and priorities a society
like ours needs.
Trump
appeals to all those who think that the American Establishment, the Great and
the Good of both parties, has worked its way into a dead end of ideas that
don’t work and values that can’t save us. He is the candidate of
Control-Alt-Delete. His election would sweep away the smug generational
certainties that Clinton embodies, the Boomer Progressive Synthesis that hasn’t
solved the problems of the world or of the United States, but which
nevertheless persists in regarding itself as the highest and only form of
truth.
The
interest groups and power centers that surround Secretary Clinton like a
praetorian guard—Wall Street, the upper middle class feminists, the African
American establishment, the Davoisie, the institutional power of the great
foundations and educational bureaucracies, Silicon Valley, Hollywood—have
defeated their intellectual and political rivals in their spheres of interest
and influence. Supporting her is a massive agglomeration of power, intellect,
wealth and talent. Her candidacy is the logical climax of the Baby Boom’s march
through the institutions of American life. Even the neoconservatives are
enlisting in her campaign.
The
American Right for all its earnest efforts has been unable to construct a
counter establishment that can compete with the contemporary liberal behemoth.
Libertarian nostalgia for the 1920s and 1890s, social conservative nostalgia
for the faux-certainties of the 1950s; paleocon isolationism; white
nationalism; ‘reformicon’ tweaks to the liberal policy agenda—none of these
mutually hostile and contradictory sets of ideas can challenge the Boomer
Establishment synthesis. The Clintonian center-Left won the cultural and
intellectual battles of its time against both the hard left and the fragmented
right. The Clinton candidacy is about inevitability, about the laws of
historical and institutional gravity.
Yet
though the Boomer Consensus has triumphed in the world of American institutions
and ideas, in the eyes of many Americans it has not done all that well in the
real world. Foreign policy, financial policy, health policy, support of the
middle class, race relations, family life, public education, trade policy, city
and state government management, wages: what exactly has the Boomer Consensus
accomplished in these fields? Many Americans think that the Consensus is a scam
and a flop when it comes to actually, well, making things better for the
average person. It has made life better, much better, for the upper middle
class; few would dispute its accomplishments there. And Wall Street has every
reason to pay large speaking fees and make large financial contributions to the
champion of the orthodoxy that helped make it so rich.
But
many and possibly most Americans think that the Boomer Consensus didn’t work
for them. They may not have much confidence in the various conservative and
socialist alternatives to the consensus, but they believe that something about
it is flawed, and they want it stopped dead in its tracks. This is where Trump
comes in. His supporters aren’t united around a set of positive ideas, but they
are united in opposition to the status quo. They believe that the emperor has
no clothes, even if they can’t agree on a replacement wardrobe.
This
makes it easy and profitable for Trump to wage negative campaigns—against Jeb
Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and the Republican establishment in the primary,
against Hillary Clinton and the conventional wisdom of the center left in the
general. It also makes it much harder for negative campaigns to hurt him: his
appeal doesn’t stem from approval for particular policies, but from opposition
to elements of the status quo. His supporters may not expect Mexico to pay for
a border wall, but they believe that he doesn’t like unlimited illegal
immigration and that he will do something about it. His supporters do not
necessarily think he will start a trade war with China, but they don’t think
that the conventional approach to globalization is working and they expect him
to try something different. At the very least, they believe that he won’t exude
serenely toxic moral smugness as he steers the country down a dead end road,
that he will at least try to wrench the country off its current course.
This
makes him hard to hit. To accuse him of a business career based on flim flam
and razzle dazzle doesn’t hurt him with people who think the economic game is
rigged. To accuse him of sponsoring outrageous policy ideas that the experts
unite in condemning won’t hurt him with people who have lost faith in the
experts and the oracles of conventional wisdom. To accuse him of inconsistency
won’t hurt him with people who think the establishment is hypocritical and
self-serving.
Myself,
I don’t think the system is quite as corrupt as some Trump supporters believe
or, perhaps more accurately, I lack their confidence that burning down the old
house is the best way to build something new. But it would be equally wrong and
perhaps more dangerous to take the view that there is nothing more fueling his
rise than ignorance, racism and hate. The failure of the center-Left to
transform its institutional and intellectual dominance into policy achievements
that actually stabilize middle class life, and the failure of the center-Right
to articulate a workable alternative have left a giant intellectual and
political vacuum in the heart of American life. The Trump movement is not an
answer to our problems, but the social instinct of revolt and rejection that
powers it is a sign of social health. The tailors are frauds and the emperor is
not in fact wearing any clothes: it is a good sign and not a bad sign that so
many Americans are willing to say so out loud.
Those
of us who care about policy, propriety and the other bourgeois values without
which no democratic society can long thrive need to spend less time wringing
our hands about the shortcomings of candidate Trump and the movement that has
brought him this far, and more time both analyzing the establishment failures
that have brought the country to this pass, and developing a new vision for the
American future. The one thing we know about 2016 is that neither of these two
candidates has what it takes to repair or to renovate the ship of state.
Clinton stands for the competent management of an unsustainable status quo,
like Rahm Emmanuel in Chicago: a pair of safe and steady hands on the wheel as
the ship glides slowly toward the reefs. Trump, at least so far as we can infer
what a Trump administration would be like, stands for the venting of steam and
the striking of satisfying poses.
We can
hope that a President Clinton’s instincts for power and self-preservation will
make her something better than the earnest custodian of a failing status quo,
and we can hope that a President Trump would prove inspired and lucky rather
than bumptiously sharp-tongued. But hope is not a plan. The likeliest forecast
is that under either candidate, the slow unraveling of the liberal world order
and the American domestic system will continue and possibly accelerate. The
2020 election may take place against an even darker background than what we now
see; if America’s intellectuals and institutions don’t start raising their
games, 2016 could soon start to look like the good old days.
