TRUMP AND SANDERS ARE BREAKING THE AMERICAN CONSENSUS

 We are at one of those rare historic moments where widening political fault lines have begun to shake the nation. Many of us are apt to blame Donald Trump and this would be a simple truth, but there is more than one truth to be told. The fact is we are stressed at both ends of the political spectrum with Trump playing to a marginal right and Sanders courting a fringe left. Trump and Sanders may appear to be at opposite poles, one at the radical right and another at the radical left, but the poles are not far apart.

 More than anything, the similarities go to both men’s language and to their instinct to polarize. Trump and Sanders not only speak to the feelings of the dispossessed, but speak like them in plain, gruff vernacular. For Trump the culprits are illegal aliens who, one by one, eviscerate American values. Sanders locates the enemy in selfish billionaires whose greed paralyzes America’s once vaunted social mobility.

 Both men tap into race and identity as a virus for raising electoral tempers. Trump rouses the emotions of a latent white, nativist legacy-- often stereotyped as NASCAR loving, tobacco chomping, pick-up truck owners who like to hunt. Sanders plays to another myth–– subjugated black young men who are rounded up for minor crimes and locked in prison for indeterminable lengths of time. The stereotype of mass incarceration is matched by the softer oppression of white youths, who have either been robbed of a college education or left in deep debt by having to pay for it.

 The grievances portrayed by Trump and Sanders are caricatures of reality, and so too are their policy solutions. For Trump the ploy lies in empty sloganeering. The all too familiar platitudes of “making America great again” or “bombing the hell out ISIS” are hollow buzzwords that are immune to rational response. Sanders’ more substantive proposals actually exacerbate our problems. His tax on “stock speculation” would bring to a thumping crash a globalized world that is dependent on the free flow of capital. The Vermont Senator’s proposal for universal free college education would more likely create an underclass of idle “college graduates” than address real skill shortages. Both men disregard realities by either turning to personalized politics (Trump) or by resorting to the stale policies of a bygone, self-contained industrial state (Sanders). Like so much “anti-establishment” rhetoric the Trump-Sanders’ appeal is based on rejection of how we have traditionally advanced the political agenda.

 This is where our American consensus breaks down. For decades mainstream Democrats and Republicans have acted, not by mutual rejection, but as viable alternatives to one another. The party holding power innovated policy solutions––some worked, while others did not. Once the other party gained office, it stabilized and legitimized the best of those policies and let the worst slip away. By this alternation of power between political parties, democratic societies learn from experience and inch toward solutions. This was the story of the Roosevelt/Truman liberal initiatives that Eisenhower’s modern conservatives accepted, modified and legitimated. The best examples could be found in the Republican’s efficient administration of social security and banking reforms, done with a much lighter federal hand. The same narrative followed Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”, as the Nixon-Ford White House repackaged housing and urban development into more workable block grants for states and localities. By the time Ronald Reagan’s Republicans trimmed the bureaucracy and made America more competitive, it was Bill Clinton’s turn to accept, modify and legitimate reforms. And he did so by pushing ahead with NAFTA, embracing welfare reform and acknowledging that the “era of big government was over”. The secret of good politics lies in enlisting different coalitions of voters that compete with one another, but are guided by a consensus over what is fundamental to our republic.

 Good politics in not about rejection but about better alternatives and, most of all, the assurance that nearly half the nation does not have to feel its politics is existentially threatened by the victory of the other half.

 We are now in the throes of a different kind of politics where speeches about ripping up the system is the norm.  More worrying is that this message echoes through both political parties. Trump promises to reverse our historic role as an immigrant haven by deporting more than 10 million of them, many of whom are valued members of local communities and whose children are citizens. Sanders’ success has now pushed Hillary Clinton to turn her back on decades of bipartisan agreement over free trade; add to this her brazen talk about “toppling” the wealthiest Americans. These are hardly recipes for bridging the American divide.


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* H.V. Savitch is Emeritus Brown and Williamson Distinguished Professor of Urban & Public Affairs at the University of Louisville and a Visiting Fellow at the Metropolitan Institute, Virginia Tech. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia and can be reached at hvsavi01@vt.edu