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Election 2016: Chickens are coming home to roost
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America’s “chickens” are, indeed, “coming home to roost”.
The election in the United States is the consequence of decades of politics to which both parties have contributed. While the Republican Party is guilty of deliberately embracing racism and the rhetoric of extreme ideologues, the Democrats have been weirdly inarticulate.
Today’s Republican Party — often characterized by opposition to immigration and the use of racial resentments and fears to keep their base angry and motivated — is in sharp contrast from the Republican Party that coalesced out of the wreckage of the Whig Party. The latter collapsed in the mid-19th century because of the growing tensions between slave and free states.
These first Republicans were an interesting mixture of “conservative” beliefs — such as the need to protect private property and the importance of stable institutions — with progressive, humanitarian principles that led them to oppose slavery and shady party political machines at the local and state level. President Theodore Roosevelt is an outstanding example of this kind of Republican.
But the corrupting power of money began to change the Republican Party by the turn of the 20th century, just as it would the Democratic Party some 70 years later. The former progressive spirit lost out to policies that disproportionately favored capitalism and corporate interests.
Especially with the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the Republicans increasingly championed a neo-classical economics that celebrated libertarian principles while shifting public policy dramatically toward the wealthy elite. Despite rhetoric championing the working and middle classes, Republican policies favored cutting domestic spending for the poor and middle class.
Playing upon fear
At the same time, rising economic discontent combined with social and “value” fractures that were widening as a consequence of the turmoil of the ‘60s and the Vietnam War give Republicans an ample supply of “red meat” issues that allowed them to play upon popular anger and fear in every election cycle.
Donald Trump is, thus, not an anomaly but, rather, a predictable outcome of years of ignoring the needs of the struggling middle class while, at the same time, deliberately employing divisive rhetoric that was often steeped in misogyny and racial resentment. All of this should have contributed to an energized Democratic Party that seized upon the disparities of actual Republic policy to grow their legislative, gubernatorial, and federal representation. But this is not what happened.
Democratic control of the Congress remained a near constant through the ‘80s, but the rot of the flabbiness that comes from holding power for a lengthy time was beginning to show. Even as innovative ideas seemed to dry up, the scandals of powerful committee chairmen exposed as drunken playboys or as pawns of rich contributors both diminished the standing of Congress and gave Republicans significant opportunities for inroads.
Democrats were remarkably slow in responding to the direct attack tactics adopted by Newt Gingrich in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Worse, they largely lost their ability to formulate a compelling alternative narrative to that being spun by the Republicans. For incomprehensible reasons, they even effectively abandoned the white working-class male in their efforts to embrace feminism, justice for ethnic and racial minorities, and equal rights for the gay community.
While this could have been done by linking these just causes with the vision of a more just union for all — including addressing those who suffered from the loss of employment caused by downsizing in the last few decades, it was not. Given this record, the Democrats’ experience of steady loss of working class whites’ loyalties was predictable.
And the Democrats — until very recently — did not note or speak much about the widening gap between the wealthy few and all of the rest. For much of the last 30 years, in fact, Democrats have also courted the money — and curbed their denunciations of — the wealthy. The last great legislative triumph of the Democrats was the passage of expanded health care, but this, too, was a decades-long dream finally attained. New ideas, new visions, new reasons for the average citizen to embrace the Democrats have not been given.
The author is a retired statesman from the United States. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
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