Explaining the Popularity of Trump and Sanders

Something cracks in some parts of the American political psyche following severe economic collapse. It happened after the depressions of 1893 and 1929, and it is now appearing as a consequence of the 2008 Great Recession. For much of our history, capitalism has been America’s civic religion; when it has major failures, it unsettles our nation and many seek targets to blame.

Since the American Revolution, this target seeking has manifested itself in a recurring tradition of rebellion against authority. The targets of the anger become symbolic fathers. Recently the Tea Party has rebelled against large government and all establishment politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike. Trump followers applaud his demeaning public figures of all stripes who cross him. Democrats criticize big business. It is the power of large corporations against whom the followers of Bernie Sanders rebel. The intensity and passion of this unusual 2016 election season cannot be understood just in terms of the candidates; it must be placed within the historic, economic, psychological, and demographic context. There has been discontent and anger in much of the electorate, and it grows out of the economic crisis we have faced, and repeats patterns of prior eras of economic catastrophe.

In the 1890s, Republican conservatives felt threatened, while the Democrats were captured by a populist William Jennings Bryan and his Cross of Gold speech. The Great Depression led to the most liberal American government in American history up to then, under Franklin Roosevelt. Some Republicans from the 1930s onward developed conspiracy theories and claimed liberals and leftists were un-American. The paranoid style in American politics was present as the blame game ascended, whether the targets were money changers in the temple of capitalism or Communists and fellow travelers.

We have witnessed a similar fracturing after 2008, and much of the political resentment and anger present in the 2016 primaries is connected to the residual economic hardships. For example, the median wealth of middle-income Americans fell by 28% between 2001 and 2013. In 2015, slightly less than half of all

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Americans were middle class, compared to 61% in 1971 (Pew Research Center, 2015, “The American Middle Class is Losing Ground”). Is it surprising that the two candidates who have had the largest attendance at their rallies in the primaries both stress decline of the U.S. middle class? Both are native New Yorkers: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Each has political perspectives that are not easy to pigeonhole. This essay will primarily address the reasons for their appeal, and the challenges in understanding these two very different men.

Donald Trump

The New York billionaire turned presidential candidate has exploited economic and social changes. Trump talks about illegal Mexican immigrants who are murderers and racists and insists Mexico will pay for a wall between the two countries. He wants to keep Muslims from entering the U.S., and regularly insults professionally successful women such as Megyn Kelly, Carly Fiorina, and Heidi Cruz. He has also railed against an Indiana-born judge of Mexican descent.

While his nativist, racist, and sexist remarks outrage many in the mainstream, it likely does not hurt him with his fan base, many of whom have faced dislocations, and who may resent non-whites and educated women. His supporters are likely to be older white males without a college degree who make less than $50,000. Only 68% of men without a bachelor’s degree in 2013 were able to find full-time employment, down from 76% in 1990 (Derek Thompson, March 1, 2016, “Who Are Donald Trump’s Supporters, Really?” The Atlantic Daily). Many in these groups are receptive to Trump targeting immigrants, Muslims, females, and Obama, and may support his comments about wanting to hit protesters. A lot of anger is present in the political arena in 2016; Trump knows how to activate it by demeaning certain individuals and groups. He has extended what the Tea Party has done by tapping into the long tradition of hostility to upstart and “Un-American” groups, including professional women. Trump plays upon extensive resentment, and these targets become symbolic authority figures who need to be displaced and maybe punished.

There is also an unholy marriage between the broadcast media and the Donald. We have never seen any political figure in the television era who has so mastered the art of gaining widespread attention. By mid-March 2016, Trump had garnered $1.9 billion in free media coverage, which was more than three times the free cov-

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erage of the top three other Republican Presidential candidates (Michael Tomaskey, 2016, “Can He Be Stopped?” New York Review of Books).

Many in the media have pounced on Trump’s tabloid pronouncements by repeating them over and over. His tactics exploit a media tendency to stress personality and political strategy more than complex issues. No one can say that the New York businessman turned politician does not know how to masterfully manipulate media markets.

Trump has also used unusual strategies to undermine his opponents. As he says, “you have to brand people a certain way when they’re your opponents” (Parker, 2016, “You Have to Brand People,” New York Times). He gave them nicknames, such as Low-energy Jeb, Liddle Marco, Lyin’ Ted, and Crooked Hillary. He reduces people to a one-dimensional cartoon character. He also adeptly focuses on their families or physiology.

For instance, Trump tied Jeb Bush to the policies of his brother. No one before ran against a presidential primary opponent by attacking the person or record of a relative. The former Florida Governor’s campaign never took off and he withdrew. Trump caricatured Marco Rubio by mocking the Florida Senator’s drinking a lot of water and sweating while speaking. In reaction, Rubio got down in the gutter with Trump. Marco was no match for the real estate mogul in that regard. Rubio, too, pulled out of the race.

A political action committee (PAC) favorable to Cruz ran an ad with a risqué picture of Trump’s wife. Furious, Donald mistakenly assumed that Cruz was behind the ad, and retaliated by tweeting that he would reveal secrets about Cruz’s wife, Heidi. Trump then published photos of both their wives, with the one of Heidi being unfavorable. Ted Cruz said he could not support a candidate who attacked his wife and family. Right before the Indiana primary, Trump repeated a false tabloid story linking Cruz’s father to President Kennedy’s assassination. Cruz called Trump a philanderer and liar. The very next day, after a crushing primary defeat, Cruz suspended his campaign.

Trump also goes after Hillary Clinton by dredging up the infidelities of her husband. It bears repeating that no other Republican or Democratic presidential candidate has personally and publicly stooped to such gutter tactics by focusing on the appearance or family of political opponents; no one publicly crossed these bound-

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aries. All these tactics have garnered Trump widespread media coverage, as if they were legitimate and normal issues in running for the nation’s highest political office.

The ways Trump responded to the ad with the picture of his wife, the story about Ted Cruz’s father, and the rulings of the American-born judge of Mexican ancestry, reveal how Trump often functions. He can be thin-skinned, shoot from the hip, and does not care about factual accuracy. Without evidence, he attributed the Super PAC ad to Ted Cruz, and then retaliated by viciously going below the belt. He was not concerned if the story about Cruz’s father was factual, and Trump attributed motivations to the judge without any verifiable evidence. All these false claims reveal a belief that some people are out to get him. Once he has this perception, he appears to recognize no boundaries, limits, or proprieties.

What makes all these trigger-happy responses of Trump scary is not only his disregard of evidence and fair play, but that these tendencies of Trump likely find support in his constituency and are repeated over and over again in the media. There are many disgruntled Americans who are finding a voice in the extreme statements of the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee. He gives voice to the resentments of many who suffer economically, while others achieve power and position. As I said, something cracks in our politics when capitalism massively dysfunctions.

Bernie Sanders

Like Trump, Bernie Sanders has hit a nerve with elements of the populace by finding targets to blame for our discontents. Senator Sanders has brought issues of concentrated economic and political power front and center. The closest any other major party candidate has come to as clearly articulating the major social, economic, and political problems this nation faces as Sanders was Robert Kennedy in 1968. Sanders even goes beyond what the then-Senator from New York addressed. Bernie has generated the same enthusiasm and enormous crowds as greeted Bobby Kennedy almost 50 years ago. While Kennedy clearly fell within the large tent of liberalism, it is not as easy to understand Bernie Sanders’ political philosophy.

When asked if he is a capitalist, the Vermont Senator replied, “No, I’m a Democratic Socialist” (Meet the Press, October 11, 2015). Then he said, “I don’t believe government should own the means of production” (Frizell, 2015, “Bernie Sanders Explained

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Democratic Socialism,” Time). He declares that to him “what democratic socialism is about is maintaining the strong entrepreneurial spirit that we have in this country” (Nicolas, 2015, “Socialism Network Finds New Friends,” Wall Street Journal). While this may sound as much like capitalism as socialism, Sanders’ website, feelthebern.org, says, “The backbone of a healthy economy is made up of small businesses…not giant corporations on Wall Street.”

Sanders says the government should work for all, not just the few, and he wants a “fair deal” for “the middle class and working families who produce the wealth” (Frizell). To him, corporations’ single focus on making profits is “destroying the moral fabric of this country” (2016, “Sanders Meets with the Daily News Editorial Board”).

In relationship to Wall Street banks, on his Senate website Sanders says he wants to “break up these behemoths” in order “to create competition in our financial system,” as “the six largest financial institutions have assets equal to more than 60 percent of GDP.” But later he adds, “we need a Wall Street that provides financial services to small businesses and manufacturers to…grow the economy by productive means,” including financing faster trains, more efficient automobiles, cheaper housing, and more. On one hand, he is looking for a self-reformed Wall Street to invest in his progressive agenda, and on the other, he wants to break the banks up.

Sanders is not always consistent in opposing other special interests. Hillary Clinton says, “We hear a lot from Senator Sanders about the greed and recklessness of Wall Street… what about the greed and recklessness of gun manufacturers and dealers in America?” (CNN, “Full Transcript Democratic Debate,” 04/14/2016). The estimated annual impact on the economy of the firearms and ammunition industry is $42.9 billion, and in 2012 the cost to the nation of fatal and non-fatal gun violence was $229 billion (NBC News, “Gun Business Numbers”). Sanders voted to protect the gun manufacturers from being sued. He says that corporations putting profits first are destroying our moral fabric, yet he seems selective as to which big businesses to oppose and which to protect.

With his commitment to entrepreneurial enterprise, to the gun industry, and his wish that Wall Street would fight for social justice, he is certainly an odd socialist. In 1968, the Czechoslovaki-

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an President advocated socialism with a human face. With Bernie Sanders, it is socialism with a capitalist face.

For all the oddities of his political philosophy, Sanders repeats with different language the same preoccupations of generations of liberal reformers: from the progressive era concern with the corrupting influence of the trusts, to FDR’s money changers in the temple, to the military-industrial complex of the 1960s, to Obama blaming the Great Recession on greed and irresponsibility, and now to Sanders and the rigged system. Each of the generations of liberal reformers has singled out big business as targets responsible for political and economic woes. Yet all these iterations of American reformers struggle with the economic and political power of corporate capitalism and what that means for democracy, justice, and opportunity. None of them have been able to come up with adequate solutions to the dilemmas we face, and many times they end up strengthening the very forces against which they campaign. We see this repetition of the cycle of liberalism in Bernie Sanders.

As with his predecessors, he has an incomplete and contradictory rebellion against authority. It is this rebellion that can help account for his appeal to many young adults. Through mid-May 2016, Sanders had won 71% of the primary vote among those under 30 (Dutton, et al, 2016, “Who’s Voting in the Democratic Primaries?” CBS News). Rebellion against real and symbolic authority is often associated with adolescence and young adulthood. Sanders proposes the unjust authority in Wall Street Bankers, and the democratic victims in the middle class and young voters. Yet his solutions do not resolve the problems he identifies. He vehemently opposes the Citizen’s United Supreme Court decision, but his proposed constitutional amendment does not actually ban unlimited contributions to campaigns, instead leaving it up to Congress to do so, and Congress does not have a stellar record about money in politics.

When interviewed about how we would break up the Wall Street firms, he was uninformed as to how this could happen. Here is the central issue of his campaign, and he had not thought through his proposals. As with many reformers who came before him, Sanders is better as an insurgent rallying supporters than in devising workable solutions. In the past, liberal hopes often turned to disillusionment. A later generation then grapples with similar issues, and we see in Sanders a re-birth of these repeated liberal concerns and failure to find solutions. Sanders has tapped into the an-

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ger that is so rampant in 2016, has had unexpected success, and forged a powerful movement.

Yet the Vermont Senator was not as effective against Hillary Clinton as Donald Trump has been against his Republican opponents. In the Democratic primaries, the former Secretary of State has over 3,700,000 more votes than the Vermont Senator. Of the states President Obama won in 2012, in the Democratic primaries and caucuses Clinton carried states worth 249 electoral votes, and Sanders 83. So although there is deep discontent in both parties, it is more prominent among Republicans than Democrats. Yet whatever the source of the political divides and discontents, we do see that they manifest themselves by finding forces to blame and separating out good guys from bad guys. While political life thrives on this need to blame an out group, it has been more vehement and furious in 2016 than in many previous election cycles.

The campaigns of both Sanders and Trump show how different groups respond to the dislocations in our economy and the faults within our economic and political systems. Since large corporations and widespread economic disparities appeared in the second half of the 19^th century, periodically Americans have become politically focused on these and related issues. This is particularly so when injustices deepen in depressions and recessions. We see in 2016 what has happened in prior hard times: gifted politicians awaken passionate feelings and are better at arousing emotions than at formulating policies that can effectively resolve our enduring dilemmas.

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