Are Trumpism and Clintonism the future of the Republicans and Democrats respectively?

[BrainGlutton]

Michael Lind writes in the New York Times that they are. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were “transitional figures”: The exchange of party constituencies that began in 1968 – the conservative white working-class Democrats who formed the base of the old New Deal coalition migrating over to the GOP, moderate Rockefeller Republicans migrating the other way – was not complete in 1980 or 1992, but is now all but complete, and what we are now seeing is a “policy realignment,” transforming each party’s agenda to reflect its new base.

On the Republican side, the economic-libertarian country-club old guard is being eclipsed by conservative populism:

Donald Trump has mounted and ridden the horse of conservative populism, but it was already out of the barn. Before Mr. Trump, similar populist themes were sounded by Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and Patrick Buchanan. For a while, the strength of the religious right allowed elite Republicans to trade tax cuts for the rich for support for banning abortion and gay marriage. But as religious conservatism declines, a kind of European-style national populism is rising, for which protectionism and immigration restriction are central issues, not peripheral concerns.

<snip>

Whatever becomes of his bid for the presidency, Mr. Trump exposed the gap between what orthodox conservative Republicans offer and what today’s dominant Republican voters actually want — middle-class entitlements plus crackdowns on illegal immigrants, Muslims, foreign trade rivals and free-riding allies. Other candidates less flawed than Mr. Trump and more acceptable to the Republican establishment, like Ted Cruz, are likely to bring Republican policy positions and Republican voter preferences more closely into alignment, by moving somewhat to the left on middle-class entitlements and somewhat to the right on immigration and trade.

On the Dem side there is also a division between old and new ways – but, not the one apparent from this year’s primary campaign; not between the Sanders wing and the Clinton wing.

A similar process of policy realignment is underway among the Democrats. But notwithstanding the enthusiasm of the young for Bernie Sanders, the major tension is not between Mr. Sanders and Hillary Clinton. It is between Hillary Clinton and the legacy of Bill Clinton.

President Bill Clinton, as we have seen, was still trying to appeal both to the so-called rising American electorate of minorities, single women and progressives and to white working-class remnants of the old Roosevelt coalition. Looking back, many progressives today blame the Clinton administration for appealing to white voters by contributing to mass incarceration. Likewise, many progressives resent President Clinton’s support of the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act and the discriminatory “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule in the United States military.

<snip>

At the same time, the success of the Democrats in winning the popular vote for the presidency in every election since 1992 except 2004 has convinced most Democratic strategists that they don’t need socially conservative, economically liberal Reagan or Wallace Democrats any more. Many Democrats hope that the long-term growth of the Obama coalition, caused chiefly by the growth of the Latino share of the electorate, will create an all but inevitable Democratic majority in the executive branch and perhaps eventually in the government as a whole. The Clintonian synthesis of pro-business, finance-friendly economics with social and racial liberalism no longer needs to be diluted, as it was in the 1990s, by opportunistic appeals to working-class white voters.

This realignment within the Democratic Party requires Hillary Clinton to distance herself from many of the policies of her husband’s administration and to adopt policies favored by her party’s core constituencies. On issues from criminal justice to immigration enforcement, that is precisely what she has done. Even if she had not been challenged by Mr. Sanders, she probably would have done this anyway, because with the departure of the Reagan Democrats, the Democratic coalition has shifted to the left.

As for Sanders, his appeal is more personal – Hillary not being a very charismatic figure – and generational, attracting Millennials who were equally enthusiastic for Obama in 2008 – but, he expects them to grow more conservative as they age, like the Boomer-hippies before them. The future of the Democrats will be Hillary’s, an identity politics that still focuses on racism and sexism rather than progressive economics.

For all of these reasons, it is likely that the future of the Democrats will be Clintonism — Hillary Clintonism, that is, a slightly more progressive version of neoliberalism freed of the strategic concessions to white working-class voters associated with Bill Clintonism. On the other side of the aisle, it is probably only a matter of time before the conflict between elite libertarianism and the populism of the voters in the Republican Party is resolved more or less in favor of the voters, by a new orthodoxy that moves left on entitlements and right on immigration, while eschewing Mr. Trump’s inflammatory approach.

Conor Lynch writes in Salon that Lind is right as to the GOP but not as to the Dems:

There is something strikingly absent from Lind’s analysis, and it is quite detrimental to his argument about the Democrats: The economy. Reading his piece, one who didn’t know any better might just assume that America’s economic situation has hardly changed over the past several decades. Of course, it has changed tremendously. When the major party realignments began in the 1970s, economic inequality was near all-time lows; today, it has returned to historic pre-Depression levels.

In the early ’70s, the top one percent of income earners took in about 8.9 percent of the nations income; by 2013, that number had nearly tripled to 21.2 percent. This skyrocketing inequality is largely a result of stagnating wages for the majority of Americans and ballooning compensation for executives. During the Keynesian era (1930s-1975), wages generally increased proportionately with productivity, but since the early ’70s, compensation has remained flat, even as productivity continued to steadily increase.

Even more staggering than America’s income inequality is its wealth inequality. Today, the top one percent owns more of the nation’s wealth than the bottom 90 percent. (The bottom 40 percent, meanwhile, owns virtually nothing.) People of color are impacted the most by this inequality. As of 2015, for example, the richest 400 people in America (who are mostly white men) are worth more than all 16 million black households combined (and 15 million latino households combined); harrowing but unsurprising statistics. Moreover, the average white family holds about 7 times the wealth of the average black family — a disparity that has actually increased over the past two decades.

<snip>

Once again, Lind seemingly ignores the economic realities of today. In doing so, he ignores the very reasons why economic progressivism has made a assertive comeback. While it would indeed be a mistake to assume that every last millennial who supports Sanders today will remain a committed social democrat for the rest of his or her life, it is also a mistake to ignore the fact that many young people today will be less economically well off than their parents (for the first time in many generations), or that the latest class to graduate from college is also the most indebted in history.

As for hippies becoming yuppies (which is somewhat of a myth, to begin with): The hippy movement was a social movement, largely unconcerned with economic justice, and it should also be recalled that this was a time when economic inequality was at all time lows, and social liberation was a much more pressing matter.

The neoliberal status quo that Clintonism represents has made the United States one of the most unequal nations in the world, leaving millions of children in deep poverty and transforming America into the “worlds largest jailer” (because in many parts of America, poverty is virtually a crime). Economic inequality is not going away, especially if economic centrists like Clinton continue capitulating to Republican extremism and special interests. The Democratic party’s diverse base signals a bright future — but to expect this base, made up largely of people of color who are disproportionately effected by economic inequality, to continue to accept corporate-friendly centrism, seems arrogant and politically imprudent.

[CarnalK]

http://www.salon.com/search/?q=michael+lind

enough said.

[ISiddiqui]

Instead of referring to it as “Clintonism”, I’d rephrase it as “Obamaism”. Hillary Clinton is jumping on what President Obama already started, in the evolution of the party since the days of President Bill Clinton. And I’ve read something like this before about the potential evolution of the parties - Trumpism may see the GOP turn to a populist mindset, focusing on poor white issues - on social concerns AND economic concerns, while Obamaism may continue to make the Democratic Party into a technocratic third-way party which focuses on identity politics (race, gender, sexual orientation) and regulatory curbs on capitalism, but is strongly in favor of the capitalist core of the economy.

I think that if Trump leads to a number of moderate Republicans coming over the aisle (something that started with Senators Jeffords, Chafee, Specter), the Democrats may indeed turn more Obamaist.

[Thing_Fish]

I suspect Lynch is righter.

Corporate capitalism is progressively screwing over the middle and working classes, which are disproportionately racial/ethnic minorities. At some point (not, apparently, this election cycle) you have to figure minorities are going to stop supporting a pro-corporate party.

So the theory, if I understand correctly, is that the Democrats are moving from being the party of the economically disadvantaged to the party of the economically comfortable who face discrimination based on some aspect of their identities. The GOP, meanwhile, is moving from being the party of the rich to the party of those who want to maintain white/male/straight/Christian privilege, and potentially being more open to proposals to reduce economic inequality.

But there’s a contradiction there, since poor people are disproportionately minority. Barring explicitly racist qualifying criteria for whatever new programs are introduced to help the poor, the people benefiting most from those programs will be minorities. So, to the (great) extent that “conservative” in American politics is code for “racist, sexist homophobe”, “conservative populism” is a nonstarter; you have to decide whether you want to be a bigot or a populist.

My guess is that at some point, either the GOP will become a generally egalitarian economic populist party (not necessarily entirely; you could probably put together a majority party while still alienating blacks, hispanics, women, secularists, or gays, but not all of them at once), or (probably most likely) the Democrats will purge the Clintonites and become a more social democratic party, or a new populist third party will emerge and eliminate one of the established parties.

My guess is that it is the GOP which will change or go away; its current strategy of championing both income inequality and white (etc.) privilege is becoming less and less tenable as the country’s demographics evolve. Another option, of course, is that the GOP could try to solve its difficulties winning elections by just not having elections anymore and moving to an overtly fascist system.

[BrainGlutton]

@CarnalK

http://www.salon.com/search/?q=michael+lind

enough said.

No, you meant this – better formatted. He writes in many publications and fora (many more than Lynch, I believe).

[BrainGlutton]

@Thing_Fish

But there’s a contradiction there, since poor people are disproportionately minority. Barring explicitly racist qualifying criteria for whatever new programs are introduced to help the poor, the people benefiting most from those programs will be minorities. So, to the (great) extent that “conservative” in American politics is code for “racist, sexist homophobe”, “conservative populism” is a nonstarter; you have to decide whether you want to be a bigot or a populist.

Oh, it’s a starter, all right, Trump has proved that. But probably not a finisher.

[ISiddiqui]

@Thing_Fish

But there’s a contradiction there, since poor people are disproportionately minority.

However, these poor minorities apparently voted in large numbers for Clinton over Sanders. So there is a double contradiction there if you assume that the Democrats will become a more progressive left wing party.

I have said for a while that the Democratic Party has its own fight, similar to the Republicans having economic conservatives vs. social conservatives. However, in the Democratic Party its class-based progressives vs. interest group progressives. They probably could overlap, but it seems that focusing on one area precludes one from focusing on the other area - or that interest group progressives are a bit more pragmatic than class based ones.

[CarnalK]

@BrainGlutton

No, you meant this – better formatted. He writes in many publications and fora (many more than Lynch, I believe).

No, I meant to be as lazy and spend as little time on Salon as possible.

[DerekMichaels00]

the success of the Democrats in winning the popular vote for the presidency in every election since 1992 except 2004 has convinced most Democratic strategists that they don’t need socially conservative, economically liberal Reagan or Wallace Democrats any more.

Those who think that clearly have never heard of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Centrism is a winning formula. Obama kinda stretched it, but had enough black turnout to offset that.

The Dem party will overreach if it thinks Hispanics will stay Democratic forever. They’re not voting Dem because they’re super progressive; they’re voting Dem because of the GOP’s public perception of haboring racism. The Dems would also do well to heed the lessons of Pat Buchanan’s culture wars and Dan Quayle’s Murphy Brown fight from 1992; that party kept winning so much from 1968 to 1988 that it thought it could go off the conservative deep end, and its '92 loss began at least a generation of Dem popular vote wins. The reverse can happen for the Dems too.

[BrainGlutton]

@DerekMichaels00

The Dems would also do well to heed the lessons of Pat Buchanan’s culture wars and Dan Quayle’s Murphy Brown fight from 1992; that party kept winning so much from 1968 to 1988 that it thought it could go off the conservative deep end, and its '92 loss began at least a generation of Dem popular vote wins.

I think you meant to say “The Pubs” there.

@DerekMichaels00

The reverse can happen for the Dems too.

What makes you think so? There is no symmetry or equivalency between going “off the conservative deep end” in cultural terms on the one hand, and responding to a very real need for progressive economic solutions on the other.

[BrainGlutton]

@CarnalK

No, I meant to be as lazy and spend as little time on Salon as possible.

It does indeed tend to mess with one’s computer, but the content makes it well worth the trouble.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

Hmm, a bunch of white guys explaining how minorities are going to vote in the future.

Millennial whites are not the major voting bloc. Minorities are. Why not look at how they feel?

If you do, something interesting happens. They are most optimistic about the economy and the future than whites are. There are lots of polls and articles about them. Here’s one to get started on. They do so probably because they are emerging from a lower base, especially relative to whites. They are also having more success at calling attention to problems and fighting back indifference from above.

That’s more Obamaism than Clintonism. Clinton had to overcome resistance from the white majority and favored pragmatic policies that were appealing at the time. In these more polarized days (which would astound people in 1992 that those were the good old days of bipartisanism) pragmatic politics are not sufficient. Victories have to be seen.

The progressive minority in the party needs a bottom-up national base on which to grow, something that minorities have spent decades creating. They have some issues that are attractive to all the angry people, but nobody is going to tear down the system nor is there an obvious successor to Sanders.

There’s no obvious successor to Trump, either. There are a million Cruzes scurrying around because Reagan did build a national platform of hatred toward Others that was obscured as long as whites were dominant. The antagonism toward minorities and the urban areas they preferred, the climate of anti-intellectualism, the religious dogmatism, all core to Reagan conservatism, brought activist believers into the party and they have proliferated backed by money going to every election from dogcatcher on up.

That’s a strong base that will take time to wear down, but it may have peaked. Money doesn’t flow to chaos. The local yahoos are already seeing their agendas hitting huge resistance of the sort that corporations hate. It’s not attractive to business to see their cities and states the target of national revulsion. The social issues - and immigration is a social issue, not a foreign policy one - are not solvable by Cruz and his ilk, who inflames them. What do Reaganites do when they are no longer a majority? I don’t know. But apparently neither do they.

[astorian]

Important fact: Michael Lind is never right.

Donald Trump isn’t even the Present of the GOP, much less the future. If he loses this year, who’s poised to pick up and lead his movement? No one. He has no organization, just his own celebrity, which can’t be handed off to anyone else.

[CarnalK]

@astorian

Important fact: Michael Lind is never right.

Donald Trump isn’t even the Present of the GOP, much less the future. If he loses this year, who’s poised to pick up and lead his movement? No one. He has no organization, just his own celebrity, which can’t be handed off to anyone else.

Ivanka 2020!

[BrainGlutton]

@astorian

Donald Trump isn’t even the Present of the GOP, much less the future. If he loses this year, who’s poised to pick up and lead his movement? No one. He has no organization, just his own celebrity, which can’t be handed off to anyone else.

No, but neither is the base he has riled up just going to quiet down and follow the Establishment in future cycles. It’s too late for that. Once again:

Donald Trump has mounted and ridden the horse of conservative populism, but it was already out of the barn. Before Mr. Trump, similar populist themes were sounded by Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and Patrick Buchanan. For a while, the strength of the religious right allowed elite Republicans to trade tax cuts for the rich for support for banning abortion and gay marriage. But as religious conservatism declines, a kind of European-style national populism is rising, for which protectionism and immigration restriction are central issues, not peripheral concerns.

Trump did not create that and will not be the last to try to lead it.

[Johnny_Ace]

What amazes me is how bad Republicans think the economy is. CNN exit polling of NY Pubs said 92% were worried about it. This with the economy and unemployment as good as they’ve been in years. Just goes to show how much they’ve drunk the “Obama bad. Democrat bad. THEM bad” Kool-Aid.

[DerekMichaels00]

@BrainGlutton

What makes you think so? There is no symmetry or equivalency between going “off the conservative deep end” in cultural terms on the one hand, and responding to a very real need for progressive economic solutions on the other.

I meant that in '92, the GOP thought its electoral lock was so strong that to get its base out to vote, it could go hard social conservative. From 1992 onward, they can’t win IL, CA, VT, ME, MI, PA, DE, MD, NH, all of which had voted GOP in 1988, 1984, nearly all GOP in 1980, etc. Democrats today are doing on transgender bathrooms what the GOP did back then on abortion: closing their tent. Dan Quayle attacked too hard at modernity (Murphy Brown) as Dems today are on traditional thought (transgender issues, race issues and “white privilege,” Woodrow Wilson, Redskins, etc.)

[BrainGlutton]

@DerekMichaels00

I meant that in '92, the GOP thought its electoral lock was so strong that to get its base out to vote, it could go hard social conservative. From 1992 onward, they can’t win IL, CA, VT, ME, MI, PA, DE, MD, NH, all of which had voted GOP in 1988, 1984, nearly all GOP in 1980, etc. Democrats today are doing on transgender bathrooms what the GOP did back then on abortion: closing their tent. Dan Quayle attacked too hard at modernity (Murphy Brown) as Dems today are on traditional thought (transgender issues, race issues and “white privilege,” Woodrow Wilson, Redskins, etc.)

All beside the point, isn’t it? There’s not much daylight between Sanders and Clinton on those kinds of issues, and not much of either’s base that’s about to be alienated by the liberal stance on such issues any time soon – and probably not that much of the swing vote, either. The real fault-line is economic: The Democratic Party will remain socially liberal no matter what happens – and social liberalism will win out eventually and social-cultural conservatism will be marginalized eventually no matter what happens – but will the Democrats’ future economic policies be shaped by Sanders’ social-democratic left-progressivism or Clinton’s Third-Way globalizing neoliberalism? The latter of which is not all that far from Republican Establishment’s economics, but very far from the nationalist protectionism of Trump’s conservative populists. That’s why there is actually some overlap between Trump’s appeal and Sanders’, and some voters have been wavering on which of them to back. There is a horizontal division in the electorate along the usual left-right ideological spectrum – and now, for the first time since Reconstruction, the ideological division in the public more or less neatly aligns with that of the parties; but also, orthogonal to that, there is a vertical division by class, and both parties’ Establishments are with the ruling class.

[Velocity]

@Johnny_Ace

What amazes me is how bad Republicans think the economy is. CNN exit polling of NY Pubs said 92% were worried about it. This with the economy and unemployment as good as they’ve been in years. Just goes to show how much they’ve drunk the “Obama bad. Democrat bad. THEM bad” Kool-Aid.

The party in power claims the economy is good, in order to retain power. The party in opposition claims the economy is bad , in order to retake power.

[Hank_Beecher]

The OP continues the traditional old person error of assuming that native minority voters are going to continue to cling to the Dems and block-vote due to racialism and identity politics.

This cline between the interests of native born racial minorities and whites is mostly illusion. And yet it is an ever present component in these discussions, as if it was the orbital path of the Earth: something which will little change over the millennia.

It’s been fifty years since the Civil Rights Act. Multi generational integration brings the interests of whites and native born minorities ever closer, and it makes the use of racism as a primary component of the anti–conservative message an ever weaker tactic.

In the coming decades, the racial voting patterns as we know them today are going to evaporate. As a result, the parties will change more than they have since the post WWII era.