McCain was a Senator, but I understand you’re using “insurgent” differently than I do.
As for telling the truth and not spinning, I’ll believe it when I see it. “Spin” is just perspective and gamesmanship – everyone has their own perspective, and virtually everyone will try to frame events in a way favorable to what they want to achieve. Some will stretch the truth further than others, but they’re all spinning, whether they realize it or not. I think it’s a myth that we ever had politicians who were significantly more honest and less “political” than today – the tools and media were just different in the past.
None of the politicians you listed, at least the ones that I’m familiar with, don’t spin sometimes, or always tell 100% the truth. The difference is all in degree, in my opinion, and the best we can do is a politician who is mostly honest and who keeps the spin only a couple of degrees away from unbiased reality. I still value issue stances much more than this spinning and any sort of ‘straight-talking’, since an ‘honest’ dumb war is still getting thousands killed, and a dishonest avoidance of that war is far superior.
Obama talked reform, but he had a crack campaign team and opted out of public funding so he could spend McCain into oblivion. The campaign itself was very traditional, the messaging onpoint, and he was very conservative about when he spoke and who he gave interviews to. It was all very conventional.
Trump got outspent in the primaries, and he won. He’s getting outspent in the general, and he’s 2 points behind. He speaks bluntly and has created media firestorms as a result and turned off tons of winnable voters, and yet he’s still got a shot at winning.
So let’s imagine a candidate not spending money, saying whatever’s on his mind, but what’s on his mind is intelligent, direct, and honest. Some posters have said that such a candidate doesn’t win a nomination. But I don’t think that’s true looking forward. Ben Carson was doing quite well for awhile, and people liked him precisely because he was calm and gentlemanly in contrast to Trump being a blowhard. If Carson had applied himself to learning about the issues as well as he did neurology, I think he would have been on that debate stage with Clinton and leading her substantially. At Carson’s peak, he was the best Republican in trial heat matchups with Clinton, leading by double digits in many polls. Is there any reason why say, Joe Clark, the famous hardass principal, or Stan MacChrystal couldn’t duplicate what’s been done but better?
Carson, in a “calm and gentlemanly” way, spread wingnut conspiracy theory crap and lies. That was why he had the support he had – if he was spreading decent and interesting policy proposals, he wouldn’t have gotten half that support.
Yeah, not necessarily talking about outsiders, just people not too interested in doing things the conventional(dishonest) way. Bernie Sanders was a Senator, but certainly counts as an insurgent in my book.
There’s a distinction between being human and spending millions on experts to tell you how to make a turd look like a rose. Although not an example of dishonesty, one of the things that always raises my hackles is using words different from the conventional phrasing because it sounds better, even though you’re not selling anything new. Such as Clinton using 'Gun safety"(she paused between the words, as if she was about to say, “gun control” but caught herself). It’s not a lie or anything, but it is an example of how you have all these experts telling you how to say things and it gets in the way of just being direct with people. At least “gun safety” is an accurate description of what she’s trying to do. When Democrats call spending “investments” that actually is dishonest since most spending is not an investment that any investor or economist would recognize as such. Most spending is actually just pure consumption and should be called spending unless what is being discussed actually does bring a future return.
But imagine a world in which George Bush can’t sell his war because he can’t get away with saying, “The oil will pay for it.” John McCain backed the war, but imagine him as President in 2003 selling it without such obvious falsehoods. Would he have been as successful? Or perhaps he’d get even MORE support for the war since he’d be honest about the hardships to come and people would trust him?
See, one of the reasons I think things will change is because I don’t think what politicians do to win support for their candidacies and policies is actually all that effective and in some cases can actually be counterproductive. I think Bush’s attempts to sell pretty much all of his policies demonstrate this point. It wasn’t that his messaging team wasn’t good, Karl Rove is really, really good at this stuff. It’s that it was all just so transparently dishonest. I actually think admitting the drawbacks to your policies works better than trying to do the used car salesman act. Most voters don’t get into the nitty gritty of issues. It’s about trust. A lot of good policies go down to defeat simply because the public doesn’t trust the President.
That’s the problem the inevitability of adaher’s prediction faces. It’s a little hard to assume an insurgent who gets free publicity from crazy statements and connecting with the “left out of the system” voters but still capture enough of the votes of people in the system and/or who don’t trust crazy people.
Again I don’t know where ‘insurgent’ departs exactly from ‘the consensus shifting’ either within a party or a party’s ability to perhaps build a new national consensus. Same goes for what is ‘mainstream’.
But it’s cartoonishly oversimplifying IMO to say the components of Trumpism are ‘insanity’ and ‘Steve Forbes’. Trumpism is rightist populism, with major contrasts to the conservatism of Steve Forbes, or Paul Ryan (Forbes is kind of eccentric himself to be used as example in ‘minus the crazy’).
Talk radio star Laura Ingraham is an example of Trump without the crazy, though everyone on the right will be called ‘racist’ by some people on the left. And I think she will try to jump across to elected politics and run for the 2020 nomination if Trump loses. She may once have been a smaller govt free market conservative but has deviated a lot from that now.
She very much de-emphasizes smaller govt as a goal, Ryan’s central goal. She’s very anti-trade, Ryan still pro free trade. She’s highly focused on illegal immigration; Ryan is a pinata on talk radio more than anything else because that’s obviously not a really central issue to him. She’s skeptical of ‘mass’ legal immigration, Ryan is basically pro-immigration on more or less the current scale.
She constantly speaks of the ills of the ‘Republican Establishment’ on those issues and as just out of touch elites. Of course that’s self serving rhetoric for political outsiders, who are usually ‘established’ or ‘elite’ in their own way just as much. But it has an appeal in itself, which isn’t ‘crazy’ nor going away with Trump (or Sanders).
I don’t like her or agree with her. But that’s a prototype of a much better informed and smarter (for practical purposes of politics) version of Trump, and it definitely does not just leave you with Steve Forbes or Paul Ryan. The particualr outrageous vulgar style of Trump is part of his appeal, nobody will replace him exactly. But I think you miss the appeal in a lot of what Trump says that’s neither crazy nor Steve Forbes. That’s what someone else might build on.
Well yeah, speaking just in terms of ideology, the alt-right as it’s now being called has legs. It has parties all over Europe too, we’re actually latecomers.
I think you’re being far too generous to Trump – this may be the Kellyanne Conway version of Trump, but the real world Trump is incoherent on the issues at best, and batshit crazy at worst. Forbes was my example of a rich plutocrat with no political experience who didn’t propose anything particularly nuts. Trump rose on birtherism and “Mexicans are racist”, because that’s what a big chunk of Republicans and conservatives want. He’s sustained himself on that as well as anti-establishment, xenophobic, and anti-Clinton/Obama rambling. A non-crazy politician wouldn’t get that same support, since those voters are fucking nuts (politically speaking).
If Bill Gates decided he wanted to be President I think he’d work with the Democratic Party and the Democrats would embrace him. The idea that America needs an anti-Establishment candidate is flawed, as an excellent Atlantic article pointed out.
The big issue that connected the insurgents Perot, Sanders and Trump was opposition to free trade. Expect both parties to change their policies slightly to embrace voter concerns. (The Democrats will propose retraining programs, and seek better worker and environmental protection from trading partners. The GOP will talk about The Wall.)
Neither Trump nor Sanders could approach 50% support (Keep fingers crossed). If their supporters united behind a single candidate they could but that’s impossible — the policies of Trump and Sanders are diametrically opposite on every issue except foreign trade. Sanders appeals to the young, the green, the progressives, the diverse, the intelligent. Trump appeals to the old, the bitter, the xenophobes and racists, the dumb. How are you going to square that circle?
Trump’s campaign hasn’t bothered with spin? It seems to me more like they’ve needed a record amount of spin to walk back the things Trump has said. Hell, Trump himself has denied half the things he’s said.
There may be less appeal, today, in the “steady hand” political candidate, than ever before. Being the “steady hand,” predictable, stead, and boring, is a political millstone around the neck.
That Atlantic article raises an excellent point - that many voters are fed up with Washington politics because they think the solutions to America’s ills are obvious, and why-won’t-those-insider-politicians-just-pull-their-heads-out-of-their-you-know-whats and grasp those solutions that are right in front of them.
I agree with the OP that the success of a genuine insurgent candidate is popular but he won’t be the sort of normie that say McCain 2000 was and that the Thomas Friedmans and David Brooks of the world love to swoon over. A candidate who wanted to square the circle of creating a popular front of the multiracial working and middle classes would have to advance a roughly left-wing/progressive nationalist ideology. He would be fairly progressive on socioeconomic issues but emphasize universal social insurance programs rather then means-tested benefits and be sceptical of international trade agreeements. He would be a realist on foreign policy-opposed to the extensive American military commitment we have but nonetheless supportive of strong force against America’s enemies. He would be pragmatic on immigration, supporting a path to citizenship while cracking down on businesses that hire illegal immigrants. He would be moderately libertarian-leaning on cultural issues by supporting an end to the War on Drugs as well as copyright law reform but at the same time not be extremely anti-gun. He would be moderately controversial by not being afraid to take occasional personal swipes against rival politicians, Silicon Valley magnates and Wall Street banks, Tel Aviv and Riyadh-but he would avoid insulting ordinary people. He would be conversant with modern memes and tweet many a rare Pepe. Preferably he would be a military veteran as well. Such a candidate, I believe, is one who can forge enough of a countercoalition of Millennials, working-class whites, and minorities to achieve an electoral majority.
I wonder how much ideology matters though. It seems to me that we’ve had left wing candidates win huge majorities and we’ve had right wing candidates win huge majorities. I think that a candidate that can inspire trust is going to beat a candidate who doesn’t even if the untrusted candidate has the more mainstream ideology.
At least for me, the ideology of a President is only a small part of what I care about, and I suspect for a lot of voters, at least the ones who decide elections, it’s all about who they relate to better and trust more. And even for many reliable base voters it’s not really about ideology so much as they trust one party more than the other. Are African-Americans really all that liberal? Are evangelicals really all that conservative? In a few areas, sure, but not necessarily across the board, which means that in theory both should be winnable for both parties but in practice they are not and it seems to be more about respect and trust than specific policy positions.
It’s nothing to do with ‘generosity’ to Trump, nor moreover ‘generosity’ to the electorate. We might agree mostly on Trump himself, whereas calling the electorate immoral is meaningless (‘racist’, ‘xenophobic’, ‘crazy’; voters morally inferior to you is what you mean, right? and maybe many are, but so what?).
Rather, the point I think is to consider among all the things that which brought Trump to a tie in a national election as of a few days ago, which things are Trump erratic idiosyncrasies (comprehensive ignorance, astoundingly thin skin, insults in all directions) and which things smarter better informed more disciplined politicians (or those who might make the jump to politician) could build on.
Maybe the specifically obnoxious things about Trump are a big factor, maybe not. But there’s nothing crazy about seeing a corrupt bipartisan establishment, nor viewing immigration as more of a problem than a solution, nor thinking Obama has done a terrible job and Clinton is a terrible candidate. I gather you’d disagree with all that, doesn’t make it ‘crazy’.
And the Steve Forbes example still doesn’t seem accidental but rather your blind spot that there’s only the right policies (Democratic, though those may or may not be far enough left for you, and it’s your right to your opinion about that) and either crazy or non-crazy noise. But in fact there are other policy approaches which are pretty distinct from either Steve Forbes or the Democrats.
Maybe you’re right and the worst aspects of Trump are the core reason he’s been basically a tied in a national election for some time up to recently (we’ll see if the debate really changes it). I would put at least some of that on what a terrible candidate I think Clinton is, but I gather you don’t think she is, so more room to fill with explanations how Trump could be tied with her. Anyway even though I think her personal weaknesses are part of the problem, I think the appeal of populist nationalism is also a significant part.
And again my thought experiment is what if Laura Ingraham, much better informed, more careful with her words, less mean spirited, etc than Trump, but who has bought into a lot of his approach fundamentally otherwise were candidate (also assuming she somehow had the universal name recognition Trump and Clinton both have). Would she be doing better or worse v Hillary? Better I think. Part of Trump’s success IMO is more agreement in the general electorate with the general thrust of his non-conservative right leaning populism that perhaps either you or I would prefer to think, from different sides of it. And other ambitious politicians or would-be ones may build on it.
That is a good article, which I linked in some previous ‘what is Trump really about?’ thread, which ‘insurgent’ tends to get back to.
But again just because an elite view finds voter sentiment to be irrational or self contradictory (I’m not using ‘elite’ as a blanket put down, I just think it applies in this case) doesn’t really amount to a hill of beans if you’re considering how to win an election. Rauch’s article IMO supports my argument that ‘insurgency’ in the rightist populist nationalist form, ie Trumpism without Trump, might have considerably more scope.
A lot of ‘politophobes’ (the terminology Rauch borrows ‘just impose the simple solutions we all know are right there but the corrupt establishment won’t for selfish reasons’) are closer to Trump on the left-right spectrum than a Warren/Sanders Democratic Party would be (though it doesn’t have to be). It’s said Trump’s ‘far right’ to gin up the Democratic base but that’s dubious. Mainly he’s the guy saying ‘insider politicians pull your heads out’, etc. And there could be a future version of him that’s even more purely that, without the ‘Mexican judge’ etc type distractions. Some feel the ‘Mexican judge’ type thing is itself the secret sauce in that approach. I don’t agree.
I didn’t call anyone immoral – I think most Trump supporters are nuts (in terms of political beliefs) because the ideas that polling suggests that they support and believe are nuts. Birtherism is nuts; the wall is nuts; government Muslim infiltration conspiracies are nuts; etc. A big chunk of Trump’s support comes from voters who believe that stuff, and that’s why he started fast and won the nomination.
I was talking about Trump’s rise and victory in the nomination – he could never have done so without the craziness. The crazy ideas enabled this, and a “sober” Trump would have been Herman Cain or Steve Forbes, and gotten half his support or less.
You misunderstand my point, as above. A “reasonable” billionaire (or radio host like Ingraham) could never have gotten the nomination – they would have just been one relatively reasonable voice among many… like Herman Cain, or Carson (though Carson had his share of crazy), or Steve Forbes. Outsiders have already run for the Republican nomination many, many times, and they always lost. It wasn’t just outsider-ness that propelled Trump – it was craziness. The crazy was required for him to win the nomination.
That he has gotten close to tied in the general election is based on toning the crazy down and more conventional politicking. But without the crazy, we’d have Cruz or Bush or Rubio as the nominee.
Of course each individual has his own list of “obvious” solutions, which generally don’t agree with everyone else’s “obvious” solutions. Whenever I hear someone claiming that since everyone hates the status quo so a non-status quo candidate should be a shoo-in, I recall, Illuminati an old favorite game of mine it was pointed out that fanatic is the opposite of fanatic. There is no way to get the anti-regulation free capitalism libertarians to unite with the eat the rich occupy wall streeters. There is no radical middle.
Barack Obama was probably the closest we were likely to get, in terms of an outsider, straight shooter, charismatic, middle of the road, and he couldn’t get anything done, because the radicals on the right thought that he was too far left, and the radicals on the left thought he was too far right. Rather than hoping for a non-crazy Trump, we would be better off hoping for a white Obama.
Obama talked that game, but his campaign was completely conventional. massive spending, very professional spin doctors, opted out of public financing, controlled access to the candidate. They were selling reform with a conventional operation, and they governed in a very conventional way as well. I don’t think there’s anything you can point to in the Obama administration that is different in process from the Bush or Clinton administrations before it. It’s just a typical Democratic Presidency in form and substance.
No, what I’m talking about is what you see with Trump, just doing things totally differently, or how Ross Perot did things, or Jessie Ventura. Sure, two of those three were independent candidates, but I believe we’re reaching a point where the two major parties are at risk of real insurgents getting nominations. Bernie Sanders, had he won, also wouldn’t be running a campaign just like any other campaign. His campaign was closer to conventional than Trump’s, but still not like what you’d normally see with a major party nominee. Closer to Howard Dean’s candidacy.