Over the last decade I have learned that America has four different types of elections:
- Crisis elections, where the assumptions of a generation are proven to be past their sell-by date and are overthrown.
- Validation elections, in which the new assumptions are overwhelmingly ratified.
- Anti-Thesis elections, in which a new coalition arises to challenge the assumptions and eventually breaks through.
- Excess elections, in which the anti-thesis is defeated, narrowly, by the knees jerking on the old assumptions.
America works on a generational cycle, tied to economic trends, so there are some elections that wind up fitting midway between these assumptions. Sometimes events do overturn the apple cart, like Watergate, which delivered Jimmy Carter (narrowly). These are the exceptions that keep people guessing, although I really do think Watergate itself drew extensive press coverage.
The point is that 2016 is a Validation Election. It has a lot in common with 1980, or 1948, or 1908, or 1868. In all those cases, the leader who led the nation through the crisis is off the stage, and the political movement they birthed – its assumptions or ideology, its media, its industry – must find a way forward without him.
Barack Obama was the Crisis Leader America needed in my lifetime. He will remain the Greatest President of my lifetime. Maybe not the most important – Richard Nixon may retain that “honor” – but this was the man who turned the ship of state around.
In 2008, the political winds all seemed to be blowing from the right. Reporters had gone through a generation in which conservatism held sway, and they could not believe that a forthright liberal message, from a northerner, could possibly be heard. They blamed Obama’s election on the eruption of the actual crisis, the economic crash climaxing in September with the need for a trillion-dollar bailout of big banks. They assumed he would fail.
But he did not fail. He wasn’t everything his supporters wanted, but no Crisis President is. Nixon was considered weak tea by movement conservatives, and Lincoln wasn’t everything the Radical Republicans wanted, either. The Crisis Leader has one job, the system’s restoration, and everything else becomes secondary. After the crisis is passed, the winds shift to the other direction. This is what has happened in the last 8 years. This is what Bernie Sanders represents.
In 2008 the American System was truly threatened by a crisis its leaders deliberately created in their effort to cover-up one of the greatest crimes in world history – the War in Iraq. The blowback from that crime continues to be felt, in the economy, in the region, in the environment. But America is respected again, its economy is healthy again. We are winning. Barack Obama’s calm, steady leadership made that happen.
When a political movement is overthrown, its first instinct is to double-down on what caused its failure in the first place. The conservative movement, which was birthed in the 1950s with Joe McCarthy and George Wallace, which came to power in the Vietnam Era and only expanded its power over all institutions from that day through 2008, will not go quietly into that good night.
Conservatism was a complete belief system, which encompassed lives as thoroughly as Communism did in the Soviet Union or China. Yes, it was born in the free soil of America, but so were the Lebensraum and eugenics ideas Hitler used in Germany. Where freedom lives, extremism can be borne.
Modern conservatism was based on the same three pillars that have dominated Latin America since Bolivar – the dominance of the church, the control of economic oligarchs, and the veto of the military. In the America Nixon and Reagan built, these become the social conservatives, the economic conservatives, and the neo-con hawks. The first punished souls, the second pocketbooks, and the third took lives. To those who believed, these sufferings were seen as right and good, as God’s will, as the way of the world, or as military necessity.
This is powerful stuff. And it takes a powerful antidote to tear it away and actually build a consensus, a vast majority, standing against all of it, ready to bury it once and for all.
Donald Trump is that antidote.
The regions I call Trumpistan, dominated by resources, by agriculture, by manufacturing, by the industries and lifestyles of the past rather than the future, these places were fed a lot of hooey, over entire lifetimes, by the conservative movement. The economic conservatives promised prosperity, even while they were stealing their jobs and pensions in the name of “the debt the debt the debt.” The religious conservatives were stealing their souls, and what money they had left, in order to build “mega-churches” that promised the after-life, but delivered nothing substantive. The neo-cons stole the sons (and even the daughters) of Trumpistan, throwing them into the fire of war to maintain control of oil.
Donald Trump promises unicorns and rainbows to these people. He says, all those crimes were the crimes of the elites, but the ideology is real and I’m your Jesus H. Christ, heck I’m the second coming. You’re never going to suffer anymore. I’ll make it all better. Trust me.
He offers no specifics. He says he’s against everything they’ve been taught to hate, and for everything they’ve been taught to love. He claims a brilliance beyond the ken of ordinary mortals, secret knowledge. He takes the desires of those who have followed conservatism all their lives and says he will make the promise real.
No one can do that. Conservatism is broken. Conservatism is a lie. Conservativism must die like communism did. Without communism to give it something to oppose, conservatism is merely will to power, a form of tyranny.
But try explaining that to the son of a Reagan Democrat, sitting in Texas or West Virginia with his AR-15, his Bible, his beer gut and his stupid relatives telling him that he is their only hope for a better life. Try telling that to any of the insurance agents, real estate agents, stock brokers or other local power brokers on their golf courses, who thought they could leave this money and power to their kids but now find there’s an app for that.
Try telling those people that it’s the people they have spent their lives hating, despising, and even fearing that hold their real hope, and that this hope involves telling their kids that everything they were taught in school – about evolution, about climate change, about the wars they sent them to, was wrong.
Good luck with that.
What can change them, what can start the process of change that might result in at least a loyal opposition to the Obama Thesis of Consensus, is a defeat so powerful, so yuge, and so total that reality can no longer be denied.
Donald Trump must die, politically, for conservatism’s sins.
He has to lose like no other candidate has ever lost before, and he has to take his entire political party down with him. It’s only after some period in the political wilderness that Republicans will find the policies, the arguments, and the causes to politely confront, let alone defeat, the Obama Thesis of Consensus.
So to my fellow Democrats I say, don’t worry, be happy. Enjoy the next several months. Work hard, ignore the trolls, register people, and get them to the polls. The responsibility of power is coming to a new generation of Americans, to the generation of my children. It will come in a rush, across all fronts – economic, social, media, political. The world needs the very best you have.
I pray it’s enough.
