Trump and party realignment
As I watch the way journalists in the mainstream media have been treating Donald Trump for the past few months, I am reminded of the way police formerly used the “third degree” to wear down suspects to the point that they became so browbeaten and flustered, they often confessed to crimes they hadn’t committed. Every verbal misstep Trump makes is held against him, including by members of his own party, who prefer, as their presidential candidate, the reptilian Joe McCarthy lookalike, ultraright-wing fundamentalist Ted Cruz. In any case, the nomination process, with its numerous caucuses and primaries, now goes on for far too long. Lasting more than a year, it has become a trial by ordeal. Candidates run a gauntlet of wall-to-wall media coverage day after day, as reporters wait to pounce on the slightest of errors or inconsistencies. It’s “got’cha” journalism on steroids. But Trump has in his own way performed a necessary public service, by exposing the Republican Party for what it is: the party of fat-cat billionaires and neoconservative foreign policy hawks. On foreign policy, as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observed on April 3, Trump’s rhetoric “seems to involve washing our hands of military commitments — ceding living space to Putin, letting Japan and South Korea go nuclear, calling NATO obsolete.”
So, he points out, “a president Hillary Clinton will probably have more in common with George W. Bush on foreign policy than she does with Trump.
The backdrop to this election, and the rise of Trump, comes at a time when one-third of the American workforce is now part of what has come to be called the “precarious economy.” This has become a catchall term encompassing everything from day labor to temporary work to the contract economy. It denotes flexible work that is insecure, temporary, and poorly paid. Those hurting include both white and African Americans working class voters; they were particularly disadvantaged by deindustrialization. Those who claim Trump is being rejected by the Republican establishment due to his supposed racism, xenophobia, and overall erratic behaviour should remember that in 2008, had John McCain won the presidential election, the clueless Sarah Palin would have been a heartbeat away from the White House. Trump, who is an economic nationalist and political populist, rather than a real conservative, should now do something for which he might truly be remembered: run as a third-party or independent candidate in November. My guess is that Trump would attract so many disgruntled working-class voters that he would run second, behind the winning candidate, Hillary Clinton. Such a resounding defeat for Ted Cruz, the likely nominee of the establishment Republicans, would hopefully destroy the GOP, leaving the way open for the emergence of a more massbased party on the right of the political spectrum.
On the left, the socialist Bernie Sanders is performing the same service for the Democrats. And he too opposes current American foreign policy. The Democrats, however, since they remain the darlings of the academic, intellectual, and journalistic elites, will easily survive Sanders’ insurgency, despite the fact that Clinton herself represents Wall Street financiers, millionaire “knowledge economy” moguls, and armaments manufacturers, not to mention many Hollywood luminaries.
After all, as America becomes ever more multicultural, the Democrats, with their virtual lock on African American, Asian American, and Latino voters, will continue to thrive. Indeed, many such voters, who might prefer conservative approaches to cultural, economic, and social problems, will remain Democrats, because they associate the Republican Party with nativism and racism. Depending on how Donald Trump chooses to play his cards, the post-2016 political landscape may see a major realignment in the American party system.
Every verbal misstep Trump makes is held against him, including by members of his own party, who prefer, as their presidential candidate, the reptilian Joe McCarthy lookalike, ultra-rightwing fundamentalist Ted Cruz.