Revolution or incrementalism?
Published February 12, 2016
by Thomas Mills, Politics NC, February 11, 2016.
This presidential primary season is one of the most interesting in my lifetime. On the Republican side we’ve got a showman leading a pack of mostly qualified, if underwhelming, contenders. On the Democratic side the coronation of a former First Lady has been derailed by a frumpy Jewish guy with a New York accent who wears his socialism on his sleeve.
The Republican contest seems to be headed to a three-way race between Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and either Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, or John Kasich. If Bush emerges as the anti-Trump, he proves that money still rules in campaigns. If Rubio wins, he’s the Republican version of Barack Obama, an unproven leader but one who can inspire and offer a vision for the future of the Republican Party. If somehow Kasich survives, he shows that pragmatism is still alive in the Republican Party and the Tea Party has lost.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton shows the vulnerability of being in the national spotlight for 25 years. She’s been vilified by right since she tried to implement health care reform in the early 1990s. As a US Senator and Secretary of State, she made the compromises necessary to be effective. Throughout her career, both before and since she arrived on the DC scene, she’s built the relationships she believed were necessary to further her and her husband’s careers.
Politics is a messy business and Clinton has been in the middle of it for most her adult life. Now she’s paying the price. Bernie Sanders’ supporters are attacking her and questioning her honesty and credibility. She’s being held to an impossible standard for someone who has been in government as long as she has, but she’s done a lousy job of responding to the criticism. Octogenarians questioning the intelligence and commitment of young women is not smart politics.
Sanders, for his part, is riding a wave. He’s tapped into the angst and disillusionment of a generation of young people who see a bleak future. And while he’s attracting people who are usually disengaged in politics, he’s also rallying the activist wing of the Democratic Party. It’s potent combination, but he’s still not tapped into the diversity that he’ll need to win the nomination.
Still, Sanders is proving that message discipline works. He’s beat the same drum and not been distracted even when national and international events steal the public’s attention. While he may lose the spotlight for a bit, when the public returns its attention to the presidential race, Sanders is right where they left him.
In both races, once we sort through the hyperbole, the underlying theme is incrementalism versus revolutionary reform. Sanders and Trump (and Cruz) represent the revolutionaries. They believe we need instant and major reforms. While their proposed outcomes enthuse their respective constituencies, their solutions would almost certainly lead to prolonged periods of social and economic upheaval. Clinton and the GOP establishment candidates represent the incrementalism that have dominated political thinking since Reagan on right and LBJ on left.
I would argue that we are currently in the midst of a social and economic transformation already. Marriage equality dramatically shifts the way we treat and perceive LGBT people. The Black Lives Matters movement is really a continuation of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and will, at the very least, lead to criminal justice reform. We don’t know the full impact of the Affordable Care Act and climate change policies on the economy and people’s lives.
We still face big challenges. We need to address income inequality. We need political reform to reduce the influence of big money and we need to end the extreme gerrymandering that’s left our government dominated by extremes. We’ve got to address Social Security and Medicare since we’re now living into our eighties and nineties while the system was set up for people to die in their seventies.
The question we’ve got to answer is can a Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump bend the will of the political system to their vision to achieve these goals? Or do we need a seasoned establishment candidate who cut the deals necessary to address our looming needs? But let’s face it. Either way is messy and nobody will look as good while they’re in the middle of the change as when they’re just talking about it.
