All Politics Is Loco

All Politics Is Loco

American Spectator - Friday April 15, 2016

Strange civil-rights struggles to vote without proof of identity and use a public bathroom based on gender identity animate today’s Democratic Party voters as they alienate yesterday’s.

Bernie Sanders spoke at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network event on Thursday, maintaining that Republican governors seek to “bring us back to Jim Crow days” by requiring identification at the polls (presumably for the same reason those Bull Connors who sell beer, give out library cards, and allow you to board an airplane do). This follows his condemnation in late March of a North Carolina law that redundantly instructs males to use the men’s room and females to use the ladies’ room, a universally embraced custom that did not require force of law until very recently. “It's time to end discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity,” Sanders tweeted. “This law has no place in America.”

All politics is loco.

Sanders preaches a non sequitur politics that caters to the intense passions of slivers rather than the overriding concerns of majorities. And this wins, at least among a large fragment of the small fragment that vote in Democratic Party primaries.

Bernie rides seven straight victories into next week’s New York primary. He beats Hillary Clinton in the new PRRI/Atlanticnational poll, and Real Clear Politics’ poll of polls now shows that the former secretary of state’s lead — exceeding 25 points through most of late 2015 — at just one percent across the country. As his packed Washington Square rally (Greenwich Village feels the Bern — who knew!) visually emphasized this week, Vermont’s senior citizen junior senator enters the Empire State with the Big Mo.

When voters opt for odd, it says something about the electorate. More so, it says something about the elected. Red and Blue America offer the closest thing to consensus in their “none of the above” presidential preferences of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. They really hope for change — drastic change — this go around.

On the Republican side, the last men standing include the most hated officeholder in the Capitol and a gauche capitalist even more despised by Beltway snobs. Washington doesn’t understand that this means the voters hate them. The feeling is mutual. Even if Donald Trump wins a majority of the delegates, party insiders will attempt to thwart him and under no circumstances will they turn to Ted Cruz as a surrogate standard bearer.

Republican primary voters harbor such disgust with the party establishment that a candidate devoid of experience in elected office who embraced abortion on demand and some gun control measures as a private citizen wins their allegiance. Trump plays puncher rather than punching bag, ridicules political correctness, and departs from Republican establishment orthodoxy on trade, foreign policy, and immigration. But mostly voters like him because he clearly is not what they hate most: a politician. Unlike so many past years, the Republican nomination does not double as a lifetime achievement award this cycle.

Democratic primary voters flock to an avowed socialist who hung a hammer and sickle in his mayoral office and honeymooned in the Soviet Union. Like Trump, his appeal comes from his bluntness and inability to read off a teleprompter. But mostly, Democrats follow the 74-year-old Nothingarian who doesn’t even embrace their party affiliation because he strikes them as the least affected by Washington of any of the aspirants.

In both cases, the candidates give catharsis to the people giving them votes. What they give from inauguration day forward remains to be seen (or not), and seems largely irrelevant to the many frustrated people enthusiastically supporting them. If the intensity of votes mattered as much as the number of them, Trump and Sanders would have wrapped up the nominations a long time ago.

The inability to attract the super delegates may derail the billionaire and the socialist who wants to spread his wealth. But the inability of the super-delegate establishment to attract the voters who propel Bernie and the Donald may eventually spell their doom, too.

How long can the people running the parties not reflect the party faithful before the faithful lose faith?

“[D]rastic change is the most difficult and dangerous experience mankind has undergone,” Eric Hoffer observed a half-century ago. “We are discovering that broken habits can be more painful and crippling than broken bones, that disintegrating values may have as deadly a fallout as disintegrating atoms.”

Change — a dearth of comfortable blue collars, an influx of non-English speakers, rapidly shifting cultural mores, etc. — vexes citizens (even ones who voted for it eight years ago). Adapting to the electorate’s change may prove more difficult for the ruling class. 

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