Now that Donald Trump is clearly going to be the Presidential nominee of the Republican party, the pundit community is busy considering how it failed to anticipate that event. Let’s see if we can help them.
David Halberstam in his The Best And The Brightest noted that in times of crisis nearly all experts are wrong because they became experts by describing or dealing successfully with the last crisis. Thus their expertise is in describing or dealing with conditions that don’t apply in a new crisis. This seems a very succinct way of describing the situation of the current pundit class.
Abraham Lincoln put it this way “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” A thought which perhaps the pundit class should paste at the top of their computer screens.
The dissolution of the Republican party into petty bickering and public policy insanity has been a long time coming and clearly predicable. The pundits failed to predict it because seeing it happen required an ability to get out of the “dogmas of the quiet past” which they find so comforting and which they are so well paid for repeating. Let’s face it: for pundits, it paid better, and probably helped them to keep their jobs, to fail to examine what was going on in the country. Put another way, no CEO of a company which owns a major media outlet wants to hear about how his or her staff pundits are pushing for ending inequality, which would cost him or her a lot of money and would upset the CEO’s of the media company’s major advertisers. And the pundits know it. Put another way, pundits all know that they can make a lot more money being David Brooks than being someone who questions the adverse effects on the country of the activities of the Republican party.
The theory that all things tend to excess certainly applies to the Republican party, with Trump being the ultimate excess. Joe McCarthy started them down this road when he decided at his well-known Georgetown meeting that advocating government healthcare would not work as a policy ploy as the Democrats would out bid the Republicans. So he turned instead to selling fear in the form of his anti-Communist witch hunt.
The basic problem faced by Republicans for about 66 years is that Democrats are always pushing for at least some programs that would help a majority of the people, while Republicans opposed these programs (see Social Security and Medicare, for example). Republicans are tightly tied to the rich businessmen who fund the party and who don’t want to see their tax dollars wasted on making life better for other people. Thus, Republicans have been forced since McCarthy to appeal to fear of something to get voters to vote against their best interests: communists, terrorists, etc.
Richard Nixon decided to expand the party base by making a thinly disguised pitch to racist white people in the South. Then as the cold war was winding down, Ronald Reagan made the centerpiece of the Republican pitch for votes the argument to all white Americans that their problems, particularly economic problems, were caused by blacks, women and Hispanics who were aided in their scheme to hurt white people by liberals, big government and labor unions. Reagan and all other Republican politicians promised middle class America, and particularly working white people, that by making rich people richer and making international trade easier for big business, the middle class would get richer: the “A rising tide lifts all boats” claim.
To seal the deal with white middle class American, the Republican party also distracted social conservatives with lots of talk about crime, evil black people, women acting like men, the need for everyone to have lots of guns so they could protect themselves from the federal government, etc. Republicans also talked about the need for “small government”, which middle class white voters were told meant keeping the federal government from helping blacks, women and Hispanics from taking jobs from white people. In reality “small government” means protecting the economic interests of big businessmen by keeping the federal government from regulating their many activities which make CEO’s richer and the rest of us poorer.
Any pundit could have seen this going on, since it has gone on for decades, but they didn’t want to. Besides if they did see it and mentioned it, Republicans would yell at them and call them socialist, communists, and other names, and they’d probably lose their jobs. So blindness became the order of the day for pundits.
Thereafter, things worked toward excess. Because the Republican party had cut itself loose from facts and reality and could hardly tell its voters that they were taking their votes and using them to help big businessmen take their money and jobs, there was no objective criteria to which a Republican who wanted to moderate the policies of the party could appeal. Anyone who did so could be defeated in a primary by someone claiming to have a “purer” version of the party’s policies. The more a Republican politician became a parody of the party, the more likely he or she was to be elected. Which should also have been a warning bell for pundits.
The next warning bell was the Tea Party, which pundits dismissed as just a bunch of crazy people who didn’t understand how politics worked through compromise and reasonableness. Pundits refused to recognize two related things about the Tea Party: one is that it is basically racist (its support is highest in areas that poll as heavily racist) and the second is that Tea Party supporters had figured out that they were being sold out by the Republican party establishment. Even if pundits could not read economic statistics, middle class Republicans could tell that they were getting poorer, largely because their middle class jobs were disappearing. Worse, although they had not yet caught up to whites, blacks, women and Hispanics were seeing wage increases and were steadily moving more and more into positions of importance in American society. All the Republican promises about rising tides and boats had been lies. The economy was growing, but not their income. Further, Republicans had done nothing about the evils of blacks, women and Hispanics or the social changes that were happening in the country. These disaffected voters decided that the problem was that the Republican politicians they had been voting for were not committed enough to the principals of the Republican party, so they backed the Tea Party’s attempt to purify the party, which just made the party more extreme.
As pundits refused to see the racist appeal of the Tea Party, so they missed the economic and social distress of its supporters. Of course, the pundits would have been afraid to mention racism even if they had recognized it, since to do so would get them yelled at. Likewise, to publicly recognize that the Republican party had become a con job enriching the richest contributors to the party was also unwise if you were a pundit. So as a class, pundits convinced themselves that they didn’t see what would be dangerous to notice.
At this point, the rush to ever more excess accelerated. Republican politicians became more disconnected from reality. The election of a black President made it clear to their racist supporters that the party had massively failed them. Any attempt to work with that President, even when the country desperately needed help in a huge economic crisis most often resulted in a loss of one’s office. The way to election was to claim to be more and more “pure”, i.e., extreme, in support of the party’s appeal to fear and hate.
Nonetheless, even the Tea Party members could not stop, and actually didn’t try to stop, the flow of wealth and income from the middle class to the 1%. Pundits still refused to see this happening, but the middle class was all too aware of it. And so the white middle class, recognizing what was happening to them and that, despite all the Republican promises, nothing was being done to help them, sank into depression and opiate and heroin addiction. It turns out voting Republican is a gateway drug.
Into this mind-set came Donald Trump as the incarnation of Howard Beale saying on behalf of the white middle class “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.” While all the other Republican candidates tried to play the old game of promising purity, Trump promised to kick the establishment, both Republican and Democratic, in the teeth and to finally put blacks, women, Hispanics, rich businessmen, etc. in their place. Frankly, it’s the logical next plea to Republican votes.
It does not matter to Trump supporters whether he has any actual programs to solve their problems or whether what programs he does mention make any sense or are practical. Neither does it matter that his life doesn’t exactly fit with their alleged moral views. All that matters is that he is the living embodiment of their distress, powerlessness, sense of abandonment by the Republican party, and need to at least be heard. Again, the thought that desperate people do desperate things should have occurred to the pundit class or at least it might have had they been paying attention to the decades and decades of decline of the middle class.
Another quote which the pundits should put on their computers might be this from Lincoln, which in this case applies to Republican voters: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” If you try, you eventually get Donald Trump.