Analysis of the 2016 presidential election
(appeared in Green Horizon Spring 2017)
Hillary Clinton didn’t do poorly on November 8. She won the popular vote by more than two million. She had large margins in the states where she was expected to do well. She lost by a little in some of the key swing states, and that gave Trump his victory in the Electoral College.
Nonetheless, the Democratic Party as a whole had a very bad day. They gained fewer than expected seats in both the House and the Senate. They came away controlling only 13 statehouses out of 50! The results constituted a repudiation by the Outsiders—and that’s ironic because the Democrats used to be the party of the Outsiders.
Until the Great Depression the establishment elites were the conservative Northern WASP industrialists. They were associated with the Republican Party. Outsiders included farmers, immigrants, ethnics, workers, and Southern former-confederates. They generally supported the Democratic Party. Now the establishment elites are the cosmopolitan liberals, financiers, and media magnates. Vast numbers of those who live outside the cosmopolitan centers are deeply alienated and tend to vote in a way that they viscerally feel to be “anti-establishment.” It’s their perception that the liberal elites, in the manner of noblesse oblige, pay a lot of attention to urban and identity minorities—but little attention to them, the salt-of-the-earth traditional Americans of the heartland. They associate the elites with the Democratic Party and so they express their resentment by voting Republican. When the cosmopolitans refer to their states and communities, the vast red expanse on the electoral map, as “fly-over territory,” it rankles deeply. The inhabitants of that expanse have been trying to send a message for decades—in essence: “Fly-over” Lives Matter, Too. They saw the Trump campaign as a vehicle for delivering that message.
It wasn’t Trump’s (shifting) platform positions or (incoherent) solutions they were paying attention to. Rather, it was his strident critique and audacious anti-establishment posture.
Loss after loss
The way the red-state marginalized are venting their frustration is counterproductive at best and pathological at worst. Nonetheless, it needs to be acknowledged how they’ve been suffering loss after loss:
. they lose the best and brightest among their children, who leave town to go off to the Significant parts of the country;
. they’ve lost the “material stuff” . . . secure, decent-paying unionized jobs;
. beyond that, and equally distressing, they’ve lost the “soul stuff” . . . cultural stature, community cohesion, and a meaningful future.
The Republican Party cynically manipulates their valid sentiments of despair. The mainstream of the Democratic Party—the faction entrenched since the Bill Clinton-led ascendance of the Democratic Leadership Council thirty years ago—barely pays lip-service. Why? Because the Republicans and Democrats, equally committed to the globalized-trade/industrial-growth economic paradigm, have no idea how to address the frustration of those who wind up being a casualty of it.
I believe the Green Party could address that frustration. In fact, I think GP national campaigns will under-realize their potential until they do so. The key is to convey the distinctive Green economic alternative. That sounds straightforward, yet too often, especially in electoral campaigns, its most transformative aspects are attenuated or compromised. Green candidates tend to be reticent in this realm of policy due to concern that mainstream discourse will write them off as unrealistic.
Such a scenario played out in post-liberation India. Gandhi’s ability to inspire the populace was appreciated by the practical politicians of the movement. But when he tried to convey his vision of what the Greens now call “community-based economics,” Gandhi was dismissed as a dreamer who ought to stick to spiritual matters. Mainstream discourse considered the serious discussion to be centered around the debate between the socialist development model and the left-liberal New Deal model. Seven decades later we can say that both of the latter have been tried and found wanting. Neither has been able to address the needs of the hundreds of millions of Indian villagers who suffer from a frustration that disaffected red-state Americans—probably to their surprise—might very much empathize with.
The only viable alternative
The Greens hold a programmatic key to the conundrum that confounds all the mainstream parties and ideologies. Community-based economics is the only viable alternative to the globalized-trade/industrial-growth paradigm. In this country, the Greens, from their unique decentralist perspective, could and should explain that the fate of America’s small cities and rural towns within the hegemonic world-system is decidedly inauspicious, in fact is bound to yield nothing but despair. Industrial jobs are not coming back; upward-mobility is not coming back; American Greatness, in terms of the old conception of it, is not coming back.
But there could be a liberatory kind of hope in a reconceptualization of “greatness” as a high quality of life within the context of a thriving localized economy. Such would involve a gradual disengagement from the globalized juggernaut, with an objective of restoring communitarian self-reliance, integrity, and stability. It’s the only real solution. A problem is that, even when fully embraced, it’s not all so easy to elucidate in the electoral arena.
Beyond the “Green New Deal”
In 2016 Jill Stein arguably ran the best Green presidential campaign in the party’s short history. She tripled her vote total from 2012. The final metrics of the campaign didn’t quite match those of Ralph Nader’s campaign of 2000, but Jill is much more of a party builder, and so the legacy of her campaign will benefit the Greens more than did Nader’s.
Programatically, however, the Stein campaign continued the pattern of Green Party candidates putting forward an essentially social democratic platform: too much statist dependency, too much standard leftism. Such has been the default orientation of just about all contemporary progressive electoral campaigns, Green or otherwise, for decades (vide: Jesse Jackson, Nader, Kucinich, Sanders).
It’s not visionary enough. It’s not alternative enough. I’m not saying that unsympathetically. Introducing a fundamentally new paradigm is enormously challenging. But the Greens should see that as their role. Where Trump was audacious posturally (easy to do), the Greens need to be audacious programmatically—not easy to do, but necessary in order to go to the root of the problem. Also: such could get the attention of the Others—the frustrated townfolk of Kansas, the urban minorities who feel stuck generation after generation, the atomized debt-laden suburban nuclear families, even the disgruntled cosmopolitans who live in the shadows of the elites. Some of these people have decent jobs, some are educated and have achieved a modicum of affluence, but almost all have lost the most vital of things: right livelihood, a sense of place and meaning, a healthy relationship with nature, grounding in a stable and participatory community life.
Jill Stein got well over a million votes. That shows a glimmer of the potential of Green politics. But to break out, the Greens will need to break away. There was an idea during the summer of 2016 that they could plug into the energy of the defunct Bernie Sanders campaign. There had been excitement among progressives about Bernie’s endeavor to transform the Democratic Party into a European-style social democratic party. No doubt that would have been quite an achievement, given the stolid inertia of American politics. But, really, how exciting is it, ultimately? A social democratic presence would usher in some welcome reforms relative to what this country has been all about, but it’s hardly liberatory. The Europeans themselves are expressing dissatisfaction, even boredom, with social democracy.
The Green Party should be more audacious than that. It should go beyond the tepid soft leftism of the “Green New Deal.” It should be talking about a whole new direction.
Don’t shy away from a discourse of transformation
Disappointment with Obama’s “hope and change” during the last eight years may represent a turning point for America’s marginalized populations, most of whom now see no pathway to salvation. Their frustration has deepened qualitatively and is now manifesting in such disparate phenomena as Black Lives Matter and the Alt-Right. In the guise of Trumpismo it has the potential to breed pathological responses like xenophobia, racism, and strong-man/strong-state populism.
One reason why Hillary Clinton lost the election is because the Democrats have nothing more in the way of “hope and change” to offer. What Greens need to do is counter the noxious expression of the Trumpist “alternative” with a discourse of transformation that can show the way toward a healthy and regenerative road forward. They must find ways to weave their full vision into programs appropriate to all levels and all types of electoral and movement campaigns.
Again: there’s the concern that messaging “too far outside of the box” will not be taken seriously. Wasn’t that Gandhi’s pitfall?
I think the context of Gandhi’s predicament was that he was a lone and lonely voice speaking a truth that was ahead of its time. Several generations later it’s clear that a post-neoliberal sensibility is emerging, and the limited ideological alternatives of Gandhi’s time have been superseded. Green politics is notable precisely in that regard. It’s the electoral expression of a new-but-growing movement that’s steadily becoming a worldwide force. Its transformative perspective may not yet be fully appreciated, but the American election of 2016 shows the extent to which the alienated and marginalized are clamoring for an “outside of the box” alternative to the antipathetic status quo.
Those who misguidedly turned to a problematic populism last year will become disaffected when they see that Trumpismo is based on magical thinking regarding restoration of jobs, affluence, and the good life. A true alternative would involve a re-conception of what constitutes “the good life.” It would question the whole “jobs” system. It would elucidate how right livelihood flows from the organic sustenance of meaningful local community life (as was Gandhi’s contention). Greens know this. It’s embedded in their Ten Key Values. They must learn how to present it politically. It’s the remedy for this country’s drift toward embitterment and malaise.
