The New Hampshire results are in, and both parties look terrible. For the Republicans, the base is worse than the leadership. For the Democrats, the leadership is worse than the base.
Half the Republican base generally regards foreigners as job-stealing, welfare-loving rapists and terrorists. Such rank nativism hasn’t played a significant role in American politics since the twenties.
For the Democrats, the shame is that the party finds that, thanks to its repeated decimations at the state level, it has no choice for president other than a creaky creature of Wall Street who wants to get in a pissing match with a nuclear power over a country (Syria) of very limited importance to the U.S. and a superannuated socialist from Brooklyn who’s basically been in a time capsule since 1963.
I can’t blame the entire mess on the parties, though I’d like to. Virtually all of “Europe” (which includes North America) has been struggling both with the frustrations born from the worst economic downturn in living memory (after we’d all been “promised” an ever-expanding global economy) and an often horrendous “culture war” between North and South. We in the U.S. are far better off than Europe. Our economy is much stronger than theirs, and our “southerners”, almost entirely from Latin America, are stunningly benign. And yet, even here, the combination is enough to roil many Americans into near hysteria.
America’s elites need to look in the mirror. They need to ask themselves why the strongest voices in American politics today belong to a nativist blowhard and Eugene Debs’ grandson.
Afterwords
Michael Bloomberg keeps thinking he might be the solution to all this. You’re not the solution, Mike. You’re the problem.
