Wolff: Sanders could make Trump president
In the midst of American politics’ swift and kooky realignments, I wrote recently about how Donald Trump’s nomination might give Hillary Clinton the opportunity to build a new middle out of moderate Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans.
A fallacy here might be in the interpretation of moderate Democrats who, instead of being the ballast of the party, are its increasing margin — a majority perhaps but like their Republican opposite numbers, a tongue-tied and flailing one. The center is not, for either party, leading the charge this year, or even holding its own.
Hence, here’s a realignment, no more nutty on the face of it than any other, in which the nomination of Bernie Sanders gives Donald Trump the wherewithal to become, with the help of anti-Sanders Democrats, the more centrist presidential choice.
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The growing enthusiasm for Sanders — in spite of Clinton’s singular opportunity to flatten the Republicans — is rather a freakish indication of the new heart and soul, and stubborn character, of the Democratic left, as well as the party’s stark divide. As Trump and Ted Cruz are for many Republicans, Sanders — with his eccentric extra-economic views about American business and his ex-urban, faux New Englander, would-be Scandinavian, white-bread socialism — is too incomprehensible for many middle-of-the-road Democrats, including blacks and Hispanics.
Yet a path to a Sanders’ victory is clear: Two big wins in Iowa and New Hampshire could make for a delirious and emotional steamroller.
The heretofore unimaginable path to a Trump victory is also shockingly clear: Eliminating Cruz in the early primaries would make him the singular candidate of an apparently unstoppable Republican rejectionism.
In this, both parties and their operating loyalties and conceits will have effectively collapsed, leaving American politics in the grip of an on-the-fly narrative.
Who in this new story becomes more easy to imagine as less radical? The righteous and dedicated left-winger or the outrageous opportunist?
Say this for Sanders, the former Young People's Socialist League and SNCC member has been a remarkably steady, if eccentric, political pilgrim, and if anyone needed it, proof once again of broken clock syndrome. Now old, he may really be the last man standing of the New Left. The 1960s, in all their flakiness and hyperbole, didn’t die, they just went into hibernation in New England. The funky beast comes round again with surprising appeal for a new generation of uncompromising virtue.
Say this for Trump: His long career as a marketer, promoter, showman and crowd-pleaser, on some P. T. Barnum level, is the opposite of ideologically correct. If he has unrestrained and reactionary opinions, few appear to be long-held or deeply considered views. Trump is nothing if not the product of a short attention span.
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Sanders, if he succeeds, will have done so because he represents an emergent and hardening ideological view. He represents the left and its various lines in the sand. Trump, if he succeeds, will do so by representing an extreme dissatisfaction with standard Republicanism and even conservatism. He represents himself and a set of quite unique rhetorical gambits. He is not only at odds with much traditional Republican thought, he is, with a little critical interpretation, the least conservative Republican in the race.
Notable perhaps, people who know Sanders describe him as odd; people who know Trump describe him as actually kind of engaging.
Who has the greater political agility and temperamental inclination to adapt or at least appear more acceptable to the aspirational middle? There is in this not just the reasonable suspicion that Trump is a chameleon who will go with the crowd but arguably that he is, in stark relief to Sanders, the ultimate aspirational figure. His entire career, and his secret political message, speak to that deep American yearning for not just upward mobility but also vulgar ostentation common to most aspects of the electorate.
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Sanders' is a doctrinaire position, upholding orthodox, quixotic and disruptive left-wing economic views, as well as new, unforgiving, cultural pieties. Trump's is a plastic construct reflecting a set of ever-morphing impulses and media enthusiasm — he’s a salesman, and a salesman sells what’s easiest to sell. In a tight spot in which these are the only two choices, the latter could easily be the safer and more ephemeral one.
The two parties have been seized by their peculiar extremes, potentially forcing the great middle into a historic Hobson’s choice. So, yes, Michael Bloomberg, spend a billion—and quickly!