The three remaining presidential candidates have all built their campaigns around the grievances of their supporters, and this reflects something not so great about the state of our country.
Donald Trump is huge when it comes to grievance. He has explicitly exploited latent and not so latent racism, sexism and xenophobia. When his supporters say, as they do routinely, that they like him because he isn’t “politically correct” and he’s “just saying what we’re thinking,” you have to fear for your country. This is what people are really thinking?
Bernie Sanders’ entire campaign is built around resentment of “the one percent” and of Wall Street. Now, in my view these are more legitimate grievances backed up by facts. The top one percent of earners in the United States have done much better than the rest of us. Lots of people in the middle class and those who are poorer are working harder for less, while the very richest among us get to enjoy the fruits of their labors. A legitimate case can be made that the economy was brought down in 2008 in large part because of the practices of Wall Street types, who not only skated away from any responsibility but who have continued the party since.
And Hillary Clinton has cobbled together a veritable coalition of the aggrieved. Blacks, Hispanics, women, the LGBT community. If you’ve been discriminated against or put upon in any way because of your identity, Clinton is there to say she’s going to fight for you. And, like Sanders, her followers have some absolutely legitimate reasons to be angry.
But contrast all of this with the dominant message of candidate Barack Obama in 2008. “Hope” was at the very core of his campaign. He actually played down identity politics, choosing not to emphasize the historic nature of a man poised to become the first African American president. In my view, his understatement made his statement all the more powerful. I am not a person given easily to emotion, but I teared up at the Democratic Convention in Denver when Obama went over the top and became the party’s nominee and they played “Love Train.”
Obama appealed to the better angels of our nature, not to our resentments, even if many of those resentments were all too justified.
No candidate this year is trying very hard to do what Obama did eight years ago. In fairness, Clinton and Sanders do have portions of their stock message that make weak stabs in the direction of hope and unity, but it would be a big stretch to say that those sentiments were at the center of their messages. The bull’s eye of their campaigns is that you have been treated badly by others and your candidate will set it right.
Successful candidates are as much about marketing as they are about ideas. The fact that three candidates with what are essentially negative messages have been left standing (well at least two; it’s a debatable point whether Sanders is still upright) speaks volumes about what the American people really want right now. They want someone who will give voice to their anger, and their anger is, to some large extent, focused on some other subset of their fellow Americans.
It all makes a guy long for a little more reticence and stoicism — traits that Obama has been accused of having. Yes, we have some legitimate wounds, but one admirable aspect of human nature is to grow a thicker skin, to turn the other cheek, to persevere without complaint. Those qualities are way out of style right now. What’s in is to document in great detail just exactly how you’ve been wronged because of who you are. We seem to be living in a time when it is encouraged to give full voice to every slight, every “micro-aggression” both real and perceived.
When President Hillary Clinton takes office in January, as I fervently believe she will, I hope she’ll encourage us to pull back some on the national sharing circle. Like Nixon going to China, her heavy use of identity politics in her own campaign would put her in a uniquely strong position to do that.
It’s true that we need a much fairer distribution of wealth and income in our society. It’s true that racism and sexism persist and need to be corrected. But it’s also true that a society that encourages the obsessive identification of grievance is one that probably only deepens its fissures.
Here’s to a little more stoicism — a little more “Barackism” — in the national character.