He promises free healthcare, free higher education (primary education being already free) and a decent minimum wage, for all. Sanders presents a simple pitch based on three clear socio-economic issues, and a political one. Sanders, on the other hand, is appealing to what remains of the American people’s hopes of getting a fair and just deal in society. Trump is seeking to make capital of people’s deep fears and anxieties.
And it is here that the resemblance between Trump and Sanders ends abruptly. Populists appeal directly to strongly felt hopes and fears. A huge public sentiment, in its primordial form, is trying to defy the limits that the elite consensus affords people – turning the primaries into a battle between elitism and populism. In this sense, both Donald Trump, the by-now famous Republican hate-monger, and Bernie Sanders, the challenger to Hillary Clinton’s bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination, represent a similar political impulse. The 2016 presidential election is different from earlier contests because of the way in which this widely resented elite consensus is being challenged from left and right. The stranglehold of big business over election finance, aided by some significant court decisions, helps fix the boundaries of this elite consensus.īut then democracy has a way of throwing up surprises. Between them, two political parties divide up the US political spectrum, creating a narrow zone of elite consensus within which politics is allowed to play. The United States is as good a democracy as any other in formal terms but there has been a great amount of despair about the actual control its citizens exercise over the country’s political institutions and policies.
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