This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. Then everything changed.Ī story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing emails that damaged Clinton’s chances. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton’s defeat. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more capacious Democratic strategy. Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. Many registered their disaffection in 2016. Both agendas have proved calamitous for most Americans. Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means of fighting evil in order to secure global progress. Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump’s triumph, revealed the breadth of popular anger at politics as usual – the blend of neoliberal domestic policy and interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington. The repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are troubling enough, but so is the Democratic Party leadership’s failure to take in the significance of the 2016 election campaign. A merican politics have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle.
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