Requiem for a Ruling Elite

Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax] Chronicle Herald

Maybe the astounding result in the 2016 American presidential election, which saw the most improbable of candidates, Donald Trump, beat the seasoned pro, Hillary Clinton, should not have been the shock it was.

A system that had completely failed tens of millions of people for decades, and especially after 2008, needed a rude awakening. The Democrats even lost the “rust belt” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, long their bastions!

The political elites, had Hillary Clinton won, would over the next few years have allowed the rage to continue building, and 2020 would be a lot worse than today.

A really smart ruling class would have allowed Bernie Sanders to beat Hillary Clinton in the primaries, instead of fixing it and crowning her.

Now they’re looking for excuses. Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal even claimed that a group of “right-wing agents” in the FBI intentionally prevented Clinton from behind elected president.

This is indeed sour grapes. Clinton lost because not enough of members of her core constituency came out for her.

Clinton held an 80-point advantage among African-Americans, but was unable to match Obama’s 87-point edge in 2012. She won 65 per cent of Latino voters, compared with the 71 per cent who voted for Obama in 2012.

Among millennials, she won 54 per cent, compared with 60 per cent for Obama in 2012.

With women, she barely improved on Obama, gaining 54 per cent among them, just one per cent more than Obama’s vote in 2012.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, “overturned the table.” We are in uncharted waters, for sure, but with Clinton, the establishment seemed oblivious to the charted ones, and they were heading straight for the rocks.

“The Democratic Party’s failure to keep Donald Trump out of the White House in 2016 will go down as one of the all-time examples of insular arrogance,” wrote Matt Taibbi on the Rolling Stone magazine website on Nov. 10. It bullied anyone who dared question its campaign strategy by calling them racists, sexists and agents of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

“Trump's election was a true rebellion, directed at anyone perceived to be part of ‘the establishment.’ The target group included political leaders, bankers, industrialists, academics, Hollywood actors, and, of course, the media.”

The rage was directed at institutions that people believe have failed them and at an economy that doesn’t work for ordinary workers. Voters saw the aftermath of a financial crisis and Great Recession in which the gap between winners and losers just grew larger, and perpetrators escaped punishment.

 “What has happened in America should not be seen as a victory for hatefulness over decency,” contended Robert Reich, a former Democratic Secretary of Labour, in the Guardian of London, Nov. 10. It is more accurately understood as a repudiation of the American power structure.

“Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don’t reflect the insecurity most Americans continue to feel,” he wrote. They do not show the linkages between wealth and power, stagnant or declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, “and the undermining of democracy by big money.”

When liberal elites are unable to deal with, or even acknowledge, major cultural and economic problems, just calling those who are hurting names, people turn to the extremes.

After 2008, President Obama needed to be a reformer like Franklin Roosevelt, but he wasn’t. Instead, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd noted in her Nov. 13 column, he “settled comfortably into being an Ivy League East Coast cerebral elitist who hung out with celebrities, lectured Congress and scorned the art of political persuasion.”

His presidency will end with Democrats in possession of 11 fewer Senate seats, more than 60 fewer House seats, at least 14 fewer governorships and more than 900 fewer seats in state legislatures than when it began.

So maybe now we may have a “Huey Long” demagogue in the White House. The Democrats asked for it.