Sanders, Trump, and the war over American exceptionalism

The one area where Sanders might appear to share Trump’s desire to keep America apart would be trade. The billionaire Republican proposes tariffs against countries like China and Japan that “rip America off,” and Sanders, for his part, has opposed every trade deal since NAFTA. As a result, it’s possible, especially as the presidential campaign moves to Midwestern industrial states hard hit by global competition, that Sanders could win voters who might otherwise support Trump.

But if you look at Sanders’s ultimate vision for the global economy, it’s not separatist at all. He doesn’t oppose international trade; he just wants to regulate it. He supports “a progressive alternative to corporate globalism-based on global labor rights, environmental protections, sustainable development, democratization and international institutions to counter uncontrolled deflations and the race to the bottom.” This “new architecture” for the global economy may seem far-fetched. But it helps explain why Sanders’s supporters oppose trade deals without opposing immigration. They’re happy for America to integrate itself more into the rest of the world, so long as they believe that integration increases justice for the poor and working class. Sanders, after all, is a socialist. And socialists have historically challenged international capitalism not by retreating behind borders but by forging links with workers of different countries and thus building an internationalism of their own.

Despite their victories in New Hampshire, it’s still unlikely either Sanders or Trump will win their party’s nomination. But their success says something profound about the shifting identities of the two political parties. While grassroots Democrats and Republicans remain divided over the size of government, increasingly, what divides them even more is American exceptionalism. In ways that would have been unthinkable in the mid-20th century, the boundaries between American and non-American identity are breaking down. Powered by America’s secular, class-conscious, transnational young people, Democrats are embracing an Americanism that is less distinct than ever before from the rest of the world. And the more Democrats do, the more likely it is that future Trumps will rise.