Trump alone perceived America’s status quo crisis

What seems remarkable now, thinking back to the early months of the presidential campaign season, is how seemingly oblivious nearly all the candidates were to the extent and depth of the crises gripping America and the world. Consider once again poor Jeb Bush. The media and the political class made much of his initial inability, when asked about his brother George’s invasion of Iraq, to deliver a coherent answer that incorporated any lessons to be learned from that far-reaching misadventure. But that was the least of his problems. Throughout his ill-planned and ill-fated political foray, he campaigned as if he thought he still operated in the day of his father. He spoke without force, which held him back in a time of potent political turmoil, but, more importantly, without any apparent sense of urgency, without any discernible recognition of the calamitous forces swirling around his ears.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz did speak in forceful terms, but his answer was to double down on his party’s hard-right attitudes and demands—to resurrect Ronald Reagan and then move boldly beyond him to galvanize a majority within party and country. It couldn’t be done. Reagan, a highly successful president, probably deserves a “near great’’ ranking from history. But he ran the country in an era far different from today. More problematic for Cruz, the country didn’t want the same old ossified positions of right or left that contributed so much to the country’s political logjams. It wanted fresh thinking, a new cluster of ideas and positions, a new dialectic of politics capable of pulling together new coalitions that could break the country’s deadlock crisis.

As for Clinton, she not only couldn’t speak in a political idiom that showed an understanding of the underlying realities of America’s crisis politics. She actually put herself forward as a champion of the status quo and, through some unfathomable utterances, a scourge of that working-class contingent that once had been such an integral part of her party. That helped open the way for Bernie Sanders, who spoke to the realities of our time and thus resonated with large numbers of liberal Democrats deeply concerned about the plight of the working class and the growing income and wealth disparities bedeviling the country.