Trump and Sanders campaigns both represent insurgencies against party elites, they represent insurgencies aimed at taking America in radically different directions. One way of understanding those different directions is through American exceptionalism. Sanders voters want to make America more like the rest of the world. Trump voters want to keep America a nation apart.
.. American exceptionalism has meant different things at different historical periods. But today, it generally denotes Americans’ peculiar faith in God, flag, and free market—a religiosity, a nationalism, and a rejection of socialism and class-consciousness that distinguishes the United States from other advanced democracies. The Sanders campaign represents an assault on all three.
.. A 2011 Pew Research Surveyfound that while Americans 65 and older favored capitalism over socialism by 39 points, Americans under 30 favored socialism.
.. Chroniclers of American exceptionalism have long argued that the reason Americans eschew socialism is because they don’t see themselves as members of a fixed class. Instead, they see their economic position as fluid.
.. Young Americans, the population to whom Sanders appeals most, don’t believe that. Polls show that they are far more likely than their elders to believe that the rich got that way because they “know the right people or were born into wealthy families” than because “of their own hard work, ambition and education.” Older Americans overwhelmingly identify themselves as “haves.” A majority of younger Americans, by contrast, call themselves “have nots.”
.. Sanders is succeeding as a secular candidate because the young are making America—and especially the Democratic Party—more like Europe.
.. “The U.S.,” he declared upon announcing his presidential campaign, “has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.”
.. Trump’s supporters like the fact that he’s rich, blunt, and hasn’t spent his life in politics. But his pledges to keep the rest of the world at bay are core to his appeal.
.. 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.
Hillary Has ‘Half a Dream’
.. The two scenes so close to each other drove home the point for me: Hillary Clinton has a threatening young voter problem.
.. As Clinton put it Thursday in a swipe at Sanders, “I’m not making promises that I cannot keep.”
But the pragmatic progressive line is not going to help her chip away at Sanders’s support among the young. That support is hardening into hipness.
The Big Money Question at the Sanders-Clinton Debate
he threw in a line that is the nub of her defense and, in many ways, of her entire campaign: “I know this game. I’m going to stop this game.”
.. One difficulty for Clinton is that many of the voters who are drawn to Sanders—and to Donald Trump—do not believe that you can simply look at voting records and public pronouncements and understand what is going on in Washington, or in America generally. They have questions about what donors want, and may not see such inquiries as outrageous, like Clinton does. She is walking a fine line by arguing that money has a baleful influence in politics generally but has left her, personally, unaffected—Clintonian exceptionalism.
Hillary asked to release transcripts of Wall Street paid speeches
But Thursday night also opened up a new, unexpected front for Clinton on the paid speeches she gave to Wall Street after she left office. After struggling on Wednesday to answer why she took $675,000 for three speeches to Goldman Sachs, she was asked on Thursday to release transcripts of all her paid speeches to large corporations. It’s a question that clearly caught her off guard, and one her campaign will now be forced to address.
.. Sanders didn’t say it directly – but he didn’t back down, either, even as Clinton shouted over him. “Let’s talk about why, in the 1990s, Wall Street got deregulated,” he said. “Did it have anything to do with the fact that Wall Street spent billions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions? Well, some people might think, yeah, that had some influence.” “There is a reason why these people are putting huge amounts of money into our political system,” Sanders continued. “And in my view, it is undermining American democracy, and it is allowing Congress to represent wealthy campaign contributors, and not the working families of this country!”