An Actual Election?

Well kind of. If you count a caucus as an election. So here we go, the 2016 presidential election gets under way with something more than hyperbolic news reporting. Sometime in the next twenty-four hours we will have hyperbolic reporting tinged with actual voter information.

All the preamble, which feels as if it began in 2008, is now over. People, rather than telling pollsters who they like or dislike, are having to pin their colors to the proverbial mast.

Which is what is known as a ‘good thing’.

One reason, the reason for chatting about it today rather than tomorrow, is that I am tired of the so-called experts telling me who is and who is not electable. I think that’s for us to decide.

Electability is always tossed into election races when someone with some momentum behind them is seen as threat to the establishment. This year that means people like Trump or Cruz on the right and Sanders on the left. Such people are branded as extremists or populists – I cannot quite tell which it is worse to be – and are then lampooned as being incapable of implementing their oft derided extreme or popular agendas.

In Sanders case this ‘electability’ issue blurs into a ‘implementability’ issue. We need to unpack this problem:

First, the notion that Sanders would have a problem implementing his programs is a great compliment. It implies that the serious analyst making the charge is, at least, capable of contemplating that Sanders could win. After all no one can have an ‘implementability’ problem if they aren’t in the position to try. So score one for Sanders’ momentum. He apparently has the establishment worried. And no one is more establishment than Clinton. She actually sings the praises of current policy. She affirms we are on the right course. She says we just need a steady hand. Her hand of course.

Second, let’s digest this implementability thing a bit. Surely one of the reasons this election is packed with so-called extremists and populists is that voters have a hard time perceiving that anything has been implemented in recent years. Or at least, anything that matters to them. The establishment needs to take a good hard look at its own record: what has the combined might of the serious people who think they know everything managed to achieve since 2008?

Not much.

Gridlock.

Non-Implementation on a grand scale. Obamacare being a major exception. An exception that managed to be implemented because it was a total fudge. So the critics of someone like Sanders hardly have a triumphant record as a basis for their criticism of him. Far from it.

It gets worse.

Third, and related to the last point, is the idea that extremists and populists are articulating programs that are impractical on their face. In Sanders case this is the charge leveled at his health care and Wall Street reform programs. To make matters worse those leading that critical charge are amongst the leaders – or used to be – of the liberal intelligentsia. Astonishingly, such folk as Paul Krugman have morphed from lambasting the attitudes and platitudes of ‘establishment’ people to being advocates of caution and incrementalism. Whereas once Krugman could scarcely contain himself with respect to the insider so-called serious crowd, he has now jumped onboard and embraced their position openly.

Why?

After all it’s not as if the serious insider crowd have delivered a sparkling economy, rising prosperity, social harmony or any such thing. And, to put it bluntly, the very grist of Krugman’s own intellectual milieu – equilibrium based economics – is hardly a realistic fact based rock solid planets earth type of thing.

No. I think it’s more that the establishment Democrats fear that Sanders might stir up emotions and ideas that the neoliberal consensus finds alien. So the establishment closes ranks, and deploys the ‘implementability’ word.

The way I look at things implementability is derived from two sources: willpower and cooperation, with so-called political realities heavily influenced by the former. And willpower can be sourced from the voters. This is a democracy isn’t it?

Which is the central issue in this election.

For a few decades now we have drifted steadily away from democracy towards a plutocracy managed by technocrats. The will of the people, indeed the wellbeing of the people, has been largely secondary throughout this long era in which an ever smaller cadre of businesses and wealthy people co-opted government for themselves.

The extremism and populism so disliked by the media is exactly a rejection, by the voters, of the results of this long era. The desire for change is in the air. Which the serious insider folk are trying to forestall. Why wouldn’t they? It’s been their era.

The next might not be. Hence the fear.

In any case, the first votes will be cast tonight, and we can then start to see whether the momentum for change has enough power to break the self-satisfied and self-congratulatory grip of the establishment. An establishment that has failed and is in sore need of being tossed aside.