By DICK MORRIS, Published on TheHill.com, 5/17/16
Donald Trump is not only changing the Republican Party; he
is causing an overall partisan realignment in America -- one that impacts
Democrats as well.
Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign shows how far from
its populist roots the Democratic Party has strayed. Trump's victory over the
GOP field shows the same thing about the Republican Party.
The New York billionaire is stealing the base out from under
both political parties.
Trump's candidacy and its challenge to the economic and
social establishments of America highlights how close Hillary Clinton is to
both. She is the candidate of the status quo in a country seething with a
craving for political change.
Trump is the sole provider of change in this election.
Clinton may trot out her little bitty programs of incremental change, creeping
forward from the Obama agenda, but it doesn't come close to the full-scale
assault on income inequality, crony capitalism, free trade giveaways, rampant
illegal immigration and political correctness gone berserk that the populists
of both parties want.
But Trump is doing more than driving populist Democrats into
Republican arms. He is separating the establishment left of the Democratic
Party from its populist base. His candidacy separates the blue-collar social
populists from their partisan moorings even as his economic populism appeals to
the Sanders left.
A new Democratic Party is emerging from the wreckage.
The moderate and conservative Democrat is coming back from
his days of extinction. President Obama's transgender bathrooms, release of
convicted felons, opposition to photo IDs, amnesty for illegals, rising
healthcare premiums and obstinate refusal to call Islamic terrorism by its real
name have so alienated them that they are now rising in protest. And Trump is
giving them an outlet and a forum.
At the same time, Trump's attacks on crony capitalism, trade
deals that cost jobs and Wall Street money are loosening the partisan
allegiances of the Sanders left. Embittered by the primary, these Democrats now
see how closely allied the party is with Wall Street and how its submissiveness
drives its policy agenda. And when they see Trump echoing parts of their own agenda,
they may be willing to give him a second look.
They may express their outrage at Obama by voting for Trump
now. But that won't be the end. They will likely return to the Democratic Party
and oust the establishment liberals who rule it.
Trump is combining social and economic populism in a way
other politicians before him have failed to do. In his 1995 work "Populist
Persuasion," Michael Kazin separates these two varieties of populism --
economic and social -- and traces their evolution. He discusses how the
economic populism of President Andrew Jackson's opposition to a national bank
evolved into the farmer rebellions of the 1890s through the development of
organized labor and the 1960s new left. And, in consecutive chapters, he traces
the evolution of social populism from religious fundamentalism through
prohibition into McCarthyism, the white backlash and finally to modern-day
social conservatism.
Trump is the first politician who combines both strands of
populism. By his advocacy of trade protectionism and opposition to big banks,
he reaches the Democratic Party's base of economic populists. And by attacking
illegal immigration and warning of terrorists disguised as refugees, he reaches
social populists in both parties as well.
Increasingly it will become clear that Clinton is not the
vehicle for any kind of change but rather the embodiment of a special interest
status quo. And, more and more, Trump will ambidextrously drown her, from the
left and the right, beneath the waves of a political Red Sea.
Source:dickmorris.com
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