With no other option, voters tired of cronyism are supporting Sanders and Trump
It’s easy to despair about this election season – to think that Trump voters are all psychopaths, or Sanders voters are all communists. Consider a cheerier interpretation, though: that the American people – right, left and in the middle – have an acute sense of fairness. They feel so strongly about it that when voting for fairness leaves them no great choice, they’ll do it, anyway.
“You may not like Trump. And you may not like Sanders. But if you think white-collar cronyism and corruption have done great harm to the nation, who are you supposed to vote for? ”
The 2008 economic collapse was a deep trauma for everyone, across political parties, races and age groups. (If you aren’t still a little traumatized, you’re probably the elite everyone is voting against.)
The bailouts that followed changed the way people think and vote, if not forever, then for at least three elections.
Were the bailouts necessary? That, still, is debatable. Were they deeply unfair? Yes.
Both parties, led by a Republican president, joined together and used taxpayer money to reward people and companies who had failed. Reasonable people, of course, didn’t want to see investors who made terrible decisions tarred and feathered, but Americans did want to see them accept the consequences of their actions.
Instead, the world’s financial elites were declared “too big to fail.”
For decades, the country was losing millions of blue-collar jobs, and no one cared. But when a banker close to the president almost loses his bank? That’s when we have a crisis.
The politicos in D.C. may have moved on, but few seem to realize the harm they inflicted on a supposedly free-market economy when they abandoned free markets.
Consider former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s debate performance on the eve of the Michigan primary. She thought she had an easy win in auto country.
“He was against the auto bailout,” she gleefully said of Sen. Bernie Sanders. “The money was there. I voted to save the auto industry. He voted against the money that ended up saving the auto industry.”
This was supposed to be a curveball, but instead it was a softball.
“If you are talking about the Wall Street bailout, where some of your friends destroyed this economy … did I vote against the Wall Street bailout?” Sanders said. “When billionaires on Wall Street destroyed this economy, they went to Congress and they said, ‘please, we’ll be good boys, bail us out.’ You know what I said? I said, ‘let the billionaires themselves bail out Wall Street.’ It shouldn’t be the middle class.”
Two days later, Sanders won. And he didn’t just win college girls. He won nearly two-thirds of white men.
People are not as dumb as Clinton took them to be. They know that just as airlines can go bankrupt and still fly planes, auto companies can go bankrupt and still make cars. The bailouts largely helped sophisticated investors, not working-class Americans.
By this point, this issue isn’t even that Clinton voted for the bailouts, Wall Street or otherwise. It’s that she doesn’t even see defending bailouts as a problem. She should have stayed as far away from 2008 as she could in that debate, and yet she brought it up.
She even used the world “bailout” as if it is a good thing, not realizing that it’s become one of the most toxic words in politics over the past near-decade.
Trump finds the same voters Sanders does. All he has had to say, and he says it repeatedly, is that he doesn’t take Wall Street’s money.
You may not like Trump. And you may not like Sanders.
But if you think white-collar cronyism and corruption have done great harm to the nation, who are you supposed to vote for? The woman who took millions giving speeches to Wall Street? The bailout president’s brother?
If people don’t have good options, they’ll take bad ones.
This is only unhealthy if it doesn’t eventually yield them some good options. For now, though, many people are voting for the supposed pariah not out of anger, but out of hope.
This piece originally appeared at U.S. News & World Report
This piece originally appeared in U.S. News and World Report