In all honesty, I didn’t really know what to write about this week. I normally write about politics, and I certainly could do that – after all, this has been one of the most eventful elections we’ve had for quite some time.
But that would be meaningless.
I could give you some election updates, but in all honesty, it’s not very eventful as of late: Sanders and Cruz are both bracing for long-haul trench warfare against Clinton and Trump, respectively, and that looks like what will be going on from now until June.
Or, I could spew out another piece on why Trump is really, really bad, and file that under “common knowledge” along with the approximately sixteen million other pieces on the exact same topic (on which I already wrote three) But seriously, there is such an abundance of anti-Trump op-eds that they’ve basically become journalistic cliché. And these pieces are now virtually useless – anybody who reads an anti-Trump piece this late in the game is probably already anti-Trump to begin with, and the pro-Trump people won’t be reading them anyway.
I could go for something bolder and try to predict the outcomes of the election – but my guess is as good as anybody’s, because this is uncharted territory for everyone involved. Absolutely nobody saw any of the defining moments of this campaign – from Trump’s rise to Jeb’s demise to Sanders’ improbable strength. As late as the middle of 2015, Politico was still churning out pieces entitled “Newsflash: It’s Going To Be Hillary vs. Jeb” (for added hilarity, the article was subtitled “Can we all stop pretending that there’s any real suspense in this presidential race?”). Now, granted, political commentators are by no means always accurate with their predictions, but the sheer scale of the error so far has been simply unfathomable: Never have so many pundits been so monumentally incorrect. And it’s by no means limited to mainstream outlets like the Washington Post, CNN and Fox: Everyone from the Huffington Post to pundits (on both sides of the spectrum) to even the now-legendary statistician Nate Silver have gotten it wrong.
Of course, the outcomes of this election are still immensely important – there is no doubt about that. But there is also no doubt that there is no going back to the way things were – and, frankly, I’m not sure if the political establishment is fully aware of that yet. Even if Sanders and Trump are defeated, as the establishment desperately hopes, this will still be their America. Even if Trump does not become the GOP nominee, his base does not simply disappear with him, and this vitriol-filled group of voters is unfortunately so sizable that future candidates will undoubtedly try to curry favor with it by assuming some of Donald Trump’s positions. Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders has proved the viability of a progressive, hard-left message in the American political climate, and this progressive energy is also going to remain strong long after the election.
Moreover, the two have also put unprecedented pressure on the establishment candidates – and establishment politics in general. For example, on the Democrat side, taking large donations from big banks was once considered a perfectly legitimate act that nobody challenged. Obama did it back in 2008, and his progressive credentials were by no means damaged by the fact. Yet, as Hillary Clinton has come to realize, it’s a different playing field now. Meanwhile, candidates like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio – once considered ideal candidates – have found themselves, in this new political dynamic, unviable and unpopular. And whether it’s on the left or right, these miscalculations have cost the establishment dearly, in terms of both hard money and political capital and credibility.
I don’t know what is going to happen with American politics going forward, but the incredible thing is, for the first time in a very, very long time, neither does anybody else – not even the elites. We’re headed for the most unpredictable election in at least a half century, and the way America votes this time around will shape this brand new political equilibrium for its inaugural run.
Contact Terence Zhao at terencezhao@stanford.edu.