Leo Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Among the lessons of 2016 is that, politically speaking, Tolstoy was wrong.
This was the year in which everything that couldn’t, shouldn’t and wouldn’t happen, happened. In May, Filipinos elected a man who said he’d be happy to slaughter millions of drug addicts the way Hitler slaughtered millions of Jews. In June, the British tossed out the European Union, along with the toffs who had told them to stay in it. In October, Colombians rejected a deal with the FARC for which their president was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. A month later: President-elect Donald Trump.
Now Italians have overwhelmingly rejected proposed constitutional changes that were supposed to make their political system functional and economic reform possible. Beppe Grillo, the populist politician who led the charge against the changes, crowed on his blog Sunday that “times have changed.” Yes, they have.
What happened? In 2014,Daniel Drezner, a professor at Tufts, published a book extolling the International Monetary Fund and other institutions of “economic global governance” for putting out the fires of the 2008 financial crisis. The global economy had been teetering on the brink of another Great Depression, but it didn’t fall in. Ergo, success.
The book was called The System Worked. Except it didn’t. The system did more to mask problems than it did to solve them.
Government statistics can show a drop in the unemployment rate, but they give scant indication of whether the jobs available now have the status or pay of the jobs available previously. Giving unlimited credit to a panicked patient will always have a narcotic effect; it can also have an addictive one. Near-zero (or sub-zero) interest rates will goose stock markets to the delight of sophisticated investors—and the dismay of savers. Bank bailouts may make “systemic” sense. But they divorce behavior from consequence. Pushing economic management from elected officials into the hands of unelected central bankers and regulators flatters the vanity of the intelligentsia while offending the normal person’s sense that his vote should count toward his own livelihood.
In other words, the “system,” with its high-toned rationale and its high-handed maneuvers, struck millions of people as unaccountable and unjust. It might have been a good thing that the sky didn’t fall on everybody, but shouldn’t it at least have fallen on somebody? Bernie Sanders got remarkably close to winning the Democratic nomination by calling Wall Street a fraud and demanding prosecutions. Hillary Clinton lost the White House by so perfectly typifying the system that supposedly worked so well. Donald Trump is what he is, and readers know what I think of that. But Mrs. Clinton’s unforgivable sin was her outsized—and unearned—sense of entitlement.
Look again at this year’s other big political surprises.
Colombians rejected the peace deal because they would not abide having terrorists lightly let off for their crimes. Filipinos electedRodrigo Duterte because they wanted to exact moral justice against drug dealers, never mind the finer details of legal justice. Britons disregarded dire warnings about the consequences of leaving the EU because the powers of Brussels violated their sense of democratic sovereignty. Italians told Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to shove off because they weren’t sympathetic to plans they see as having been made in Berlin for the benefit of Germans.
The populist wave now cresting across much of the world is sometimes described as a revolt against globalization: immigrants failing to assimilate the values of their hosts, poorer countries drawing jobs from richer ones, and so on. But the root complaint is not about economics. It’s about justice. Why does the banker get the bailout while the merchant goes bankrupt? Why does the illegal immigrant get to jump the citizenship queue? What right does a foreign judge have to tell us what punishments our criminals deserve? Why do our soldiers risk their lives for the defense of wealthy allies?
Those of us who believe in the liberal international order (now derisively called “globalism”) ought to think about this. There are powerful academic arguments to be made for the superiority of free trade over mercantilism, or of Pax Americana over America First. But liberalism’s champions will continue to lose the argument until we learn to make our case not in the language of what works, but of what’s right.
Joel Benenson, Clinton’s chief strategist, piled on: “There were dog whistles sent out to people.. . .Look at your rallies. He delivered it.”
At which point, Conway accused Clinton’s team of being sore losers.
“Guys, I can tell you are angry, but wow,” she said. “Hashtag he’s your president. How’s that? Will you ever accept the election results? Will you tell your protesters that he’s their president, too?”
The session was part of a two-day forum that the school’s Institute of Politics has sponsored in the wake of every presidential election since 1972. It gathers operatives from nearly all of the primary and general election campaigns, as well as a large contingent of journalists, with the stated goal of beginning to compile ahistorical record.
Generally, the quadrennial gatherings are frank but civil ones, in which political operatives at the top of their game accord each other a measure of professional respect.
This year, in the wake of a brutal campaign with a surprise outcome, it was clear that the wounds have not yet begun to heal. The animosity of the campaign aides mirrors the broader feelings of millions of voters on both sides.
Campaign officials lashed out at each other, and also against the media — which neither side believed had treated it fairly.
Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook also acknowledged that her operation had made a number of mistakes and miscalculations, while being buffeted by what he repeatedly described as a “headwind” of being an establishment candidate in a season where voters were anxious for change.
He noted, for example, that younger voters, perhaps assuming that Clinton was going to win, migrated to third-party candidates in the final days of the race.
Where the campaign needed to win upwards of 60 percent of young voters, it was able to garner something “in the high 50s at the end of the day,” Mook said. “That’s why we lost.”
He and others also faulted FBI Director James Comey for deciding in the waning days before the election to revive the controversy over Clinton’s use of a private email system.
Trump officials said Clinton’s problems went beyond tactics to her weaknesses as a candidate and the deficits of a message that consisted largely of trying to make Trump unacceptable.
David Bossie, Trump’s deputy campaign manager, taunted Mook: “You call it “headwinds,’ I call it self-inflicted wounds.”
Conway added, “There’s a difference for voters between what offends you and what affects you,” arguing that Trump was speaking more directly to people’s anxieties and needs.
Strategists for Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), who waged a strong challenge against Clinton for the Democratic nomination, agreed. “There was a large part of the Democratic primary electorate who had concerns about the secretary’s veracity and forthrightness,” said Jeff Weaver, Sanders’s campaign manager.
Clinton’s campaign insisted, again and again, that their candidate had been held to a different standard than the other contenders — as evidenced by the controversy over her use of a private email system while secretary of state.
Palmieri contended that many political journalists had a personal dislike for the Democratic nominee, and predicted that the email issue will go down in history as “the most grossly overrated, over-covered and most destructive story in all of presidential politics.”
“If I made one mistake, it was legitimizing the way the press covered this storyline,” Palmieri said.
Mook added that Trump deftly used his rally speeches to “switch up the news cycle.”
“The media by and large was not covering what Hillary Clinton was choosing to say,” Mook said. “They were treating her like the likely winner and they were constantly trying to unearth secrets and expose.”
For instance, Mook posited the media did not scrutinize Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns as intensively as Clinton’s private email server.
Conway retorted: “Oh, my God, that question was vomited to me every day on TV.”
The strangest criticism of the media, however, was by Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
His complaint: Journalists accurately reported what Trump said.
“This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally,” Lewandowski said. “The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar — you’re going to say things and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”
At a dinner the previous evening, CNN chief executive Jeff Zucker was heckled during a panel discussion about the media by operatives from several losing Republican campaigns, who accused the network of showering Trump with free publicity.
To win the GOP nomination, Trump vanquished a highly credentialed field of 16 other Republicans, some of whom were backed up by tens of millions of dollars in outside spending. What his opponents failed to recognize, until it was too late, was that 2016 would be an year unlike any other, in which the standard rules would not apply.
“The uniqueness of this cycle made it such that some of those traditional kind of avenues became less effective,” said Danny Diaz, who managed the campaign of the presumed early frontrunner, former Florida governor Jeb Bush.
“Money and mechanics matter, but passion about a candidate matters more,” added Mike DuHaime, a strategist for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), another establishment figure in the race.
Barry Bennett, the campaign manager for retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, said of voters: “What they wanted more than anything else was strength, and Donald Trump was supplying it every day.”
Clinton consultant Mandy Grunwald had a darker interpretation, which she expressed in an icy backhanded compliment to the Trump team: “I don’t think you give yourself enough credit for the negative campaign you ran”
She noted that the murky corners of the internet were rife with false stories that Clinton was in dire health, and on the verge of going to prison. “I hear this heroic story of him connecting with voters,” Grunwald said. “But there was a very impressive gassing of her.”
Benenson, meanwhile, served notice that the election may be over but that the battles it spawned are not.
“You guys won, that’s clear,” Benenson said. “But let’s be honest. Don’t act as if you have a popular mandate for your message. The fact of the matter is that more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump.”
At which point Conway turned to her side and said: “Hey, guys, we won. You don’t have to respond. He was the better candidate. That’s why he won.”
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 