Aside from right-wing, working class, older, undereducated white males, who favour Donald Trump by a wide margin over Democrat Hillary Clinton, there is one other group the Republican candidate is not going out of his way to provoke and alienate. And it’s a real oddity because it is a group of people who one would never expect he would have a chance to court, but just might.
In fact, these are voters who generally self-identify as “very liberal” according to polls. They are the supporters of Bernie Sanders—the former Democratic hopeful, who gave Clinton more of a run for her money than she might have liked.
Aside from being “very liberal,” which one would think immediately counts them out as voters for the right-wing, authoritarian thug on the ticket opposite their socialist champion, many of those disenfranchised Sanders supporters have something very powerful in common with the Trumpeters. They are angry. And they are angry about the some of the same things, primarily the feeling of not having a political voice.
They see a system that is “rigged” against their interests. They see a country that no longer has the largely mythical opportunities it once did for people like them. In short, economic disparity is common ground in the two very different camps.
In wooing these voters, Trump may have difficulty with some of their expectations. According to caucus polling during the primaries, the most important qualities they are looking for in a candidate are honesty and trustworthiness, things that don’t even register on the Trump scale. But politics can sometimes make strange bedfellows, as the Shakespearean adage goes.
And Trump’s rhetoric is so vague, it could have widespread appeal with disenfranchised people of varying stripes.
For example, in one speech he said: “Our roads and bridges are falling apart, our airports are in Third World conditions, and 43 million Americans are on food stamps.” Also: “This country is a hellhole. We are going down fast. We can’t do anything right. We’re a laughingstock all over the world. The American dream is dead.”
These statements are very negative, fear-mongering, largely meaningless and, of course, none of it is even remotely true. In fact, rarely does an accurate or constructive statement cross the Donald’s curling lip, but it fits a narrative that could be applied to any number of potential scapegoats.
Wherever one lays the blame—Sanders supporters tend to demonize Wall Street, while Trumpites put their woes squarely on the shoulders of immigrants—the grotesque and growing scourge of income inequality defines a precipice which has given rise to the almost unthinkable possibility of a full-out lunatic taking up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC, USA.
Honestly, had it not been for dire fear of the likely narcissistic demagoguery of a Trump presidency, the Democrats may very well have made Sanders their candidate. Wouldn’t that have been an epic left-right battle for the White House?
Hillary, of course, has her own popularity problems. One poll has her as the second most unpopular major party candidate in 40 years. Fortunately for her, and the world, she is second only to none other than the Donald himself.
Nevertheless, income inequality may be the defining issue of our times as it has been over and over and over again throughout history, and never without blood.
In an excellent 2014 memo published in Politico Magazine to “my fellow zillionaires,” Nick Hanauer—the visionary first investor in a little startup called Amazon many moons and trillions of dollars ago—laid it out in no uncertain terms.
“But the problem isn’t that we have inequality,” he wrote. “Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy.
The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.”
Hanauer actually has a prescription for fixing the situation that sounds decidedly more like Sanders than Trump, including a $15 minimum wage, which he has been promoting for years.
He also has a warning for his “filthy rich” compatriots.
“If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.”
Maybe Hanauer should be running for president. He is an unapologetic capitalist—like Trump only actually good at it—but he also has some humility, a heart and a brain.
Meanwhile, we can only hope the Sanders and Trump camps remain strangers and not bedfellows.
