Much has been said this election season about the end of Reaganism, which has defined the Republican Party for the past three decades, and the emergence of Trumpism.
New York Times columnist David Brooks offers a masterful assessment in his March 25 column. Missing, however, is any serious acknowledgement of a Democratic Party alternative in a crumbling post-Reagan era.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders are well positioned to initiate what the Republican columnist calls a “redefined compassion” to replace Reaganism. This requires a “paradigm shift” that he believes involves a new “nationalism,” redefining what our institutions stand for and what it means to be an American.
What Brooks omits from his assessment is the prospect of a realigned Democratic Party majority for a New Deal in this century. During the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt evolved from a balanced-budget Democrat into one who supported a government engaged in a global war and new domestic policies. He energized America’s marketplace and fostered workers’ rights, which created a middle class for America’s poor and European immigrants.
Brooks rejects a Trump who holds “a monopoly on audacity,” but he doesn’t mention the Democratic contenders as clear options. Sanders is too ideological for him, and Clinton is a policy wonk diminished by laborious pragmatism and perceived political scandal. She’s an easy target for critics in search of a new Camelot.
Unlike Sanders, Clinton has been in the national political throes of Reagan policy faceoffs for 30 years. Critiques downplay her past compromises as character flaws — not efforts to fend off that era’s more extremist ideas. This has made for a lingering distrust of Clinton’s ability to evolve with a more progressive political climate and a distrust over her grasp of the political practicalities and complexities underlying Sanders’ campaign commitments. Many fail to see that Clinton’s skepticism for the ideals she shares with Sanders is rooted in past struggles. She tried and failed, for example, in a 1990s White House effort for universal health care. It is why she wants to build on Obamacare, which has so far provided 20 million more people with health insurance, as a realistic step to that end.
The battle over health care is but one of many illustrations in Clinton’s experience at working toward positive change. It is an alternative to what Brooks sees as Trump’s anti-Reagan populism of fear and anger. He would prefer Ohio Gov. John Kasich among the three Republican finalists. However, the party’s dominant Trump-Cruz base is unlikely to make this practical conservative its nominee.
Like Cruz, Sanders has no track record of the bipartisan leadership needed to effectively implement his progressive slogans. A recent ranking shows Sanders and Cruz as least likely to work with the opposition party in the U.S. Senate.
Clinton’s campaign essentially embodies the concepts of compassion, reciprocity and love that Brooks believes are needed values for a new Republican Party in his redefined world. She and Sanders embrace a more charitable view of the “human condition” in stark contrast to Trump’s antagonistic, zero-sum world view of greatness, winning big and simplistic deal-making.
Brooks concludes his article by recommending the substitution of an Adam Smith capitalism with a communal sociologist, Emile Durkheim. But even Smith recognized that the world is not one of purely rational, utility-driven individuals. Writing in his book “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” in 1759, Smith invokes our better angels by reminding us “There are evidently some principles in the nature of man, which interests him in the fortunes of others and renders their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.”
In a 1970s debate with conservative thinker William F. Buckley, the American socialist Michael Harrington quoted those very words from Smith in advocating for a growing public sector.
Whether a Clinton presidency represents a new, defining moment for this country, a 21st-century New Deal, is not certain. America’s voters, of course, have the final say. Will they look beyond the human imperfections and the political compromises to recognize that a Clinton presidency can finally move this nation beyond the Reaganism that has defined American politics since the 1980s?
Ralph C. Carmona was a delegate to the National Democratic Convention for U.S. Sen. George McGovern (1972) and President Barack Obama (2012). An adjunct professor and retired government relations executive, he is vice president of the Maine State Employees Association Community College Adjunct Faculty Union.