Under Water

       

       The Sanders and Trump candidacies share the common discomfort zone of growing economic pain.  Reflecting their lost status, sixty-six percent of Republican-leaning voters say life has gotten harder over the past 50 years according to the Pew Research Center. It also finds that in 2016 half of Republicans sound like Bernie Sanders, saying the economy favors powerful interests. Perhaps more accustomed to lower altitudes of well-being only 28 percent of democrats say times are harder. The pain is most obvious among young voters with two-thirds of college graduates reporting good jobs are hard to find

       

       While these 2016 findings demonstrate a certain symbiotic relationship between Sanders and Trump followers they show a different tie between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, voters viewed Mr. Trump unfavorably, 65 percent to 24 percent. In the same survey Hillary Clinton was viewed unfavorably, 56 percent to 32 percent.

Both are highly unpopular in spite of their apparent nomination. NBC’s “Meet the Press” moderator, Chuck Todd, reported this past Tuesday evening that this would be the first time in U. S. political history that both parties' presidential candidates had net unfavorable ratings with the public.  The popular candidate is the one experts say has already lost, Bernie Sanders, with a net 9 percent positive rating. 

       The “remember the Alamo” sentiments among both parties document both their nostalgia and their pain as members of a falling middle class plus the large dissonance they face among a new generation of voters under 40 years of age going 70 percent for Sanders. Their plight is illustrated in super-wealthy Silicon Valley where teachers are moving away and out of the schools because they have no place to live.  The school districts can’t compete. They’ve raised teacher pay 12 percent, according to the San Jose Mercury News (4/30) but the cost of available rentals rose as much as 64 percent.

       In his NY Times column this week the nation’s preacher, David Brooks, writes about a March speech by Hillary Clinton’s in West Virginia that was a failure of imagination. “She didn’t really capture the way economic loss has triggered a series of complex spirals, and that social decay is now center stage….

it’s hard to hold off the dislocation, distrust and pessimism. Birthrates drop. Family structures erode. Life expectancy falls. People slip between the cracks and inevitably drug use rises. According to The Charleston Gazette-Mail, between 1999 and 2009, per-capita consumption of oxycodone, hydrocodone and fentanyl tripled. By 2009 West Virginians were annually filling 19 painkiller prescriptions a person.”

      The question is whether the Democratic party establishment has any capacity to address their listing political ship and begin to make major revolutionary changes or whether its new tack is the same old same old slow-footed liberalism.  For the Republicans, the problem is that Trump, the outlier, has virtually no Republican Party left to either love or reject.  He’s alone in a sea that more than once in history has raised up murderous dictatorships. They’re already in place in the Middle East and Africa.

       The sense of descending catastrophe eludes political game players with the exception of Bernie Sanders who while long on diagnosis and short on prescription does have the virtue of directly facing the problem.  Like the fictional story told of the day scientists discovered the sun was about to overheat, melting the polar ice caps and covering the world with water. They warned U. S. religious leaders to prepare their people for the worst. So, the story goes, the Catholics organized final confessionals, the Protestant’s leased stadiums for last revival services, but the Jews called their people together and said “We’ve got 24 hours to learn how to live under water.”

       We’re definitely under water.