"Anti-Establishment" is Just Code for Irresponsible for Governing
Donald Trump is struggling a bit with the governing thing. Quick exits for high level staffers like his National Security Adviser, having his executive orders knocked down as unconstitutional in the courts and even having his health care law panned on all sides of the political spectrum, Trump has a track record now of being ineffective at governing in the way he promised to do so during his campaign. This should not shock anyone- he ran his entire campaign on knocking the way we govern our country. Clearly his style and ideas weren’t going to work within the government that actually exists.
You see it from the “DemExit” crowd- calling Democrats “neoliberals” for supporting Dodd-Frank, the ACA and a $12 minimum wage over their preferred Glass-Steagall, Medicare for All and a $15 minimum wage. You see it from the Tea Party and White Nationalists on the right- calling Republicans “cucks” for being unwilling to bankrupt the government or default on the debt during the Obama years. There is a brand of people that not only wants their way, but the most pure manifestation of their way, and will take no negotiation, no compromise. They would rather lose elections than moderate a hair on any policy, and they’d rather candidates who would compromise to pass things lose. They want their chosen elected officials to behave as though they have 60+ Senate seats and 275 U.S. House seats, even when they don’t. They want to demand their way, and that the other side’s way should be crushed- even when the electoral results suggest that’s not what the public want. They are liberals who want to pretend that the public really wouldn’t care about higher taxes for the pet projects they want to pass, or conservatives who want to pretend that the people hurt in the name of their “small government” fetish aren’t really people at all.
To be clear, these folks live in a very special bubble, one without any glimmer of reality. When they lose an election, on either side, they say that the nominee was too moderate, that they didn’t really embrace the values of their cause, and that is why they lost. They pretend that if their candidates embraced their most extreme positions, they would convince Congress and all the interest groups in Washington to follow them. It is, at best, a fantasy land, and at worst a recipe for hopeless gridlock and destruction.
This is not to say that there are not authentic critiques from the left of Hillary Clinton, or the right of Mitt Romney. Maybe if Clinton had embraced some more progressive, Elizabeth Warren-esque positions in an authentic manner, before Bernie Sanders became a semi-viable candidate, she would be President today. Perhaps if Romney were a human being and not a malfunctioning robot, he would be President today. There are good reasons to believe that Hillary Clinton could have turned out 75,000 more voters in three states with a slightly different campaign. I said slightly though, and did so for a very specific reason- because the real problem that some of her most ardent left-wing critics have with her is that she has governed, and made the impure deals, took the meetings with people they don’t like and along the way, taken some votes they can’t accept. This is because Hillary Clinton governed, and people who govern have to talk to each other, even when they disagree, and this by default makes them all “the establishment.” “The establishment” are the people actually responsible for passing budgets, appropriating money, carrying out foreign diplomacy, carrying out justice and doing all the other things a government that works does every day.
https://medium.com/@richardwilkins_51183/anti-establishment-is-just-code-for-irresponsible-for-governing-a5c76532618#.883h97pbn
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