Because the Budget Session of Parliament approaches, we must talk about Iowa and New Hampshire.
There is an air of grim familiarity to the sight of Hillary Rodham Clinton struggling in the Democratic primaries against a rank outsider with an inspiring if naïve message and a charged-up fanbase. Clinton may have won the Iowa caucuses, but with the thinnest of margins; and, remember, she had a 50 point-plus lead there when the campaign started. She goes into New Hampshire trailing Bernie Sanders in that state by a daunting margin. Meanwhile, Sanders’ campaign actually managed to rake in more donations in January than Clinton’s has, mildly surprising if the latter is actually the candidate of money, as Sanders not-so-subtly implies.
Barack Obama, who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008, recently gave a thoughtful interview to Politico in which he admitted that his campaign, his supporters and the media were “too huffy” about Clinton that faraway, charged January. “It is important to maintain a tone in which people feel as if you’re playing fair,” he said. But, as he implied, very few people feel the need to “play fair” against Clinton. Partly, I think, that’s because she’s a woman, and if she was as blunt as Sanders tends to be, would put off vast numbers of voters who have internalised a certain degree of sexism. Partly that’s because she’s been the most public of figures for so long – since, in fact, a speech when she gave when graduating college in the early 1970s – and is always competing against “the bright shiny object people haven’t seen before”, in Obama’s words.
But there’s something deeper at work, too. When people attacked Clinton in 2008 as the status quo candidate in comparison to Obama, it was odd – given that Obama was distinctly to the right of Clinton on most axes policy, including on health care. Today, as she fights Sanders – who calls himself a “democratic socialist”, whatever that means in the American context – it at least can’t be said that her policy positions are being misrepresented in the same way. Yet the attacks on her are similar, but this time through misrepresenting Sanders’ chances at effective governance, and through how his “political revolution” is being constructed. And in the structure of Sanders’ political appeal there lies a fascinating lesson about politics in the millennial age.
Sanders is a great guy. Like Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, he’s the ideal backbencher – always fighting for the underdog, putting out under-discussed but sensible ideas, going back to first principles. I don’t even want to get into whether he is “electable” or not. That’s not my point. My point is this: even if elected, he seems to want to wish away the actual way in which policy is made.
The big lesson of Obama’s first few years, in which despite a rousing mandate and a Democratic House and Senate he couldn’t get enough done, is that deal-making is the essence of politics in an age of 24x7 opinion. When public obstructionism fires up a legislator’s base thanks to breathless media coverage, you have to be particularly skilled at compromise in order to get things through. Clinton’s career has been built on this sort of compromise; Sanders’, on the opposite. Sanders recognises this; but he calls constantly for “political revolution” – claiming that the popularity of his ideas would be enough to increase turnout on Election Day in November, and have the Democrats take back the House and Senate. This should, logically, be laughed out of court – and yet it is the quicksand upon which Sanders’ house of promises is built, though few call him out on it. And of course, even if the Democrats do take back the House and Senate, it doesn’t mean that the President won’t have to make compromises – again, look at Obama struggling in 2009-10.
Just as compromise becomes more important in the actual business of politics, we have a voter base that, ever younger, increasingly rewards “authenticity”, as if they’re picking a craft beer and not a candidate. Sanders leads Democrats from the “millennial” generation by a vast margin; in the Republican race, Donald Trump does the same. There too, there’s a search for genuineness at work. Trump is the very opposite of dignified and presidential – but this is seen as a frank unwillingness to censor himself. This was exactly the case with Labour’s Corbyn in Britain, too, where younger people who largely came out in his support in the leadership election saw him as the antithesis of the mealy-mouthed, hypocritical Blairites.
Women like Clinton will suffer doubly in the middle of this. Women in public life are expected always to speak less from the heart, for fear that they will come across as “emotional”. And similar ingrained sexism means that women who are baldly assertive about their basic principles are far less appealing to electorates then men who are. Surely it is worrying for the future of feminism that many younger women seem to be less aware of these basic truths than their older counterparts.
You just have to take a look at the awfulness spouted by much of Sanders’ support base online to realise that there are two very different standards here. A woman selling pie-in-the-sky fantasies of changing politics into a process where everyone loves each other would receive knowing smirks. A man is hailed as a hero, especially by loutish young men.
President Bernie Sanders would, I fear, likely be a disaster. Not because his policy preferences are a problem – but because he would be faced with the need to compromise, and to create political space for those he hates. If he didn’t, he would be rendered toothless. If he did, his aggressive, entitled millennial base would turn on him.
So why have I spoken about American politics at such length? What does this have to do with the Budget Session? I mean, there are no lessons for our very different country, are there? Well, let’s see. Is there anyone in India who was elected promising to wipe out the opposition? Who has a loutish, young support base that intimidates others into silence? Who has discovered that running a country and pushing an agenda might mean giving up political space you won fair and square to an opposition you thought you had defeated? Who is caught between the political style he ran on, and implementing the policies he promised? If you can think of anyone who fits that description, let me know.
mihir.sharma@bsmail.in; Twitter: @mihirssharma
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