Qwiss! wrote:
I think this is an oversimplification. Sanders is a Washington insider for most of his career and if you look at who is supporting him they are largely well informed, educated, liberals. People are voting for him not because he is an "outsider" but because he is proposing real changes in his policy proposals. These are the things they believe in.
I think when it comes to the crunch people are voting for Trump because he states out straight things they believe in, where as when Cruz and the other Rep candidates try to say it they mask in it in more politically safe speech because they fear the media. What Trump figured out was that if people agree with you already they don't care how much of the media disagrees, especially if you give them the language to dismiss that media while you are it.
If anything this primary races are showing that America is getting more and more polarised. Sanders represents a left wing style of Democrat that hasn't featured in American politics for decades while Trump/Cruz are a natural progression of the Republican hard shift to the extreme right. Maybe the move to the centre in politics is going away? We have Corbyn and Cameron in Britain who aren't too far off either, especially when you consider how close Blair and his followers were to the Conservatives policywise.
Sanders is perceived as an outsider, that's what's important—all the candidates with a chance are insiders, and to any extent they're not now, they will be once they're elected because there is no real base for a power that acts from outside the establishment in the US. Sanders' socialism is affect—as in Obama's case, most of what he says is not a promise, and most of what he promises can't be achieved within the confines of the US system.
As in Jeremy Corbyn's case (or SYRIZA's case, for that matter) that holds true even though most of what Sanders proposes is perfectly rational (almost boringly rational) considered from the standpoint of citizens' collective interest. Aside from foreign policy, extremist Corbyn's policies are drearily uncontroversial—the most daring thing he suggests is renationalising some utilities the privatisation of which has been a disaster.
Single payer health care has become emblematic of the sort of rational policy that goes by the wayside in the US. The rest of the developed world considers its benefits straightforward, Hillary Clinton says it's a grotesque evil.
In our political sideshows, the ideas of left and right are by-products reflecting the way elections work, not the economic conditions the electoral system overlays. Within this spectacle, charismatic figures like Trump do flourish, thriving on the inherent absurdity that we all recognise.
The "move to the centre" that Blair and Clinton were said to represent was never really a move to the centre at all. It consisted of two things:
Firstly, the operational reality of ruling interests requiring market regulation, public ownership and public services to be rolled back to further enrich themselves. This package was wrapped up a rhetoric of rational compromise palatable to a section of the voting public that had previously been loyal to the union movement Thatcher broke in the UK (and Hawke and Keating mostly neutered in Australia in the same period).
Secondly, some artificially extended good times in global markets brought about by price bubbles around the internet and the property market, and the rapid and corrupt industrialisation of some very large economies, funded by debt.
The idea that the poorest among us should have to "give something back" or prove themselves in order to retain basic rights and entitlements never made sense. A few dozen people now control half the world's wealth, they're the ones who are short of mutual obligation.
