Anger at the political class fueling populist candidates

I see pitchforks. Lots of them, and it reflects the almost seething anger that runs across the political spectrum in America these days. It’s fueling the likes of Bernie Sanders, who is now attracting the largest crowds, by far, of any presidential candidate, as well as Donald Trump, whose anti-establishment bomb-throwing has him leading the Republican field.

While Sanders and Trump are polar opposites in many respects, they are both tapping into a deep and growing well of dissatisfaction with the American political class and their enablers. While the Trump phenomenon gets plenty of coverage from a sensation and celebrity-obsessed mainstream media, it’s overwhelmingly dismissive, and with some justification.

Trump has always been over-the-top, but even so it’s been tough to tell at this early stage whether he’s actually campaigning, or engaged in a kind of performance art.

Is he really the synthesis of every negative impulse in the Republican id, or another Stephen Colbert simply playing a xenophobic blowhard for the cameras?

Whether he’s serious or satire, he’s clearly struck a chord, and not just with the Republican base. When Jesse Ventura came out in support of Trump recently, it should have been a wake-up call that Trump is tapping into more than just the anti-immigrant crowd.

This election, more than any other to date, appears to be a public reaction to what has become increasingly obvious in the wake of the Citizens United decision: America’s political class has been captured in its entirety by what Sanders routinely calls “the millionaire and billionaire class.”

It was just a few weeks ago that top GOP contenders, including Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, and Ted Cruz were summoned to southern California by the Koch brothers to essentially audition for their campaign lucre. Back in April, Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who kept Newt Gingrich’s campaign funded in 2012, held a similar confab for GOP candidates. In every case, the candidates appear, like supplicants, each trying to convince the billionaires that they would be the strongest advocate for cutting their taxes, defending Israel, or heading off action on climate change, depending on the funder’s particular agenda.

Democrats, like Hillary Clinton, have their own sponsors, like Goldman Sachs or Citicorp, two Wall Street firms that have collectively funneled millions to Bill and Hillary in “speaking” fees in recent years.

Truth in campaigning would require the candidates to wear logos on their foreheads, so the public could keep track of who’s sponsoring whom.

The political spending of a handful of millionaires and billionaires now dwarfs that expended by the presidential campaigns and political parties themselves. The Koch brothers and the network of right-wing “think” tanks and sponsored media outlets and pundits on their payroll are expected to pour as much as a billion dollars into the 2016 campaign. And that’s just two billionaires!

It’s no wonder that the concerns of average Americans can’t seem to get traction any more. Our political system has catered primarily to the rich and powerful since at least the Reagan administration, but the situation today is nothing short of oligarchy.

Indeed, a well-regarded statistical analysis, included in a 2014 book called Affluence and Influence, analyzed 1,779 policy outcomes in Washington over a period of more than 20 years. The conclusion? “Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” In short, corporate America and their CEOs call the shots in Washington. What you think doesn’t matter.

And the situation has only gotten worse since the 2010 Citizens United decision, which helped open the floodgates to unchecked and unaccountable political spending. Today, we have a government run by and for the top one-tenth of one percent of Americans.

The only real threat to the billionaires, of course, is an engaged citizenry that, to paraphrase Howard Beale, is mad as hell and isn’t going to take it anymore.

It’s people like that filling auditoriums to overflowing to hear Bernie Sanders take on the billionaires and call for a government that actually works in the interests of average people.

Anyone who says America can’t do more for its citizens is uninformed. There’s unbelievable wealth in the U.S., it’s just that it is increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Some good old-fashioned redistribution, like we saw back in the days of that old socialist Dwight D. Eisenhower—when top marginal income tax rates were as high as 91 percent—would go a long way toward improving life for the vast majority of Americans. Like providing free tuition at public colleges, improving (rather than cutting) Social Security, and allowing all Americans to buy-in to Medicare. Such ideas would be run-of-the-mill in any other developed country (and most enjoy overwhelming political support from the American public), yet they sound radical in the current U.S. political environment. But that’s only because they challenge the power of the billionaires, who use their influence to keep the mainstream political discussion within carefully proscribed boundaries.

It’s only Sanders, who won’t take the billionaires’ money, and Trump, who has his own billions, who are free to step over those lines— Trump through his outlandish political incorrectness, and Sanders through advocating a long list of beneficial policies and programs that he’d finance by taxing the rich.

Of course, challenging the power of the oligarchy is going to take much more than voting. For one thing, the billionaires on the right have worked closely in a number of states with Republican legislatures to create obstacles to voting, such as voter roll purges, voter ID laws, and the gross disparity in the imprisonment of minorities. It’s part of a calculated and well-funded effort to disenfranchise as many average Americans as possible.

In the end, we’ve seen that only when citizens take to the streets persistently and in large numbers, can they begin to break through. We’ve seen it with the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, and the organized push for the $15 minimum wage, all of which were successful to some degree in putting their issues on the political agenda.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Sanders and Trump is that Sanders understands that he can’t be an agent of change by himself. At every stop, he tells crowds they have to be willing to really work to save what little is left of our representative form of government. Obama sounded similar themes in 2008 and failed to follow through, but Sanders has far more credibility on the subject. As an independent, he’s always had to work both an inside and outside game to achieve political change.

Trump, on the other hand… well, he’s all about Trump. “We the people” would never be more than a means to an end for one of the most unapologetic narcissists that has ever taken the public stage.

Still, both Sanders and Trump sense the almost desperate anger that’s alive in the land and while they may be channeling it for different ends, their ability to capture the imagination of the citizenry should make the oligarchy very nervous. Lots of Americans are ready to “see the fat ones cut down to size.” Bring on the barricades. The pitchforks are waiting.