Beyond the fringe
by Tom Sullivan
Lazier pundits like to view Sen. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as fringe candidates. But that’s Village-speak for “not establishment.” What fans find attractive about both is their iconoclastic styles, which couldn’t be more different. Writing for Bloomberg News, Will Leitch attended Donald Trump’s event in Mobile, Alabama last weekend and found that the common thread among those standing in line in the heat was this:
They were sick of all the bulls–t. They were sick of being talked to like they’re idiots. They might not be up on the policy papers or every specific detail of the Iran deal. But they can smell bulls–t.
Trump, the flashy billionaire, the reality show host, the consummate bullshitter, uses bullshit to cut through bullshit. They like that. Leitch explains:
They hate Hillary Clinton, they hate Obama, they hate Jeb Bush, and they hate them all for the same reason: They think they’re lying to them. Many, I found, especially hated Bush for his Spanish-language campaign ads. This came up several times. Bush is “as bad as any of them,” said Tony Hamilton, a truck driver from nearby Pensacola, Florida. “I voted for his brother and his dad, but not him, never. He’s just like the rest of them.”
They hate them so much that even if incoherent — his speech was all tangent and no theme — Trump’s unabashed bullshit comes across as authenticity, and that’s good enough. Even when Trump asks an audience of lower-income, southern T-party voters, “anybody here have a Mercedes-Benz? They’re wonderful, right? Great, great cars,” the crowd goes with it.
Meanwhile, for all his unhipness, Bernie Sanders has attracted a large percentage of the youth vote, Nathan Heller writes at the New Yorker. Sanders feels “open and friendly,” but in a more coherent way:
… From 1981, in his first elected post, as the mayor of Burlington, he fought for corporate regulation and against big-money fundraising. He sought to lift the minimum wage. Recently, his supporters have produced old footage from his early years, as if to show that, in a field of opportunists, Sanders has held firm to his beliefs. The anachronism of his world view proves both his authenticity and his lack of hidden baggage as a candidate. For young voters, who approach the booth with shallow political memories, this “open” attitude toward Sanders’s past can come as reassurance: they don’t have to worry about being pinioned by a history that they don’t know, because history, for Sanders, is a backward projection of the behavior that they saw last week. The approach is striking in an era when even personal life is preconceived, polished, performed. Sanders is exceptional because he seems, demonstrably, the same guy who he was before the iPhone cameras first appeared.
With 37 percent favorable among under-30 voters in
one poll, Sanders hardly sounds fringe. Hillary Clinton polls 40 percent among the same age group, writes Heller.
Both Sanders and Trump supporters seem tired of business as usual. But while Sanders seems like a seasoned veteran with ideas whose time has come, Trump comes off as a pitchman selling himself as “new and improved.”