By Inderjeet Parmar
This op-ed was originally published on The Wire: http://thewire.in/61161/are-americans-threatening-the-naturalness-of-elite-rule/

The anti-elite sentiments of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders’ supporters may upend the Pareto principle, but can they succeed?

“Looks like the Pareto principle has been proven to be correct once again … Don’t mean to sound cynical but whether people are becoming poorer and desperate or expressing deep discontent, nothing is going to change. The [top] 20% are still going to dictate terms with their immense control over media and money.”

The quote above is one thoughtful reader’s response to the US presidential election campaign. Donald Trump appears to be losing ground – largely through his own off-the-cuff bigotry and xenophobia – and Bernie Sanders’ leftist challenge seems to have fizzled out as the Democratic Party unifies behind Hillary Clinton, all to defeat their common enemy: Trump.
The Pareto principle – named after the work of Italian political sociologist, Vilfredo Pareto, is part of a larger theory that may be summed up as the inevitability and ‘naturalness’ of elite power. The history of power in all societies everywhere is one of elites – some fox-like and cunning (elite democracy), others leonine and masculine (rule by force) – circulating in an endless series of births, deaths and re-births. And quite right too, as ‘elitists’ assert.
So whatever the political label or rhetoric, elites always rule. The Pareto principle contends that about 20% of any population basically produces 80% of the desired results – whether we refer to police officers fighting crime or teachers educating students, or the ownership of wealth and the earning of income. Adding to this tradition, other major elite theorists, such as Robert Michels, have argued for an iron law of oligarchy: whichever political party – revolutionary or reactionary, fascist, communist or democratic, conservative or liberal – gains power, it is bound to be ruled by an elite minority that is better organised, more gifted, and effective, justly easing out the masses from real power.
Elitism certainly confirms the cynical belief that nothing ever truly can or ever will change. But its take on reality suggests that the future looks just like the past, effectively defying radical historical shifts in power be it between classes or races or nations.
Elitists like Pareto seemed to revere hereditary aristocracies where the ‘talents’ reigned supreme and democracy posed a threat, and Marxism threatened complete annihilation. Pareto’s birth in 1848 – a year of democratic revolutions in Europe as well as the publication of the Communist manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – and his death in 1923 in an era of rising fascism, tells its own story of the fear of change and the desire to return Italy to the past glories of the Roman empire.
The end point of Pareto’s predictions is also open to question and worth exploring in the US context. The change that Sanders and Trump represent is explicable only in the context of recent political history – increasing dissatisfaction with elites on the right and left exemplified by insurgencies from the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement, respectively. The Occupy movement spread across the nation, involved millions of people and expressed deep public discontent and anger – much of it shared among tea partiers on the right – especially in the areas of military spending, corporate welfare and opposition to special interests, especially the big banks that were bailed out by taxpayers after the 2008 financial meltdown.
Those movements were the tinder-wood for the Trump and Sanders insurgencies against their respective party elites in the 2016 primaries. According to American sociologist Alvin Gouldner, that means where there is an iron law of oligarchy, there is an equal and opposite law of struggle for democracy, an axiom especially true in the modern era. It is just a matter of time before the democratic eruption comes.
It might be worth considering another Italian thinker – Antonio Gramsci – who wrote about intellectual hegemony, political power, and political transformation: hegemony is almost always contested more or less openly and maintaining hegemony is no easy process. Gramsci offers hope through struggle and exposes the superficiality and inherent instability of elite domination, its openness to challenges from below.
Gramsci died in one of Benito Mussolini’s prisons but practised what he preached – “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” – and his work inspired millions to keep pushing for change, because change itself is inevitable, given time and the balance of power between the status quo and change makers, those who make real history.
Apply that principle to history and we see that things do change even if the change is partial, incomplete and unsatisfactory to many – the end of apartheid in South Africa, political independence for the colonial world, relative peace in Northern Ireland, major advances in racial power relations in the US, the transformation in women’s rights across (most of) the world. And if we apply Gramsci to American politics today, perhaps we might see a more complex picture – movements for change albeit tempered by a reassertion by status quo forces, the tentative, uncertain steps towards the domestication of a radical agenda with the original impulse hardly extinguished.
Hence, we see that Clinton and her running mate Tim Kaine have been forced to reject the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement due to the power of the Sanders movement and because of its appeal to rust-belt white workers, a portion of which are die-hard Trump supporters.
Clinton may not be a fully convinced opponent of Wall Street and big money politics – after all, she and former President Bill Clinton make millions annually in speaking fees paid by the likes of UBS and Goldman Sachs – but she does feel the direction of the political wind changing. We may see some movement on instituting a financial transaction tax on speculative behaviour, the strengthening of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – that senator Elizabeth Warren fought to establish – and action against corporate concentration.
Warren’s reputation has been enhanced by her stream of effective attacks on Trump and her campaign to rein in the power of the big banks seems to have been renewed by the Sanders movement. Sanders is acting as a major sponsor of the Warren-John McCain bill to restore key provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act – passed in the wake of the Wall Street crash of 1929 but repealed 70 years later during Bill’s presidency. The Act prevented banks from speculating with ordinary peoples’ hard-earned savings. Clinton is committed to pushing a modernised version of Glass-Steagall.
The necessity of higher wages – backed by a new federal minimum wage of $15 per hour – was forced on Clinton by Sanders’ representatives on the Democratic platform committee at the national convention.
Clinton was also forced to flip-flop on the abolition of college tuition fees – she is now committed to making state universities and colleges free for students from families earning less than $125,000 annually – over 80% of all students.
From significant plans for an infrastructure bank to lead the renewal of the US’ roads, railways, ports and bridges, to higher taxes on the 0.1% of top income earners, to a public option for healthcare cost reduction, to greater intra-party democracy, including reforming the super-delegates system, Sanders’ legacy may yet live on should Clinton win the White House.
As professor Bastiaan van Apeldoorn of the Free University of Amsterdam argues, “The old order may no longer be sustainable; but we may be witnessing an interregnum, with the old order dying and a new one struggling to be born. The choice may increasingly [have to] be one between a real radical (left) reformism or fascism or Trumpism” or whatever form white ethno-nationalist bigotry may take.
“These are critical, transformative, times,” Apeldoorn comments. “With the (still likely) election of Clinton the neoliberal, Open Door, elite will get another lease of life but I cannot imagine it will be a sustained return to normalcy. Both the Trump and Sanders campaigns have made that clear.”
It may not be quite the political revolution Sanders demanded, but it is a major step away from the Trump counter-revolution, and an important nod towards the demands of the Sanders movement and parts of Trump’s working class political base and possibly a slightly fairer society. Things could be a lot worse.
But the cost to the American people will have to be paid in energetic vigilance – to ensure a level of political mobilisation to guard against a smooth return to ‘normalcy’ and the Pareto principle.

by Inderjeet Parmar
This op-ed was originally published on The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/at-the-core-of-hillary-clintons-image-problem-is-the-familys-foundation-62737

If Donald Trump has stunningly high disapproval ratings, Hillary Clinton isn’t far behind. For all that this year’s presidential election was once supposed to be a coronation, it’s become clear that the electorate mistrusts the woman Donald Trump calls “Crooked Hillary” – and that mistrust could yet derail an otherwise ideal opportunity to continue the Clinton dynasty.

Given her negative image, Clinton may struggle to capitalise on the even greater distrust and disapproval of Trump. An issue that has raised questions about Hillary’s credibility is the Clintons’ deep and enduring corporate financial connections.

According to a Washington Post investigation, the Clintons' political campaigns and charitable foundations, most notably the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, have received in the region of US$3 billion in donations over the past 40 years. A network of organisations and charities aiming to empower women and girls, assist economic development, and save lives, the foundation is estimated to have raised somewhere in the realm of US$2 billion dollars, about two-thirds of the Clintons' four-decade fundraising haul.

This funding for “good causes” has been coming in since 1997, when Bill Clinton began fundraising to build the Clinton Presidential Center in Arkansas. Since then the foundation’s remit has widened to a host of initiatives, including the Clinton Global Initiative, among others. And the list of the Clintons' philanthropic associations runs long.

The Clinton Foundation’s “strategic partners” include various banks and financial institutions – Barclays, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Goldman Sachs among them.

Pitching In

The foundation’s actual practices in its work have come in for a lot of scrutiny. In particular, its apparent generosity in earthquake-hit Haitisince 2010 was undermined by the saga of the temporary shelters it donated for use as school rooms and temporary housing. An investigation by The Nation found that temperatures in some of the shelters had reached over 100ºF (35ºC) and that some of the children who spent hours inside them suffered severe headaches and other illnesses.
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The investigation also indicated high levels of formaldehyde, a known carcinogen (and, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also a cause of asthma and other lung diseases) in one of 12 trailers tested. They were manufactured by Clayton Homes, which is being sued by the Federal Emergency Management Administration for having allegedly provided formaldehyde-laced trailers to victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Clayton Homes is owned by Berkshire Hathaway, a holding company owned and controlled by billionaire Warren Buffett – an early and high-profile member of the Clinton Global Initiative and longtime Clinton campaign donor.

Bad Feeling

So what political consequences might all this have for Clinton’s presidential bid?

It’s likely that allegations regarding the foundation may deter a proportion of Bernie Sanders’s supporters from voting for Clinton in November. Sanders himself has now endorsed Clinton, much to the chagrin of his more loyal voters, and he hasn’t focused too much on the Clinton Foundation. But when pressed in a CNN interview, he did open up somewhat: “If you ask me about the Clinton Foundation, do I have a problem when a sitting secretary of state and a foundation run by her husband collects many millions of dollars from foreign governments, governments which are dictatorships … do I have a problem with that? Yeah I do.”
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On the Clinton Foundation’s receipt of tens of millions of dollars from assorted foreign governments, including Saudi Arabia, he said: “You don’t have a lot of respect there for opposition points of view for gay rights, for women’s rights.”

An air of distrust has hung over the Clintons and their foundation from the very beginning. And heading into the general election, Hillary Clinton and her campaign may find it hard indeed to shake off.

Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of International Politics, and Co-Director of the Centre for International Policy Studies, at City University London. Follow him on Twitter and via his blog.

by Inderjeet Parmar
This op-ed was originally published on The Wire: http://thewire.in/57932/donald-trump-joseph-mccarthy/

Just as in an earlier era, McCarthy’s criticism of the US army was a major factor in his downfall, the Republican presidential nominee’s feud with the Muslim parents of a fallen US Army soldier could herald the end of his campaign.

Red lines were crossed, insults against numerous ethnic groups were hurled, anti-elite charges of being out of touch advanced, accusations of treachery and of selling out the country to subversives and foreigners were made repeatedly, with seemingly little political consequence. But the end came when there was a concerted attack on one of United States’s most revered institutions – the army.

This is what led to the downfall of US senator Joseph McCarthy in 1953-54. He had gone too far, was out of control and was bringing elite anti-communism – a mainstay of Cold War US’s justification for global expansion – into disrepute.

Could this have also caused the beginning of the end of Republican contender Donald Trump’s presidential campaign? Has he gone too far, even for hard-core, right-wing Republicans, who had fostered the very political culture from which Trumpism sprang? And with the turning and defanging of Bernie Sanders’s leftist assault on Wall Street, has US politics returned to normalcy with the establishment firmly back in the cockpit?

The downfall of McCarthy

The anti-communist McCarthy had decided, in discussions with that other Machiavellian Richard M. Nixon, that his road to fame, and possibly the White House, lay in exposing the supposed communist takeover of the US.

From the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, to the Protestant church and the White House, the US was riddled with corruption and weakened by Communist fifth columns, and he was going to “take our country back”, as it were.

Adding to a broad anti-communist and anti-liberal movement, which included the House Un-American Activities Committee, McCarthy went after nearly every organisation in the US, except the KKK, the FBI and the GOP. He wreaked havoc among federal employees, thousands of whom lost their jobs, were blacklisted or suffered an even worse fate.

He spoke, the media amplified his message through largely uncritical reporting and heads rolled. He seemed invincible, his witch-finder general role became popular and his place in the White House seemed assured.
President Dwight Eisenhower frowned upon his methods, but refused to condemn or repudiate McCarthy; he happily tolerated, and supported, the construction of an existential Soviet threat as the basis for a foreign policy of anti-communist containment.

Yet, the Wisconsin senator’s aura of Teflon-like invincibility was finally torpedoed when he went so far as to attack the US’s cherished military at a time when there was a near-universal support for its warriors, especially those who had fought the “good war” a mere decade earlier.

During the US army hearings of 1953, McCarthy said that General Ralph Zwicker, a decorated soldier, had the intelligence of a five-year-old and declared him unfit to wear an army uniform. He later tried to destroy the career of a young US army lawyer, Fred Fisher, by denouncing him as a fellow traveller of communism and a member of that ‘bastion of communism’ in the US, the National Lawyers Guild. This attack led the US army’s lead counsel, Joseph Welch, a Boston-based, blue-blood Republican, to declare: “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

From that point on, the US public turned away from McCarthy, and viewed him as cruel, manipulative and dangerous, as did the US ‘moderate’ right-wing political elite. His fall from grace was rapid thereafter. He was censured by the Senate and he faded away, dying of alcohol poisoning in 1956.

Yet, McCarthy’s censure was on the grounds of conduct unbecoming of a US senator – of ungentlemanly behaviour – and not due to the pain and suffering that he had caused to untold numbers of people. The GOP had had enough of McCarthy after his fiery anti-communism, once a powerful tool against the Democrats, had brought anti-communism itself to disgrace. He was out of control and hence had to take the rap for it. The man was disowned, but the anti-red campaign continued and McCarthyism continued even without McCarthy.

Trumped by his own rhetoric

Trump’s attacks on Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a soldier who was killed in Iraq, in response to the speech given by Khizr at the Democratic National Convention, and his subsequent comments on Ghazala being silenced by the couple’s Islamic beliefs, have led to outrage among the general public and even among some Republicans. But even though many Republican leaders have criticised Trump, they have largely refused to repudiate him as their party’s candidate.

Trump’s defence against Khizr’s accusation that he, the GOP’s nominee, had sacrificed nothing for his country, was that he had created thousands of jobs, which ultimately rang hollow. Khizr’s call for Trump to step down from the election race as he was unfit to lead the US was followed by President Barack Obama’s own invitation to the GOP to jettison Trump as their candidate.

Trump’s retaliatory attack on the Khans follows his disrespect for the Vietnam War record of senator John McCain, who had spent several years as a prisoner of war, and his subsequent trivialisation of a Purple Heart from an admiring veteran of the Iraq War. But, McCain, who is in a tight race to retain his own Senate seat in Arizona, has yet to reject Trump.

As polls show, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton now holds a 10- to 11-point lead over Trump, who now also faces concerted attacks from the right, such from the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion. Clinton, and Republican senators and representatives are now more openly challenging Trump’s stance on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression in the Ukraine and his assertiveness in Syria, and there appear to be murmurs about the GOP’s rules on replacing their duly elected nominee.

Adding fuel to the fire, Trump alienated even more Republicans by initially failing to endorse the candidacies of Republican senators and GOP leaders Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, even when his running mate, Mike Pence, publicly voiced his support for them. All of it is looking to be a shambles of their own making.

Reinforcing their usual political allies, the Republican donors from corporate America are pulling the plug on the Trump campaign. The billionaire Koch brothers remain unconvinced that Trump can be tamed by the GOP or by Pence, and are refusing to donate their fortune to Trump’s faltering bid for the presidency.

Chief Executive Officer of Hewlett Packard Meg Whitman, and many others, have been recruited by the Clinton campaign to denounce Trump and to back Clinton, hence adding another GOP donor’s scalp to their tally after having reeled in Michael Bloomberg.

Republicans like former Reagan-Bush appointee Frank Lavin, are reassured by the conservatism of the DNC and Clinton’s selection of senator Tim Kaine as her running mate. Lavin recently commented, “I have an increasing comfort level with Hillary Clinton…. She’s not going to be bossed around by the Bernie Sanders wing of the party”. A ‘Republicans for Hillary’ group now appears to be imminent.

Could there be a lifeline?

Yet, the figures for June and July indicate a major surge in small donations to Trump’s campaign. His support among the US’s economically disenfranchised, looked down upon nationalists and ethno-centric elements of the white working class seems to be holding. But even they might not like Trump’s disrespect for military service.

White rural southerners join the US military in droves. But, as so powerfully explained by J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, Trump is the only candidate who speaks the language of their desperate plight.

The GOP donors’ and Democrats’ pincer movement appears to be gaining momentum with dire implications not just for the Trump campaign, but also for the proclaimed radicalism of the Democrats trying to hold on to millions of Sanders voters.

Trump’s anti-establishment credentials remain intact, while his political credibility among sceptical Republicans lies increasingly tattered . Clinton’s base in the establishment, despite numerous anti-corporate passages in the party’s manifesto – now more apparently a sop to the powerful, but defanged Sanders movement – seems stronger than ever.
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The centre ground, ever the preserve of the self-declared ‘moderate’ establishment, appears to be holding, but skewed heavily to the right, defying both the Sanders revolution and Trump’s attack on elite power and its global over-reach.

Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of International Politics, and Co-Director of the Centre for International Policy Studies, at City University London. Follow him on Twitter and via his blog.

by Inderjeet Parmar
This op-ed was originally published on the Wire: http://thewire.in/56725/the-democrats-leaked-emails-pseudo-drama-elite-hollowness-and-return-to-politics-as-usual/

As large sections of the population reel under the pressures of falling incomes and rising inequality, the political class has gone back to business as usual, reflecting why the country is in a political crisis – one that is likely to hurt Clinton far more than Trump, come November.

The Democratic National Committee’s leaked emails pseudo-drama reveals far more than the real story at the heart of the matter – the DNC discussed means to sabotage the Bernie Sanders primary election campaign. The DNC thereby violated its claims of political neutrality between rival candidates and favoured Hillary Clinton, a party establishment darling. Diverting attention from the substance of the charge of political bias, the DNC first gently and politely nudged out its chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz (to a very comfortable honorary position) and then blamed the Russians for hacking party email servers in a bid to benefit Russian President Vladimir Putin’s (apparently) preferred candidate, Donald Trump. Trump, rising to the elite politics game, added his own flavours to the mix and attributed to Putin a racial slur against US President Barack Obama, and egged the Russians to continue leaking more emails. In the age of post-truth politics, no evidence was required for these claims but their job was done – eyes were on Russia and Trump, and not on the DNC’s wrong-doing.

While deflecting attention from the original issue, the episode also demonstrates why the US is in a political crisis today and will remain so for some time to come. While large swathes of the electorate scream from the pain of trying to make ends meet as real incomes fall and inequality rises, health care costs increase, police violence against black men reaches epidemic proportions, America’s infrastructure crumbles and people look to leaders who apparently offer ways out of the crisis, the American political class has gone back to business as usual. They take or admit no responsibility for the Iraq War or the financial meltdown of 2008, fail to mention the debacle in Afghanistan, and the massive increase in the power of Wall Street corporations in economic and political life. America’s problems today, it appears, have nothing to do with the Republicans or Democrats.

Elite party politics

This political amnesia is far more likely to damage the Democrats than the GOP’s Trump – the only candidate reflecting popular anger against elite power; indeed it plays into his hands and boosts his chances of winning the White House – unless, of course, he self-ignites following one of his red-line crossing gaffes. This election was billed as Clinton’s to lose – and she and her celebratory coterie, backed by big money, appear to be heading into a very rough election season up to November. It may be that Trump fails to win rather than Clinton defeats a candidate Obama has declared unfit for office.

Both parties’ conventions provide an insight into the crisis of elite party politics today and the more significant conclusion that neither party offers very much to their target voters. The GOP spent their convention papering over the cracks in their party’s fabric and raison d’etre, attacking the record of the Obama administration, and promising to make America great again and give it back to its own people – code for the anti-minorities xenophobia that galvanises an alliance between loyal Republicans and Trump’s white working class core support. The latter have been regaled with tales of jobs for all by abolishing free trade and bashing the Chinese. But no support for increasing the federal minimum wage or investment in crumbling roads and bridges or schools has been offered. All the while, Trump built bridges to party elites with his selection of Mike Pence as his vice presidential running mate – a dyed-in-the-wool tax-cuts-for-the-rich-and-corporations-conservative from the tea party wing of the GOP. Trump’s mission to restore America has no place for any redistribution of income and wealth, which is what a majority of Americans and large proportions of Republican voters actually want. The only threat to GOP elites backing Trump is from the billionaire candidates own penchant for outrageous bigotry.

The Democrats, convened in Philadelphia, were let off the hook by Sanders’s full-throated backing of Clinton and pretended the Sanders insurgency never happened even as Obama, his wife Michelle Obama and nominee Clinton praised him, and then started a major celebration of America’s continuing greatness and its status quo. This left them with one place to go in focusing attention: Trump.

Trump is not only at the centre of his own campaign, he is also the Democrats’ sole target. No vision backed by specific policies and programmes to curb the power of Wall Street and big money in politics, and no plans for job creation or infrastructure-building. To be sure, the Democratic platform bears witness to the compromise with Sanders – on college tuition fees, health care and federal minimum wage. But on the major question of the neoliberal order’s attachment to globalisation and outsourcing of factory jobs, and the power of big money in economy and politics, including bankrolling Clinton for decades, and the gross levels of inequality the process has generated, there is silence. Just more talk about how bad Trump is. Meanwhile Blackwater, one of the world’s largest private equity funds, whose CEO sits on the board of the Clinton-Obama think tank, the Center for American Progress, has held fundraisers for Obama and Clinton and is being tipped by some as a future treasury secretary, held a major reception in Philadelphia. Clinton has received up to $123 million from such Wall Street denizens in contrast to a paltry $19000 (yes, that’s $19K) donated to the Trump campaign. (Sanders received $0 from corporations). Clinton has personally earned over $20 million from closed-door speeches at Wall Street firms. That’s why she cannot even understand where critics of corporate-cash-dominated politics are coming from – to her, this is how normal politics works. Any plank of the Democrats’ platform needs to be read in this context.

It is unsurprising that last week’s great celebration of the glorious Obama years – also funded by major Wall Street donors – failed to address any deep-seated problems of American society; yet it plays directly into Trump’s hands and threatens a smooth transfer of power from Obama to Clinton. It permits two things: Trump appears as the change candidate, and he can turn his guns onto Clinton in a race to the bottom on who’s part of the establishment, closer to the people or Wall Street, the more dishonest and corrupt. And Trump is a lot better at playing that game than Clinton.

To Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, what’s most disturbing about the Brexit and Trump debates “is that there is zero elite reckoning with their own responsibility in creating the situation that led to both Brexit and Trump and then the broader collapse of elite authority”. Trump resonates, Greenwald commented, not due to popular stupidity but because people feel cheated and let down by “the prevailing order…. that they can’t imagine that anything is worse than preservation of the status quo”. People are so angry with the way things are that they simply want out of the current position, to throw out the existing elite, regardless of the consequences. This anti-politics is precisely the core appeal of Trumpism, a phenomenon set to outlive its eponymous hero.

The Trump and Sanders campaigns rode the deep discontents of a nation all the way to Cleveland and Philadelphia, despite sabotage attempts from party elites. The Sanders campaign has thrown in the towel and focuses on Clinton versus Trump, forgetting the structural inequality that propelled voters into its camp. Trump is in the process of betraying his core constituency, enjoying the fun and games of elite party politics.

Business as usual, normalcy, has been restored – or, has it merely been stored up for a future explosion?


Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of International Politics, and Co-Director of the Centre for International Policy Studies, at City University London. Follow him on Twitter and via his blog.

by Inderjeet Parmar
This Op-ed was originally published on The Wire: http://thewire.in/55222/both-trump-and-sanders-have-been-absorbed-by-establishment-agendas/

Clinton has chosen to defy the millions who voted for Sanders and taken the strategy of winning the centre ground, gambling on anti-Trump feeling to draw Sanders supporters into her camp – as they have nowhere else to go – by November.

Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders ran insurgent primary campaigns directed against their respective party elites and gained a following of millions, shaking the Democratic and Republican establishments and threatening the dominant neo-liberal order at home and challenging America’s global role. But, despite Trump’s nomination as the GOP’s presidential candidate and Sanders’s victories in 22 states, it is increasingly clear that party elites are slowly winning back the initiative, using their enormous resources to manage and incorporate the challengers into politics as usual.

The results are not identical in each party because the Right has greater salience in the GOP than does the Left in the Democratic party. Trump, therefore, has far more room for manoeuvre and can maintain more of his racialized style within the Right, boosted by the fundamental fact that he won the nomination without serious opposition. Sanders, on the other hand, lost, despite frightening Democratic leaders and is now actively backing Hillary Clinton as the progressive candidate America needs.

Yet, this process of selective incorporation and marginalisation is fraught with problems for party elites and for the American electorate, which has shown its deep disdain for the main political parties’ programmes, records and styles in the wake of the disastrous Iraq War and the relentless rise of income, wealth and power inequalities since the 2008 Wall Street meltdown. A large part of Trump’s appeal echoes that of Bernie Sanders’s – of voiceless millions for whom the American dream is pure chimera.

Pence and Kaine

Trump’s choice of conservative Mike Pence and Hillary Clinton’s of conservative Democrat Tim Kaine is a signal that the insurgencies are being defanged. Party elites may believe that they’ve successfully absorbed discontent through means both fair and foul; but the greater danger to the body politic and for America’s global role is for party elites to close their eyes to the massive undercurrents of political and economic discontent that the primaries and conventions have exposed. As Jefferson noted in his day, a little rebellion from below is significant precisely because it provides a health-check of the political system, opening the way to reform. Ignoring the politics of mass discontent and returning to normalcy may merely store up an even greater explosion – of either Right, Left or both – in 2020 and beyond, crippling American politics and hamstringing its global power.

For Donald Trump, the need to prove his seriousness as a presidential candidate and to have any chance of governing the nation should he emerge victorious has already forced him to compromise. His selection of Pence – a hard core Tea Party conservative close to the billionaire conservative Koch brothers, who have rejected Trump’s divisive anti-conservatism – is a major sop to party elites, contradicting the anti-conservative political base that Trump’s campaign championed. Mike Pence has alienated the LGBT community and organised labour, and backs lower taxes on the rich and corporations. Since his selection as running mate, he’s also backed Trump’s call to ban entry to Muslims from countries facing terror attacks. Trump’s recent declaration that his administration would reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act (with its restrictions in big banks) is not just an anti-Bill Clinton tactic but also an attempt to shore up his white working class political base and the pent up anger at Wall Street financiers. And party elites have moved reluctantly to accept Trump’s rhetoric and style with a view to be perceived as beyond reproach if the billionaire loses the election in November 2016.

Sanders’s incorporation is in fact the greater story of 2016. His role appears to be to bring into the Democratic fold an enthusiastic young electorate and other liberals, disappointed with President Obama’s refusal to challenge the powers that be, despite promises, and eager to change the politics of neoliberal order and challenge the militaristic role of the US in world politics. Yet, Sanders’s defeat was nowhere near total – hence his ability to bring elements of his programme onto Clinton’s platform – on college tuition fees, a public option in healthcare reform, the future role of super delegates, a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage, a new unity commission on party democracy, and so on. Yet, he made only a minor, and probably temporary impression, on Clinton’s robust support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a key element of Sanders’s campaign. At the same time, (Wiki)leaked emails showing the Machiavellian manoeuvring of DNC leader Debbie Wasserman Schultz – including trying to tap into the perceived anti-Semitism of Southern Baptists against Sanders – have led to her resignation, opening the way to further intra-party change. Claiming, with Clinton, that the party has the most progressive platform in its history, Sanders appears to be rowing back from calling for a new independent progressive party of the left. Even more than that, Sanders has acted as a cheer-leader for Hillary Clinton and made strenuous efforts to dampen the protests of the very people he mobilised in his campaign.

The choice now

Sanders’s anti-Trump stance has helped Clinton promote herself as the last best hope for America, or the least worst. Yet, despite the strength of anti-party elite feeling during Sanders’s primary victories in 22 states, and millions of votes for an overtly ‘socialist’ programme, Hillary Clinton’s choice of Tim Kaine as her vice presidential running mate is a major blow to the insurgents. Kaine is a conservative Democrat, hawkish on the issues of Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, and the Islamic State; he stands for full blown free trade that’s devastated working class communities and contributed to increasing inequality, and demands a soft line with Wall Street banks and money power, elements of which got him elected as Virginia’s senator in 2012, against a hard core tea party Republican.

In what has been a celebration of the last eight years of Democratic control of the White House, Hillary Clinton has chosen to defy the millions who voted for Sanders and taken the strategy of winning the centre ground, gambling on anti-Trump feeling to draw Sanders supporters into her camp – as they have nowhere else to go – by November. Rather than offering a vision to America or a new grand bargain to reduce the power of finance and of America’s global military deployments, Clinton has cautiously moved to court ‘moderate’ Republicans uncomfortable with the overtly racist and alienating character of Trump’s rhetoric and political base. She has chosen to ride two horses – declaring the party platform as the most progressive in its history while also suggesting she’s a safe pair of hands. Trump is now the more radical-sounding candidate in the 2016 general election even as he moves closer to GOP elites and Wall Street in search of desperately-needed election campaign funding.

By November 2016, America may face a choice between a cautious advocate of the domestic and global status quo, and an anti-politics right-winger claiming to speak for ordinary people while dividing them. Americans will choose from the lesser of two evils rather than a positive vision of economic renewal, popular empowerment, reduction of the power of big money, and a realistic approach to a changing global order.

The crisis of America’s elites is set to continue because they appear to have failed to account for the political earthquakes of 2016.

Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of International Politics, and Co-Director of the Centre for International Policy Studies, at City University London. Follow him on Twitter and via his blog.