Unbought and Unbossed

Let's look backward a minute to the late 60s and early 70's.  Turn on some music: MoTown or Jefferson Airplane.   Pick up a Ms Magazine.  Or a book.   

Unbought and Unbossed is the title of Shirley Chisholm's autobiographic rise to be the first Afro-American woman in the US Congress and a Democratic candidate for president in 1972, the year the Democrats eventually nominated George McGovern.   

The Amazon description of her book describes her appeal:   "She shares how she took on an entrenched system, gave a public voice to millions, and sets the stage for her trailblazing bid to be the first woman and first African-American President of the United States. By daring to be herself, Shirley Chisholm shows us how she forever changed the status quo."

Unbought and Unbossed

In 1972 Democratic voters were frustrated because the political system in the first Nixon term blocked the changes they wanted addressed, a prolonged war in Vietnam and unrest at home for women's "liberation", racial justice, greater toleration of widespread marijuana use, liberalizing sexual mores.  Women burned bras, symbolizing freedom from gender constraint. (Or something.  Does anyone really understand what bra burning has to do with women's equality?  Tell me, please.)  Male college students grew beards and longer hair.  Black unrest in cities caused fires and looting, frightening whites and accelerating "white flight" from cities.   These changes caused a backlash that was politically much stronger than its cause: Nixon's Silent Majority condemning Acid, Amnesty for Draft Avoiders, and Abortions.

In 1972 there was no compromise or accommodation between the progressive impulses and its backlash.  Hippies irritated the Silent Majority but black urban crime scared them.  

The blocked political system caused people on the political and social left to infer a diagnosis of the problem.  It wasn't simply that there were more votes for openly racist politicians (Strom Thurmond, George Wallace,  and Jesse Helms, for example) and for softer voiced conservatives generally, it was "an entrenched system" requiring a trailblazer to change the status quo.   Being black and female, she was positioned to the left of  the white male WW2 veteran US Senator George McGovern who largely shared her views but was a more electable version of the same impulse.   

Backlash won.  The "Silent Majority" backed Nixon in a landslide.   Her diagnosis was that the problem was the system, but the election results suggest that it wasn't the system; the system may actually have worked in the sense that the majority ruled.  Chisholm led a frustrated minority.

In 2016 there are people frustrated on both the right and left. Polling suggests that this is a very different era.  The frustrated are the majority, and maybe a very sizable one.

Many voters aren't getting what they want.   Middle East wars persist.  The economic recovery is underway but feels slow.  Voters themselves have chosen divided government, and both the right and left consider the political system to be "entrenched" and unresponsive.   The partisan media has nurtured fear and outrage.  The majority of people--on both left and right--feel the country is on the wrong track according to polls, but thanks to  constitutional checks and balances the political process is stuck.

Republicans incumbents  who wanted their party to be a governing party lost primary elections.  The survivors insisted that the GOP be a party of protest and obstruction.  Boehner is ousted, for not obstructing enough.  The result is that the political system is frozen up.  Obama has 11 months to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court and likely cannot.

Resentment from the right:  Political and social conservatives on the right feel frustrated that social change on homosexuality and marriage and multicultural inclusion are coming at them faster than they want, but thanks to the Supreme Court and a gridlocked Congress cannot stop it.  Politics isn't working, they feel. It fuels nativism and resentment of minorities.  Trump, Cruz, and Rubio openly compete for those voters, and it is the majority pool of votes. The dominate two houses of Congress, but they are not yet getting their way.   Immigrants are still here.  One still has to "push one for English".  Muslims are supposed to be treated respectfully.  Whole classes of people get special protection thanks to affirmative action, anti-discrimination laws, and lax immigration enforcement. Obama of questionable legitimacy still holds office.

Talking to South Carolina Tea Party people

The diagnosis from the right:  The system is broken.   "Political correctness" stacks the deck on behalf of these outsiders.  Plus, there is dysfunction at the top in the form of powerful groups like the Chamber of Commerce, and K Street lobbyist and powerful special interests generally  who have made bi-partisan peace with Democrats.  Wall Street and big business had been part of the Republican coalition, but now they are part of the problem.   Republican populism now understands Big Business to be an enemy, a sellout, a RINO Republican in Name Only.

Waiting 3 1/2 hours in Nevada

Trump, self funded and contemptuous of the game of contributions-for-access that he had played for decades, presents himself as unbought and unbossed, the descriptors of Shirley Chisholm.    He is the one Republican candidate who captures both directions of Republican resentment.   Trump says the Republican establishment and the whole political system of special interest influence is corrupt.   He doesn't admit his complicity; he highlights and glories in it.  He is an eyewitness.   Hillary attended his third wedding.  Money talks, and Trump knows it and shows it and condemns it.

His major remaining Republican rivals all share his target down to the unfairly protected outsiders.  Only Trump has the credibility to condemn the elites at the top and therefore the overall political system.  He is self funded.

Watching the setup for the Sanders rally 

In 2016 the progressive left feels frustrated.  College students in their 20s and "millennials" in their 30s overwhelmingly support Sanders.  Sanders voices frustration over the income and government benefit allocations between the generations.   Young people pay into Social Security and Medicare and question whether they will get the benefit; older people get the benefit and have stopped paying in.  The system is generally unfair, but older Democrats benefit from it and like it.  And, significantly, they support Hillary, not Sanders.  

Young people pay--or owe--for college costs that have grown enormously compared to the minimum wage incomes young people can command.   Rents are very high relative to wages for most young people.  Young people lacking parental help or inheritance see an economic landscape stacked against them.    

Bernie's Crowd in New Hampshire

But the status quo political system didn't fix it, even when a black Democrat was president.   Why?  Their diagnosis, voiced by Sanders:  the political system is broken.  The problem is gridlock caused by powerful financial interests at the top, people and groups who effectively own the Congress and protect the entrenched system.

Sanders looks and acts like an incorruptible old semi-hippy, a guy who drives an old car, wears old clothes, and avoids the chains of a corrupt system.  Because he successfully collects money in $25 chunks from the masses of frustrated voters wanting change, Sanders, too, is unbought and unbossed.   

He compares well against Hillary because Hillary lacks Bill's political dexterity and appeal and because her entire biography documents that she is a liberal who has worked effectively within the political system.  It is her strength and perhaps-fatal weakness.  She has raised the system's money, received its endorsements, learned to pull its levers of power.  She knows rich people, vacations with them, speaks to them, and is a progressive voice within the system of donors and interest groups and K Street.  But bottom line, she is a practitioner within the system, not a destroyer of it.

And the diagnosis is felt by progressives and has been defined by Sanders, not her.  The system is entrenched, broken, and corrupt.

Trump and Sanders have the biography to fix the problem.  Sanders says he will take the unjustly acquired money from the billionaires who took it thanks to unjust and unfair loopholes for the billionaire class.     Trump says he will take it from the unjustly received money by the coddled parasites protected by weak leadership and political correctness, and won't be deterred by the powerful elite.  (But he doesn't say he will tax them or impoverish them; only reduce their influence.)

Sanders and Trump are sounding the themes that Shirley Chisholm voiced: unbought and unbossed.   And this time they represent a majority.