The end of the establishment?
baltimoresun.com
baltimoresun.com
The article doesn't say it explicitly, choosing to hint at it instead, but I think a big part of the popular revolt against big, remote establishments everywhere (also see: Brexit referendum polling) is that these institutions have normally made little or no effort to self police, or demonstrate any kind of ability to self discipline or self reform. The past 15 years especially have seen a more or less constant stream of scandals where people at the top of societies power structures very clearly acted badly or even broke laws, yet nobody was ever held to account ... except those who tried to reveal the wrongdoing. The track record of the elite enforcing the same rules against themselves that they enforce against everyone else is utterly miserable.
This is not a US specific thing. It can be seen to a lesser extent in other parts of the world too. One of the biggest arguments for the UK leaving the EU is that the EU has become a vast bureaucracy that is remote, bloated, undemocratic, disconnected from the people etc. The tone-deafness was made clear when the EU demanded yet another budget rise despite the fact that the member states were all trying to cut their own deficits, often by freezing public sector wages or simply laying people off.
Now mix this in with the partitioning of American society into ever more clearly distinct political tribes and it's not surprising that people who have a message of "We are outsiders just like you who won't hesitate to really shake things up" are getting so much traction. A big part of Obama's original appeal was his entirely unrealised promise to try and reform Washington. Unfortunately he lost interest in that once elected. Not that he could really have fixed anything anyway: the mismatch between emphasis on the US President and how much power they actually have is kind of ridiculous.
When reality diverges from perception (as you and the OP seem to suggest, and I agree), it feels to me there a sort of economic potential energy there that may provide an opportunity for someone to capitalize on. Perhaps we need some scrambling unicorns to pivot and see how they could help improve democracy and level the playing field between the disconnected establishment and the general populace.
As an individual, I frequently sigh at my ability to impact the momentum of things. The world may not be as I'd like it, but I see little I can do about that. I get that small changes by many individuals can have a big impact in the aggregate.
Perhaps what would help would be a social amplifier app that would allow users to plan/schedule and participate in small changes in mass that could send louder social signals to the establishment. Maybe folks would to listen to us more frequently than once every 4 years.
I'm sure there are other opportunities and the devil is in the details. I'm not saying this is easy, but society needs some new tools. The folks here on HN are precisely the right people that should be doing something about this.
It's just more noise. It's one reporter's take on current events. There's no attention given to history, or even a reasoned take on the economics involved. It's pure narrative, a bunch of facts strung together with nothing tying them together but opinion.
What we're seeing is another evolution in the media-driven political cycle. Political candidacy has changed immensely in the last few years. Social media turned out to be way more politically useful than anybody ever thought it would. So candidates that use it effectively are going to be able to manipulate the news cycle more.
It doesn't give them an overwhelming advantage over the traditional power base, but they have been caught flat-footed.
That Americans are currently receptive to populist platforms shouldn't be surprising. We're still in the primary phase, and primaries are conducted in rural areas where the most provincial Americans live. The messaging needs to be kept simple.
Once the primaries are over, the nominees are going to move to the center for the real race. Happens in every single presidential election. We're just paying more and more attention to it these day. Nobody used to care about primaries.
https://storify.com/cshirky/republican-and-democratic-partie...
But stated differently, the flaw becomes apparent: "No member of any group can ever say that the group consensus is wrong, because they are a member of the group." But the one criticizing isn't a member of the group who shares the consensus, and the contradiction evaporates.
Where "one reporter" was once Secretary of Labor.
Sanders still seems to have a chance after a handful of states. That's a change for sure. And the explanation seems plausible. Unless you think Sanders is charismatic leader, worshipped by the masses, it must be a change in the voters part.
Everybody gets excited over their pet independent candidate every single election. But now these indies can get their issues taken seriously by end-running establishment control over the news cycle.
The media creates the perception of who is winning and who is losing. Politicians trick the media into giving them coverage. They can build momentum by building awareness. Voters can only choose who they're aware of, for the reasons the media gives them. American voters are only a fraction of the population, only a quarter of Americans vote.
Three quarters of Americans don't care enough about politics to cast a vote. I'm one of them. This 4 year endeavor to place someone in the most powerful office in the world better resembles a bush-league pro wrestling circuit than anything like Serious Business.
But that's not even the strangest part. The strange part is that this is how it's been running for decades.
Sanders is not worshipped by the masses. He's merely running a flashier campaign than Hillary, so we see him more in the media. Ditto for Trump.
America is the same, it's politics that's changing. I'd prefer Hillary over Trump or Sanders, but any of them would do a decent job. Trump's basically a liberal anyway, if you look at his positions over time, he actually looks fairly reasonable. I'd prefer Hillary because she'd be able to actually get things done with Congress.
No chance. Not with Congress the way it is now, and run by Republicans. Neither will Sanders.
The weird thing out our democracy is, it's getting more democratic, even with pathetic turnout, the public exerts more of an influence on the news cycle, and that drives the political agenda.
Mostly in the first half-term, with a Democratic Congressional majority -- his signature legislative accomplishments (Affordable Care Act, ARRA) were achieved then.
> The weird thing out our democracy is, it's getting more democratic
No, its not.
> even with pathetic turnout, the public exerts more of an influence on the news cycle, and that drives the political agenda.
There's a number of forces steering things in between there, assuring that the impact that the news cycle has (because of the spin on the events, even if the public exerts more influence on which events get attention -- which is a dubious proposition, I think) reflects a fairly narrow set of biases held by the powerful.
There doesn't seem to be any evidence that the substantive policy output of the political system is becoming better aligned with the strength of views in the public, such that the net effect of any of this would be "more democratic."
100% of the House and 1/3 of the Senate is up for election at the same time as the President. There's no particularly strong reason to believe that the next Congress must look like the current Congress.
What kind of things do you expect Congress to do? Generally it's better when Congress does only absolutely necessary things and does not do anything else.
The chances of both of them being on the ballot are pretty slim, and the likelihood of one of them being able to win an election in a head-to-head race with a non-alarming establishment candidate is slimmer still. Radical candidates can shift the political agenda, but the closer they get to actual power, the more likely they are to shift it in the opposite direction to the one they intend.
Primaries are conducted everywhere, so I don't understand this part. And wouldn't "provincial" people be less likely to vote in the primary than they would be to vote in the general?
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/10/white-man-pat...
http://www.gallup.com/poll/176042/trust-mass-media-returns-t...
So for 3/5 to 2/3 of the population, observation shows that a unified message from all the multinational megacorp journalists of anti-Trump hatred results in soaring poll numbers for Trump. Every time some elitist smarmy condescending newsreader indicates their oh so holier than thou hatred of Trump, his poll numbers go up a little more.
Note this applies to the "other guys" too. Decades of screaming on fox news about how Bill Clinton and now Obama are going to destroy the country, planet, universe ... chicken little buffer overflow. If I can't vote for Trump I will vote for Sanders. If the establishment neocons on fox news hate him, he might be somewhat off, but also can't be that bad of a guy, I mean look at the other people they hate who aren't the best but aren't that bad. Obama may very well go down in history as one of our worst presidents, but hes just not that bad.
Note that a 3/5 majority would be quite a landslide in a general election.
Sure, there is a demographic that sees negative coverage of Trump (and Sanders) as proof he must be the only totally honest guy with real, serious policies. But it isn't 3/5 of the population, or anything close.
I mean, you'd probably find the figure for British citizens that trust the media to be at least as low. Trouble is, trust in people that the media widely dislike is even lower, and so they still lose.
I find this argument baffling when applied to the EU.
Most of the scandals were in the banking and finance industries, not - say - the EU parliament.
The Greek debacle, which was probably the biggest failure of the EU since its creation, was created by the EU's banking and finance industries.
Perhaps it's the industry that's the problem, and not Europe itself?
Not that the EU isn't remote, but it's not so remote that it has no interest in promoting standards of human rights legislation.
By a remarkable coincidence, a key foundation of Brexit is the dismissal of the EU's requirement to treat workers in a civilised manner as "Brussels red tape".
As for Trump - the idea that you can dethrone an Establishment run by and for narcissistic billionaires by electing another narcissistic billionaire seems entirely fantastic.
If Trump is elected, the US establishment will be happy to do business with him, as usual.
Sanders may be a tougher nut to crack, which is why he can't be allowed to win - and why the idea that these candidates "challenge the Establishment" is nonsense, when no Establishment policy is under any serious threat in this election. (Or any other.)
No, it was created by the EU who bailed out the banks, paying them money and forcing the loss on the taxpayers.
> Most of the scandals were in the banking and finance industries, not - say - the EU parliament.
The EU parliament is a scandal in and of itself - "let's waste some money and have two parliament buildings in two cities!"
No, it was caused by the Greeks living beyond their means.
So, the people who originally took the loans from the banks. How horrible! People, being forced to pay their debts.
e.g. In the case of Kaupthing, quite a lot of UK local governments were directly using them as a deposit bank and lost money when the bank collapsed. These deposits were made whole by the UK central government.
I know the answer, I just wonder if you do.
We're going to create this constitution, and you (the people) don't get to vote on it, but you have to live under it. Oh, one country insists on letting the people vote, and the people vote against it? They'll have to vote again, because the people can't be allowed to stop what we're doing.
That is where you find the EU "establishment" completely out of touch with the people.
I agree that the EU does not seem to have a serious problem with top officials ignoring the rules and being unpunished for it (or if it does, I don't know about it). However the USA clearly does. James Clapper being just one example. Hillary Clinton being another who is in the news right now.
W.R.T. Greece, that is very clearly a couple of systemic problems coming together:
1) Banks being too big to fail. Same problem all over the world. Not EU specific.
2) EU being willing to continue giving Greece large sums of money far after it became clear that the country was completely broken and shouldn't be in the EU at all, because they're ideologically incapable of contemplating the EU getting smaller.
> By a remarkable coincidence, a key foundation of Brexit is the dismissal of the EU's requirement to treat workers in a civilised manner as "Brussels red tape"
I guess you're thinking of the working time directive?! Not sure what you mean here. At any rate, it's a bit off topic for this thread which is really about US politics, perhaps I shouldn't have brought up the EU at all.
Trump's argument is very simple - "To get to Washington you need a lot of money, most of these guys get it from shadowy lobbyists, but I am already super rich and that makes me unbuyable - and thus a man of integrity who says what he thinks. With me you know exactly what you're gonna get".
It is a very simple, straightforward argument and unfortunately it has a core of truth to it.
Exactly. Greece was merely the scapegoat for the bailout of the massively over-leveraged banks that bet against their sovereigns when they saw the Euro would equalize risk.
For a much better explanation of how the EU got into this mess, see the this[1] talk by Mark Blyth (Econ prof at Brown).
Except the EU isn't that big, about 33,000 staff [1]. I also seem to remember voting in EU elections so it's hard to call it undemocratic.
[1] http://ec.europa.eu/civil_service/docs/hr_key_figures_2016.p...
That said, 33k is quite a bit larger than I expected, actually, given that the entire UK civil service is about 10x that size but the EU doesn't do benefits management, tax collection, defence, doesn't run a justice system, transport system, etc.
With respect to democracy in Europe, it's a bit complicated. People tend to care a lot more about their national parliaments than the EU parliament. The UK, in particular, gets outvoted in the EU parliament a whole lot, so regardless of what you think of the system in the general sense, for the UK it results in having to do things it doesn't want quite a bit.
I don't think it's fair to say he lost interest in it. It's a combination of 1) having less power than people think; and 2) having to be everyone's President, not just the people who elected him.
If you were President and had a good faith desire to govern by national consensus, what would you do? Deregulate industries? Increase regulation? Flat tax? Eliminate social security? Increase social security? Universal healthcare? No healthcare? End the drug war? How much of that do you think would drum up more than bare majority support?
For those interested, more here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzrBurlJUNk
Watch the entire documentary, lays it out plain and simple. To this day, not a single prosecution.
I think its mostly #1, combined with the fact that reform was behind a few high-priority economic issues, and by the time they were taken care of, Congress was embroiled in campaigns for the midterm elections, where the Democratic majority fell to a Republican majority unusual (even in the history of divided government in this country) unwilling to work with the President (Mitch McConnell, famously, stated that his #1 priority as Senate Majority Leader was to assure that Obama was a one-term president), which meant there was no way for any reform agenda Obama had to make progress.
> If you were President and had a good faith desire to govern by national consensus, what would you do?
I don't think any President has had a good faith desire to govern by national consensus (nor do I think that governing by national consensus in the US, at any point in its history, would be a reasonable or even sane desire.) OTOH, Presidents have very little practical choice, on certain matters, other than to operate within the constraints set by Congress' willingness to participate.
Obama campaigned on "fix Washington" but then went on to drive a fairly ordinary centre-left policy agenda (centre-left by American standards).
'President Harry Truman complaining:
"I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have sense enough to do without my persuading them. ... That's all the powers of the President amount to."'
Just to touch on this one point, the situation has its own twisted logic. With this election the concept of the presidency may be entering a new phase where it acts primarily as a lighting rod for disaffection. This effectively helps to strengthen existing power structures in the houses (the parties, ways of working, lobbyists etc.) by focusing popular discontent on a single office.
Perhaps more relevantly, it was always he lost the narrow (and unreliable, thanks to a handful of often hostile Democratics) Congressional majority at the first midterm, and it was replaced with an unusually obstructionist opposite-party majority which meant that any Obama policy initiative was dead on arrival.
> Not that he could really have fixed anything anyway: the mismatch between emphasis on the US President and how much power they actually have is kind of ridiculous.
Candidates often have been very eager to point this out and trying to reflect some of the attention to their Presidential campaign to other avenues (including down-ballot campaigns and maintaining an active grassroot network for their priorities.) But this tends to be ineffectual; people still act like electing a President is all you need to be concerned about, and act surprised when they don't get what they want from doing that alone.
White police officers are the devil and by extension poor whites are the devil [but we see that non white officers engage in similar behavior] The notion that all Hispanics have Mexican ancestry and all want to be addressed in Spanish or that all blacks identify with Sharpton politics.
People call Trump a populist and at times racist, they have said the same thing of Sanders not so much for what he says but because of who follows his candidacy [the demographics].
It looks like there are people who are rebelling against some of the divisiveness of identify politics and misguidedly people are labeling these people pejoratively as being a certain kind of people [racists, misogynists, xenophobes, uneducated, poor, etc.] when most likely they are simply rebelling against traditional politics where they have been simply useful but not tended to.
For establishment candidates it'll be tough to balance efforts to underscore minorities in a major way without excluding or at the expense of browbeating majorities because unfortunately they are assuming a zero sum game even while saying otherwise.
When was the last time you watched a story on Television about the European American poverty and economic dislocation in the US?
When was the last time the President or an elected official campaigning for European American Scholarships, loan assistance programs or European American organizations?
They use to call the middle class the silent majority. There was an unspoken agreement between the Politicians the Media and the Middle Class that everyone was working for the good of the people, all the people including European Americans.
But I think the last 15 years have shown conclusively in the eyes of the silent majority that agreement has been torn up and thrown in the bin. And the Media the Politicians and there Billionaire pay masters have turned quite dramatically against the good of the European Americans working and middle classes.
So they will not be silent anymore. They will make there demands and organise and vote according to who best serves there interests. There is no amount of Media spinning demonization and appeals to white guilt that is going to put European Americans back in there nice little box. The Billionaires killed that golden goose that was the silent majority now they will have to deal with the consequences.
The homogenization of all Europeans into on mass of culture-less 'white people' serves a political purpose. It polarizes the entire electorate into easily manipulated identity blocks based on race. They create a narrative that the amorphous 'white people' has this or that evil intentions and serves as a bogyman to scare other groups. Polarization keeps people voting in very narrow dependable voter blocks based on a dependable list of identity block issues.
The way forward is to assert European American policy issues into national policy debates. And take the magic wand of 'white people' away from the progressives and the republicans. Neither of which have any intention of advocating policy on the behalf of European diaspora.
That is what the media and the establishment fear most of all. European Americans asserting there rights as a coalition demanding political representation. Once that happens they can no longer hide behind 'white people' while simultaneously demonizeing us as a scapegoat. There will be a clear demarcation line between the policy objectives of the super wealth who control the economy and Political parties and the 99% of European diaspora who have legitimate political, economic and social demands that have to be taken into account.
One way forward would be to disengage in divide and conquer politics and engage instead in actually addressing pressing issues. Poverty, violence, injustice, without tingeing it with race or class but rather as societal problems that we as a whole society must address rather than it's a [some group's] problem.
For example the unequal gender pay issue is not best addressed as a problem caused by males but rather as a social problem which must be addressed by all to get to a place on average where all get equivalent pay. That is addition rather than subtraction.
I agree that it will be disastrous for the united states but I see no will to change course in politics or social trends. In fact it seems the mainstream media is desperate to instigate some large scale social conflicts in the uS.
Hillary Clinton, in one of the early Democratic primary debates.
It was an amazing display of skill. Clinton was asked by a black member of the audience how she, as a white woman president, would improve the lives of black Americans. She somehow turned the question around, and by the end of her answer, she was talking about a recent study on the declining health of poor whites and how she would help them.
And the audience actually applauded! Nobody there -- either black or white -- seemed to notice how artfully she dodged the question and presented one of her limitations as an apparent strength. I was floored.
Its along the lines of, oh you think your poor? Well, theses people over here are much poorer then you. You should not complain and be happy with what you have because it can be much worse!
If you looked into the world back then - there was great revolting against establishment too - no matter the ideology (or actions) in any country during the great depression - they were exchanged for someone else.
The ruling class has 2 responsibilities - economic growth and redistribution and security. They must keep reasonably safe and deliver enough to the people to not starve.[1]
The post 9/11 media frenzy made people feeling permanently insecure - this is something no government can win now. The US now has 2 economies that are lumped together for statistical purposes. The one of them is doing just fine. But its recovery masks the plight of the great unwashed that all the rest of us are.
The people feel the desire to burn the system. Nothing strange with that. Anyway - if the presidential election is Bernie vs Not Trump or Hilary vs Trump - you can completely write off the establishment candidate. Since the voters behind Bernie and Trump seems to hate the current order more than they are loyal to their own party.
The bullying against BS supporters to vote for Hilary in case of her winning the nomination is telling.
[1] Safety and not starving have different meanings depending on society, culture and past experience.
I would imagine there should be some supporting artifacts of this in various reports. Where would one look to see data to support this (two clustered groups experience the world significantly differently).
I would imagine that publicizing this data would help people validate their concerns that no, things aren't going as well as I've been told.
Maybe a slightly better line would be based on US GDP. Per capita it is ~$53,000, capturing a share of the economy larger than that can reasonably be described as doing ok (of course the line would be different for a household than an individual).
Maybe a living wage is a better benchmark. The minimum required to "thrive" with a normal list of opportunities/choices that people can be expected to encounter. E.g., car required if not living in high-density urban environment, raising children, having pets, buying simple furniture, healthy food, internet access, life and house/rental insurance etc. It's all about access to thriving, not access to luxury, and in each place and circumstance that access is different, but living wages can be indexed to all these factors. The more factors included to counter the various axes of oppression the better.
For example, in Canada we have the Canadian Centre for Policy alternatives which publishes living wage data/indexes every year for a number of cities.
A few years back I helped cofound a programming and design worker co-op with a handful of other people and we discussed using such an index to determine salaries for members in different cities. E.g. if the Montreal team gets 4x the local living wage, then the Vancouver team also gets 4x their local living wage, even if the absolute amount appears higher.
That is the first i found. But it is somewhat dated.
On the R side I'm one of the guys who was kicked out by the neocons for not being a bond villain warmonger or televangelist wannabe. The neos were the establishment for a couple decades, and now the wheel turns and we're going back to "real" republicans again and kicking out the neos. I'm pretty happy Trump voter, but I'm really an anti-Jeb voter or anti-Rubio voter. Is Trump the best real republican out there? Probably not, but he's the first in the limelight of this new cycle.
On the D side their party kicked out all the hippies and replaced them with Wall Street shills. At least in leadership positions. The R purged their entire party whereas the D has always had hippies, just no longer in leadership. Again they're not eliminating the concept of an establishment, they're just kicking the wall street shills out and putting the hippies back in charge. Again, is Sanders the best hippie out there? Probably not, but he's the first in the limelight of this new cycle.
If I can't vote for Trump I'll vote for Sanders. I trust an honest enemy more than I trust my own parties former leaders. I don't think this is an unusual outlook, either. If, oh who am I kidding, when, Hillary screws Sanders out of the nomination, Trump should pick Sanders as veep, that would be epic.
The interesting part is the synchronization across party lines. Both parties having a coup at the same time? Well, the rank and file have more in common with each other than they do with their former leadership, so...
Other than those minor issues its a very good article.
I also don't accept that Sander's left populism is in the same category as Trumps' fake right populism. As another commenter stated quite well above, Trump is establishment. You can't get more establishment than a real estate tycoon who got rich from daddy's money. It's the same thing as the Bush family, just more crude.
(1) He plays along - most likely. (2) Continued gridlock. (3) He spends four years trying to steamroll Congress by vilifying his opponents, scapegoating and executive order abuse - causing a political and constitutional crisis with vague similarities to 1938 Germany.
I'm ambivalent about all the candidates, just mainly concerned about demagoguery at time of economic and social upheaval.
Of course, I'm not holding my breath. Successful politicians are wizards at portraying 1 thing and doing another, so it wouldn't surprise me if you're right. I'm just saying I think there's a slightly bigger chance that he's someone to buck that trend.
And how would that be any different from the last 7 years? The only real difference I can see is the side the press will be on.
The thought process that this is a new thing is ignoring the last couple of election cycles.
Trump is a wildcard, for everyone, supporting him or not. His rhetoric panders towards certain groups and is worth an enormous amount of money in free press coverage. The things candidates say before and after being elected are not particularly credible but I suspect this is even less so. The track record isn't there, the Republicans certainly have no idea what he will do.
If Trump was elected, the US government would still have to be filled with humans, and for the most part these will not be the type of people who are responding positively to him right now.
As a side note, I don't see any problem with "gridlock." Every time a bill passes in to law, we get 1,000+ pages of new rules, exemptions, loopholes, and special favors. An acceleration of this would not be particularly desirable.
Some of his goals include cooperating with Russia to fight ISIS in Syria, cooperating with China to put North Korea in its place, negotiating better trade deals with China, Japan, and Mexico, rejecting the TPP, and strengthening the border between Mexico and the US. It seems to me that he could at least partially accomplish many of those goals with just the power vested in him and his cabinet.
US politics is no longer country politics — it's more of an important part of world politics than an isolated thing. Just the same, US economy is more of a part of world economy. The article quotes "taxes on the rich" going down, but it omits the main reason: "taxes on the rich" are really taxes on capital (which includes not only billionaires, but individual investments of hundreds of millions people), and the capital is mobile now. If the US wouldn't lower capital taxes, the capital would just flow away. Same principle works for US blue-collar workers: sorry guys, but you're competing with workers from India and China now. And, to be honest, on a humanity level, it feels completely fair that your wages going a little down while theirs go up, tremendously. Same is true for financial elite: US financial elite is no longer financial elite of one country, but financial elite of the entire world.
And, of course, same is also true for US presidential elections. Of course, only US citizens can vote in it. But the political establishment itself is already slowly morphing to being a part of international political class rather then being tied to a specific country: it's especially apparent when you look at various NGOs, think tanks, funds and other similar organizations. And both Sanders and Trump are perfectly logical candidates in this context. They may be radicals on US political arena, but in a broader, worldwide political spectrum they don't feel out of place one bit. (Which is pretty ironic when you consider how isolationist both of them are).
So, the whole world is looking at this US election cycle, but if you're part of US, the whole thing will make much more sense if you take a break from the spectacle and look around.
It's not just "wages going a little down," it's more like the entire economic fabric of large areas of the country has been disrupted by globalization and has been slow to recover.
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/138023808851/the-second-america...
I think today's political climate is more similar to the 1930s, when widespread disaffection led to adherence to all sorts of populist movements and figures, from the Grange to the Wobblies, Huey Long (Trump's closest antecedent) to Father Coughlin (whose modern echo is perhaps Ted Cruz), and into dangerous fringe groups like the Klan and the Bund.
What is concerning now is that the centrifugal tendencies are accelerating in our government, leading to self-sustaining structural dysfunctions that will prompt further contempt for the government and lead to a greater desire for a "man on horseback" figure to set things right. Trump, I fear, is just the beginning.
All that's happened so far is that, at last, the "establishment" message isn't selling. Occupy won the battle for the message, by focusing attention on "the 1%". That hasn't translated into action. We're not seeing pro-labor legislation getting through Congress. We're not even seeing aggressive enforcement of existing minimum wage and overtime laws. We're not seeing employers going to jail on a regular basis for wage theft or violating immigration law.
All that's happened is that the GOP has managed to shoot itself in the foot. Again. Face it, all the Republican presidential candidates are worse than Bush Sr, or Eisenhower, or Reagan. It's embarrassing. This is the legacy of being "the party of No" in Congress - there's nobody with a track record of accomplishing much.
Not sure what to make of Trump. He's the first national level demagogue the US has had in many decades.
On the off-chance either of them would be elected, nothing would change as far as the "establishment" is concerned.
Remember how Obama was the candidate of "hope and change"?