Let’s face facts: 2016 has not been about ideas. You’re reading our annual magazine issue devoted to the 50 thinkers changing American politics, but honesty compels us to admit that this campaign season has not really emphasized deep thinking. Sure, America remains starkly divided over vital questions of public policy and political ideology, divisions on sharp display on this list, but that’s not what 2016 has been about, either.
No, 2016 has been about Donald Trump, who is not a thinker and is not interested in policy or ideology or ideas. He’s not a Burkean conservative, a Hayekian conservative or a Randian objectivist. He’s an id with an itchy Twitter finger and a gift for political theater. He’s the alpha male of the cable-TV playground—giving his antagonists nasty nicknames like “Crooked Hillary” and “Lyin’ Ted” and “Pocahontas,” waddling like a penguin to mock Mitt Romney, belittling the president of the United States as a loser, a foreigner, a terrorist sympathizer. He’s made it clear that when he does take positions—even the kick-’em-out/keep-’em-out immigration positions that vaulted him to the Republican nomination over 16 more policy-oriented rivals—they’re always negotiable. He really has just one idea, which is, as he said in his convention speech, “I alone can fix it”—or, as he says almost every time he opens his mouth, “Believe me.” You could argue the Trump phenomenon is partly about immigration and globalization, which is true in the sense that The Celebrity Apprentice was partly about issues in the workplace. But it’s missing the point of the spectacle. The Trump phenomenon is about cultural resentment, anger and most of all Trump. It’s primal-scream politics, a middle finger pointed at The Other, a nostalgia for a man-cave America where white dudes didn’t have to be so politically correct. Trump isn’t selling detailed nine-point policy plans or a coherent worldview; he doesn’t read books or even briefing papers. He’s just telling America we’re losers and selling us Winning. Saturday Night Live used to have a fake pundit whose solution to every problem was to “FIX IT!” Now life is imitating parody.
The result has been a circus, a must-watch reality show, a festival of vapidity. Trump has insinuated that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered, that Ted Cruz’s dad helped assassinate JFK, that the official unemployment statistics are rigged and the election will be, too. This is not normal.
Yes, the 2012 election was thin on vision, but at least its silly-season frenzies—“You didn’t build that,” “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” “47 percent”—had some plausible connection to American policy debates. Not anymore. When a major-party nominee calls Mexicans rapists, suggests that a global trade war would be no big deal and argues that vaccines harm children, he’s shorting the entire marketplace of ideas. When he boasts that he devised his radical approach to NATO as an off-the-cuff response to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and ridicules Hillary Clinton for hiring eggheads to churn out wonkish white papers, he’s making an implicit case for detaching politics from rational thought. Trump is selling Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir, a believe-me cure for all that ails America, and if pointy-headed intellectuals want to nitpick the details, well, in Trumpworld, that’s just proof they’ve lost touch with real Americans.
Still, thinkers continue to think. And history suggests that ideas will continue to matter, even if they’re not the must-see TV of the moment. America has a pretty long record of showing that the conversations we begin in election years will eventually percolate into national agendas.
Which is why this year’s Politico 50 list is one that starts not with the two nominees—Trump’s candidacy represents an assault on ideas, while Clinton’s seems like a continuation of President Barack Obama’s ideas—but with the runners-up in both parties, Senators Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders, who showed in this election year that it was possible to represent a consistent and energetic ideology of dissent, Cruz from the Tea Party right and Sanders from the Birkenstock left. Ultimately, Cruz couldn’t rally enough Republicans behind his traditionalist vision of economic, social and foreign-policy conservatism, just as Sanders fell short with his system-is-rigged jeremiads about campaign finance and Wall Street megabanks, but they clearly spoke for important constituencies. Just as the campaigns of Gary Hart in 1984 and Al Gore in 1988 foreshadowed that of Bill Clinton and his successful “third way” in 1992, or the Ronald Reagan of 1976 foreshadowed the winning Ronald Reagan and his GOP revolution of 1980, today’s losers can shape the politics of tomorrow.
Still, much of 2016 has been about trying to understand and contextualize the astonishing rise of Trump. And while his grandiose promises to end terrorism, restore law and order, and erase the national debt through sheer force of will might not be idea-based, his unexpected success has focused attention on trends and truths that are. Several members of The Politico 50 were included for ideas that help explain Trumpism, if not Trump himself, from Harvard economist George Borjas, academia’s top immigration skeptic, and Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, an enthusiastic backer of Trump’s brand of nativist nationalism, to three-time presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, whose campaigns provided an intellectual blueprint for the worldview that became Trumpism. With Trump talking about cracking down on media reports he considers libelous and banning Muslims from entering the country, Khizr Khan’s mere act of holding up his pocket-sized Constitution counts as an idea. It’s also important to contemplate how Trump happened—and even though some pundits may draw too straight a line connecting, say, the rising death rates among white Americans identified by Anne Case and Angus Deaton with the screw-the-world grievances of pissed-off white male Trump supporters, it’s worth studying how those grievances captured the Republican Party.
The polls all suggest that those grievances, while real, are not widespread enough to send Trump to the White House. But if the Trump show is canceled in November, both parties would face a crossroads, and the marketplace of ideas could be poised for a grand reopening. Democrats will have to grapple not only with traditional tensions between their liberal and centrist flanks, tensions highlighted by the rise of the populist left represented by Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but with the task of forging a new governing agenda after Obama enacted most of their old governing agenda. And Republicans will have to figure out what their party stands for, after its takeover by an opportunistic loudmouth who rejected so many of its stated economic, social and military principles. Can it return to familiar conservative policy prescriptions, whether via House Speaker Paul Ryan’s smiling-establishment approach or Cruz’s snarling no-compromise version, or is there another path that might be more appealing to Trump voters?
In any case, after a campaign dominated by furors over racist butlers, deleted emails and “blood coming out of her wherever,” the true value of our Politico 50 is its glimpse into what comes next.
***
Hillary Clinton is a policy wonk, and Trump is correct that she’s populated her campaign with similarly technocratic eggheads, represented on our list by Neera Tanden, Ann O’Leary and Heather Boushey, liberal intellectuals with particular interests in family-friendly workplace policies. The campaign’s main focus has been responding to Trump’s hourly outrages, but it has also produced 205 pages’ worth of detailed policy proposals to tackle everything from puppy mills to rural disinvestment to Alzheimer’s disease. It’s tempting to mock Clinton’s check-the-box smallball, her earnest support for a Coal Communities Challenge Fund and the New Markets Tax Credit and the Labor Department’s YouthBuild program, but presidential policies that affect the lives of Americans tend to begin with campaign promises.
So give Clinton her due: She’s clearly got ideas.
It’s less clear whether she’s got big ideas.
Ever since the New Deal, the Democratic Party’s main idea has been that government should provide economic help to Americans in need. That was the idea behind Social Security and Medicare for the elderly, food stamps and Medicaid for the poor, Pell Grants and loans for college students, and the rest of America’s welfare state. Obama campaigned on this idea as a “we’re in this together” approach, contrasting it with the anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-government Republican ethos he dismissed as “you’re on your own.” Clinton has embraced the same communitarian idea in contrast to Trump’s me-me-me-ism; her campaign slogan is “Stronger Together,” which makes sense coming from the author of It Takes a Village.
After the passage of Obamacare, a giant step toward the Democratic dream of universal health insurance, some thought the party might try to explore new paths. The American safety net that originated with the New Deal seemed just about complete, finally covering the sick as well as the elderly and needy, and it seemed conceivable that Democratic mindsets might change now that circumstances had changed. Instead, Obama kept pushing for incremental expansions of the welfare state, like his new rules extending overtime pay to millions of workers, as envisioned by Ross Eisenbrey and Jared Bernstein. He did not crusade to reimagine America’s social contract. And his closest stab at a foreign-policy doctrine, his own quotable, if inelegant, phrase “Don’t Do Stupid Shit,” did not exactly qualify as a philosophical breakthrough in the field of international relations.
Clinton does not seem interested in radical intellectual renewal, either. She wants to ease student indebtedness, building on Temple University professor Sara Goldrick-Rab’s proposals for free college that Sanders helped elevate to prominence in the primary, and increase the federal minimum wage, bolstered by findings from economists Alan Krueger and David Card that employers would not respond by eliminating many jobs. She’s continuing to advocate working family issues like paid sick leave, a pet project of the energetic California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez. She will continue Obama’s pushes to extend civil rights to transgender Americans, as in the bathroom battle launched by administration officials Catherine Lhamon and Vanita Gupta, and to improve the criminal justice system, a priority of police reformers like Chuck Wexler, as well as Black Lives Matter activists like DeRay Mckesson and Brittany Packnett.
These are all defensible tweaks to the American welfare state, but they do not represent a new vision for the nation. That’s because Clinton mostly embraces Obama’s vision for the nation. In fact, one reason her agenda can seem squinched is that Obama accomplished so much of his own agenda. He helped prevent a second Great Depression and jump-started a slow but steady recovery that cut unemployment to 5 percent. He launched a clean-energy revolution, let gays serve openly in the military, raised taxes on the rich and slashed the federal deficit. He enacted sweeping financial and education reforms as well as his health reforms. He brought most of America’s troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and while he didn’t eliminate terrorism or pacify the Middle East—he doesn’t think U.S. power can do that—he did pursue openings to Cuba and Iran. He checked off a generation’s worth of items on the center-left to-do list.
So now what? The main intellectual argument for Clinton’s candidacy mirrors Obama’s argument for reelection in 2012, the case for a bulwark against Republicans who want to reverse the Obama era, with the bonus argument that Trump is a racist nutcase who can’t be trusted with nukes. Clinton hopes to check off the to-do items that Obama couldn’t get past the GOP Congress—gun control, immigration reform, an infrastructure bank—but she mostly believes America is already on the right track. Her one break with Obama has been her pandering renunciation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she hailed as “the gold standard” for free-trade deals when she was secretary of state. For Obama and his TPP point man, Michael Froman, the deal represents America’s economic and geopolitical future, but under heavy political pressure from the Democratic left, Clinton took the side of anti-corporate free-trade critics like Lori Wallach.
It has become obvious in 2016 that most of the intellectual ferment in the Democratic Party is coming from the left, from thoughtful liberals like Sanders’ economic adviser Stephanie Kelton, a critic not only of harsh austerity but of deficit worries in general, as well as polemicists like Thomas Frank, who has made his name trashing Democratic elites as water-carriers for the rich. But while Clinton has adopted the system-is-rigged rhetoric of her party’s Sanders-Warren wing, it’s not clear that she truly embraces its worldview. She seems more comfortable with Obama’s incremental better-is-better-than-worse approach, or perhaps her husband’s cartoonishly micro “school uniforms”-style policy agenda of the mid-1990s. And it must be said that while left-wing desires like breaking up the banks and ditching any pretense that budgets ought to be balanced are big ideas, they’re not necessarily good ideas. Similarly, preventing Republicans from taking away people’s health insurance, gutting financial and environmental regulations, and forcing the Treasury into default may not be inspiring, but they’re pretty compelling. “Don’t Do Stupid Shit” beats the alternative, too.
After all, intellectual ferment can be an overrated quality in politics. Just look what happened to the Republicans.
***
“We are the party of ideas,” Speaker Ryan recently tweeted. It felt a bit odd at a time when the public face of that party was calling Obama the founder of ISIS and urging Russia to hack Clinton’s emails, but Ryan attached a link: “IDEAS are really what make this country great.”
Maybe. But Republican ideas, especially the trickle-down ideas beloved by Ryan and his fellow supply-siders, have endured a rough couple of decades. The leaders of the Party of Ideas warned that Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax hike on the rich would shred the economy and expand the deficit, just before the economy boomed and the deficit vanished, then predicted that George W. Bush’s 2001 tax cuts would create huge surpluses and lasting growth, before surpluses became giant deficits and the economy hurtled toward the worst collapse since the Depression. Republicans then savaged Obama’s tax hikes on the rich, as well as his health reforms, financial rules and energy policies, as “job killers,” but an economy that was bleeding 800,000 jobs a month when he took office has added 15 million jobs since 2010. Reality just hasn’t cooperated with Republican economic rhetoric.
And it’s not just GOP theories of the economy that have clunked in practice. Bush’s war in Iraq was a fiasco, notwithstanding the assurances of neoconservatives. Gay marriage does not seem to have shredded the fabric of America, notwithstanding the warnings of social conservatives. The scientific evidence for climate change has become overwhelming, in brazen defiance of Republican dogma. GOP leaders haven’t always done much reckoning with the real-world performance of their ideas.
The Obama era has also highlighted the conditional nature of the GOP’s commitment to some of its most cherished ideas, a willingness to turn on its own principles that extends beyond the typical inconsistencies of governing. After presiding over a wild spending spree while they controlled Washington in the Bush era, Republicans rediscovered their belief in spending restraint when they were in the opposition. But when Obama embraced conservative education reforms like the Common Core, most Republicans discovered they no longer liked that kind of conservatism. In fact, the most consistent GOP principle in the Obama era has been anti-Obama-ism. And that’s a principle all Republican voters have embraced.
This partisan definition through fervent opposition helps explain how a Morning Joe-watching, race-baiting, born-to-privilege billionaire—not only America’s most prominent doubter of Obama’s citizenship, but also his professional, intellectual and emotional opposite—became the Republican nominee. It wasn’t because Trump embodied Ryan’s party of ideas. Primary voters marinated in talk radio and Fox News weren’t looking for a latter-day William F. Buckley. They preferred a latter-day Morton Downey Jr.
Trump did adopt some of the party’s ideological orthodoxies, like its all-out opposition to Obamacare, gun control and climate action. He also announced an economic plan that sounded like a satire of trickle-down thinking, pledging to eliminate the national debt in eight years while slashing $10 trillion in taxes. It was an obvious fantasy, but the other 16 Republican candidates offered tax-cut plans that relied on similarly magical assumptions even if they less flagrantly abused basic math. If anything, Trump’s fairy-tale economics helped normalize him in the primary.
At the same time, Trump has rejected the less popular elements of the GOP catechism, including entitlement reform, free-trade deals and the Iraq War, which he had previously backed. His big issue is immigration, but that seems to be less about substance—after all, the undocumented population has not increased under Obama—than about expressing hostility to Mexicans and Muslims, just as his opposition to trade is much less about reimagining the global exchange of goods than it is about flipping off the rest of the world. Trump’s politically incorrect disdain—for the media, for minorities who complain about police brutality, for protesters who disrupt his rallies, for an African-American president with a professorial style—has energized a rage-aholic plurality of Republican voters. There’s some truth to his quip that they’d support him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue. Maybe their fervor isn’t all about race, but nonwhites certainly don’t seem to feel it—and Carol Anderson, an African-American studies professor at Emory, has documented how historically, advances by minorities in America have triggered white efforts to roll them back.
In any case, the rise of Trump has created an unhappy quandary for Republican elites. Most of the party’s leaders have grudgingly endorsed him, arguing that while Clinton clearly means four more years of progressivism, Trump has at least said he would appoint conservative Supreme Court justices, and could conceivably sign Ryan’s budget and other conservative policies into law. Other Republicans, like the spirited Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, have declared themselves #NeverTrumpers, arguing that Trump’s racist and erratic rhetoric ought to be disqualifying, and that true conservatives shouldn’t go to bat for an unfit Republican who isn’t a true conservative anyway. The #NeverTrump faction has targeted Trump’s heresies and flip-flops, portraying him as a liberal Democratic donor at heart.
For the most part, neither side of this intra-Republican debate has really argued that the party of ideas needs new ideas. The argument has focused on the logorrheic steak salesman at the top of the ticket. In fact, the last official self-examination by the GOP establishment, the so-called autopsy after Romney’s defeat in 2012, concluded that the party needed to embrace immigration reform if it wanted to compete for the fast-growing Hispanic vote and retain any hope of winning presidential elections, a conclusion that may have been correct but clearly didn’t anticipate Trump.
So the what-comes-next question will be even more pressing for Republicans, for electoral as well as intellectual reasons. There will be intense internal pressure for the party to return to its pre-Trump status quo, to the standard-issue economic-military-social conservatism espoused by most of the 16 candidates Trump beat. But that formula didn’t work for Romney, and the nation is growing less demographically Republican every day. And if the party wants to move past Trump, it will have to figure out how to do that without alienating the plurality of its voters who supported Trump. Perhaps it will follow the road map laid out by “reformicons” like Yuval Levin, who has argued for a more forward-looking, decentralized, community-based conservatism. Perhaps it will find a way to jettison or at least downplay its most unpopular positions, the way it has quietly dropped its all-out opposition to gay rights, while retaining the rest of its playbook.
Then again, if recent history is any guide, Republicans will discover a renewed sense of unity immediately after the election, through their shared opposition to Hillary Clinton’s agenda. They’ll put off those uncomfortable questions about what they’re actually for.
***
It would have been nice if the 2016 campaign had featured great debates about inequality and competitiveness, communitarianism and individualism, globalism and isolationism. Instead, the narrative has lurched from email management to retweets of neo-Nazis, casino bankruptcies to Vince Foster’s death, stopping along the way to contemplate the nonexistent Article XII of the Constitution, Trump’s claim that the Morning Joe hosts are dating, and so forth. Suffice to say, it hasn’t been an enriching or uplifting election year.
The silver lining here is that no-idea campaigns are a luxury of sorts—what the hipsters call a First World Problem. America and the rest of the first world do have real problems—Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon has some troubling evidence that our era of fast growth is over—but if the United States truly resembled the lawless, jobless, hopeless dystopia Trump describes, we’d probably hear less about Benghazi and unreleased tax returns. And when it comes to the substantive politics of ideas, both parties have in some respect become victims of their own success.
For years, Republicans successfully portrayed Democrats as soft on communism, taxes, welfare and crime. But today, the Soviet Union is gone, the top income tax rate is barely half what it was a generation ago, crime has fallen to historic lows and the last President Clinton signed a tough Republican-backed welfare reform bill. If modern Republicans can’t get traction on those issues, it’s partly because they’ve already won those arguments. At the same time, Democrats have largely gotten their way on issues like health insurance, gay rights and protecting Social Security from even modest cuts. Meanwhile, Obama has already cracked down on carbon-belching coal plants, created a consumer agency to ride herd on financial fraud, started regulating nicotine as a drug and watched a ballgame in Havana. In terms of Democratic goals, he hasn’t left that much unfinished business for Clinton.
Anyway, that’s the silver-lining perspective: Over the past few decades, both parties have translated many of their best ideas into concrete policies. But it’s not clear that either has much that is interesting to say about the next few decades yet. The Democrats have become a party of stale ideas. The Republicans have arguably become a party of failed ideas. This November, most Americans across the ideological spectrum will be voting against rather than for.
Still, if ideas aren’t driving our politics at this wacky, unsettling, unfathomable moment, they’ve shaped how we’ve arrived here. And soon enough, this moment will pass. The Politico 50 points to a world beyond the Trumpathon, to the ideas behind the circus scenes—about Twitter and Uber, DNA and GMOs—that will shape the next moment.