Sanders campaigns in Waterloo, Iowa, January 31, 2016. (Alex Wong/Getty)

In Iowa, all eyes are on the Republicans, and understandably so. Ahead of Ted Cruz, a senator who memorized the United States Constitution in high school and who hails from a state so opposed to the prospect of an overbearing far-off government that it took bayonets to one, literally; and ahead, too, of Marco Rubio, the winsome, up-by-his-bootstraps Florida senator whose parents were immigrants from Cuba — a walking testament to the enduring reality of “the American dream” — is Donald Trump, a Manhattanite mogul whose enduring contributions to the Western heritage include multiple gilded monuments to his ego, 31,000 tweets, and a comb-over the color of Sunny Delight. Tonight, we will have our first indication of whether Trump is an actual presidential contender, or whether his momentum, like his marital vows, over-promised.


But something similar seems to be occurring across the aisle. Hillary Clinton — until recently not simply the “presumptive nominee” of the Democratic party but its heir apparent to Barack Obama, as sure a successor as the Prince of Wales — is leading Bernie Sanders, the Senate’s only (well, only admitted) Marxist, within the margin of error. Yet so nervous is the Clinton camp that the candidate has been pointedly downplaying expectations (“I always thought that this would be a close race!” she fibbed earlier this month), and this weekend campaign manager Robby Mook himself took to knocking on doors in suburban Des Moines. It’s no longer just Bill Clinton feeling an unexpected Bern.

It’s not simply that Hillary’s model — Obama, but for Women!™– was never going to work. And it’s not just that she’s a lousy candidate, though she’s most certainly that, with her deep-hypnosis nod toward interlocutors and her Elphaba cackle.

It’s that the times, they are a-changin’.

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have both capitalized on a shared anxiety among a plurality of voters at both ends of the political spectrum.

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have both capitalized on a shared anxiety among a plurality of voters at both ends of the political spectrum: that American politics as presently constituted is illegitimate, that the people pulling the levers of power, whether in the committee rooms of Congress or the boardrooms of Goldman Sachs, have no legitimate claim to that power — because they have acted immorally in the dispensation of it.


On the right, moderate, working-class voters, mainly white, feel that a professional class has used the esoteric financial and monetary devices at its disposal to undermine blue-collar workers, and connived to ensure that representatives in government abet its schemes, usually by jiggering the rules to import cheap, foreign labor.


On the left, meanwhile, young people, particularly, believe that they have been unfairly saddled with debt, see themselves boxed out of the job market, and see the avenues for advancement narrowed ahead of them. They are the victims of the recklessly self-interested generation that came before them — which, by the by, is many of those same Wall Street and K Street overlords who are bogeymen on the right.

#share#Trump and Sanders have tapped into these narratives, neither of which is entirely wrong, and neither of which is entirely right. But they are sufficiently powerful to induce genuine political realignments. On the right, the question now is whether Reagan-style conservatism — hawkish on foreign policy, libertarian on economic policy, and traditional on social issues — is giving way to a quasi-Buchananite populism: non-interventionist on foreign policy and protectionist on economic policy but conflicted on social issues. On the left, it’s whether the relatively cordial detente with free markets that has held since LBJ is faltering, leaving a center left, incarnate in the form of Hillary Clinton, and a far left eager to “eat the rich.”


#related#Tonight’s results will be either the first indication that these sentiments may be sufficiently widespread to change the topology of our politics in earnest — or a first reassurance that the existing political consensus will hold, at least for the time being.


Whatever the results, the fact that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are on the cusp of victory suggests tectonic political movement underfoot, the quakes from which we’ll be dealing with for a long time to come.

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