Today let us explore the emerging new two-party structure in America.
You have the party of creeping crudeness and you have the party of creeping democratic socialism.
There is a reason the hottest political properties in the country are Donald Trump, leading the creeping crudes, and Bernie Sanders, leading the creeping democratic socialists.
Trump's political emergence well-represents the powerful boorishness and debasement movement that is grounded mostly on the right but just as applicable to portions of the left.
Trump regularly makes and shrugs off misogynistic slurs and rampaging insults. His critics are "stupid"--though he's the one who once asked rhetorically when was the last time America beat Japan at anything--or bleeding "from wherever."
The right loves him because he says he's only slurring Rosie O'Donnell, who is, as you know, a lesbian and leftist.
The left professes to abhor Trump's crudeness as it flourishes in the arena of Republican primary politics. But the left extols an entertainment culture that:
• Celebrates the rise of observational standup comedy in which anything goes in language and subject matter, because it's honest and real and relevant.
• Celebrates films like Judd Apatow's that use crudeness as a foundation for laughs and to make an eventual higher point, because they're honest and real and relevant.
• Gets its news and political commentary from f-bombers like Bill Maher and John Oliver, and Jon Stewart until the other day, because they, while maybe not always honest and real and relevant, are surely providers of vital red-meat protein for the professed vegan left.
In the creeping crudeness movement, you might be an upscale restaurateur who doesn't approve of protesters on the street below, so you dump cold water on their heads. Or you could say Medicaid is for cheaters and kick people off with random meanness.
Or you could physically interject yourself between Bernie Sanders and a microphone to say that he, who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is a "liberal white supremacist."
That brings us to Bernie, who champions the creeping democratic socialism that has steadily gained a foothold if not an acknowledged prominence over the last several decades.
Its prominence is not acknowledged because, actually, denial may be emerging as a significant third-party movement in the United States.
There was that time I was explaining to an assembly--for reasons I can no longer remember or imagine--that the United States relies on a capitalist system generally while using socialism as a vital element for a backstop.
A scowling woman raised her hand, asked abruptly if I was serious about that socialism stuff, and then shook her head when I said of course I was.
She looked senior enough to have been on socialism.
By that I mean Social Security and Medicare. But she looked well-to-do enough not to be on Medicaid. For all I know she could have been well-off enough to be a semi-socialist partner with government in ownership of a steel mill or a Humvee plant.
A creeping socialist democrat like Sanders is not a full socialist, of course. Nobody talks full socialism for the Western world.
He does not advocate--or he knows better than to advocate--shared public ownership of all production of goods and providing of services.
What he advocates is a democratic choice to ratchet up our already-thriving socialist increments, those backstops, to wit:
• Since we already have Social Security for seniors, let's juice it up to pay enough for people to get by on.
• Since we already have Medicare for seniors and Medicaid for the poor or disabled and public health care for our veterans and Obamacare's subsidies for the lower-middle class, let's ease those public-health tentacles all the way out to provide government-paid health care for everybody.
• Since we already require a minimum wage, let's just hike it up to make all working folks a little more able to subsist.
• Since we already have public education, let's stretch it out to cover the college years, since postsecondary education is now as essential as elementary and secondary education, and since college-loan debt is strangling our brightest young people just as they begin to contribute to our work force.
• Since we already presume or pretend to regulate business, let's really regulate it to limit the extent that it harms Americans with off-shore jobs and steadily consolidates greater profits in the pockets of a few.
Bernie Sanders is not radical. He's incremental.
Donald Trump is not edgy. He's mainstream.
It may be, though, that we are in a transitional, not transformational, state.
Trump and Sanders probably won't get their nominations this time. Most likely a heavy corporatist named Bush and a light corporatist named Clinton will.
But Trump and Sanders are men of our time, for sure.
John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 08/16/2015