Current Polls and A Wave Like 1968

Recent polls showing Donald Trump taking the lead in a few national surveys have created some angst among Democrats.  But, as David Atkins at Washington Monthly points out, these polls are pretty much meaningless at this point in time. Trump has been consolidating his support among Republicans for a couple of weeks now, while the Bernie and Hillary are still fighting the final battles on the Democratic side. Until Hillary actually secures the nomination and has a little time to consolidate Democrats behind her, any head-to-head poll with Trump is probably not indicative.

On the other hand...Mark Kurlansky wrote a fascinating book, 1968: The Year That Rocked The World, which described the uprisings, armed and otherwise, that swept the globe in that eventful year. From the anti-war and civil rights movement in the US, to student protests in France and Germany, the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, to the Cultural Revolution in China, calls for change seemed to know no borders. And I wonder if we are not seeing a similar wave this year as citizens around the world respond to the economic failures of the last 8 years. Call it a revolt against the "Davos elites", the centrist economic technocrats on the right and on the left who have lost all credibility due to their inability to create any kind of significant recovery from the economic disaster they created. In addition, the collapse in the price of oil and other commodities has put an economic strain on those resource rich countries, further adding to the discontent with the status quo. The collapse in support of these centrist parties has opened the door for populist, nationalist, and xenophobic demagogues to fill the void. 

In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte was just elected President running a nationalistic campaign and vowing to be a "dictator" against crime and corruption.  In South America, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador have seen their governments repudiated.  In Brazil, in what is seemingly an center-right coup, the leftist government of Dilma Rousseff has been ousted in an apparent attempt to limit the investigation of massive and endemic corruption on both sides of the political spectrum. In Europe, the collapse of the centrist parties on the right and left has already occurred in Greece and Spain, openings that the far left has exploited. In Austria, both of the long-ruling center right and left parties were eliminated in the first round of voting, and the second round ended in a breathtakingly close loss for the far right Freedom Party, a party formed by former Nazis in the 1950s and whose current platform is nationalistic and xenophobic. In France, the ruling Socialists will barely be able to compete in the next election, leaving the far right National Front, another nationalist and anti-immigrant party, to compete against the Republicans in next spring's elections. And then there is the June 3 referendum in Britain to withdraw from the European Union which could change the shape of the United Kingdom and Europe in the years to come. Especially in Europe, the failure of the Davos elites has led to a frightening rise in the far right all across the continent, something that should concern us all.

One of the theories in Kurlansky's book is that the ubiquity of television helped discontented citizens in one country see that others were feeling similar frustrations which created a circular feedback loop that strengthened all these uprisings.  And, similarly today, the success, especially in Europe, of these far right nationalist and anti-immigrant parties feeds upon itself. Which brings us back to Trump. Trump's nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric is, unfortunately, not that out of step with similar trends around the globe. Sadly, Hillary Clinton is most definitely a product of the establishment and it seems that when theses tsunamis of discontent sweep around the globe, the establishment get washed away. So, while we shouldn't put too much stock in these current polls, we should fear the global sea of discontent that Trump has been able to tap into.