Commentary: It is probably taboo for a news columnist to state this: presidential politics can be rather dull.
Both major parties' primary campaigns have been underway for a very long time and there is a long way yet to November 8. As usual, most political reporting focuses on poll numbers, personalities, and campaign tactics. Useful data and analysis of human problems, workable solutions, potential systemic reform, and expressions of authentic vision that don't sound like canned speeches - the substance about which we actually care - that gets short shrift. Instead we get an unending reality TV show starring Donald Trump and a bunch of squabbling DC-bots.
Watching the spectacle from here in New Mexico, one can be forgiven for seeing this as a clash of titans on a distant mountaintop, disdainful of our concern except on Election Day. We might get visited by candidates around primary time or election day, so they can be photographed eating some green chile and kissing our children (or vice-versa), but we understand we have little say about who the Washington parties nominate, and even less say in what they will do if they win. It is a major factor in the low enthusiasm we have for voting in these United States, even among the minority who participate.
While for the most part the process is a show, Desert Sage will admit that on caucus night in Iowa last week, presidential politics actually were interesting.
On the Republican side, Senator Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses despite grabbing the "third rail" of Iowa politics, and a matter of some concern to New Mexico as well: Cruz opposes ethanol subsidies. He opposes fuel regulations requiring that gasoline be mixed with ethanol. No other candidate from either party dared to challenge Iowa's ethanol lobby. Cruz instead focused on the EPA, a common enemy among ideological conservatives and Big Ethanol. His pivot worked, and despite some passionate opposition Cruz defeated a powerful lobby that no one, not even the iconoclastic Donald Trump, dared to challenge. This under-reported development might prove a game-changer for future races.
On the Democratic side, the razor-thin statistical tie between Hillary Clinton (once thought to be inevitable and strongly preferred by the party's establishment) and the longtime independent Bernie Sanders, running on a populist liberal agenda, was itself not as remarkable as the demographic data about the voters. Among voters younger than 30, Sanders defeated Clinton six to one, and between ages 30 and 44 Sanders also beat Clinton 58 percent to 37 percent. Will a new generation take this old party in a new direction?
Sanders has branded himself a "democratic socialist," in the tradition of Scandinavian countries that marry capitalism to a welfare state and bargaining rights for workers. We are in a moment of ideological confusion, an ignorance that allows Trump to get away with calling Sanders a "communist" and Clinton supporters to muse about the hammer and sickle. The Sanders platform has little to say about social ownership of the means of production and no existential critique of capitalism. Regulating capitalism to make it seem more fair, distributing its surpluses more broadly, and maintaining programs that absorb some of the human damage of capital's instability, are hardly revolutionary. Not long ago, that was a mainstream liberal platform.
It may well be that the millennial generation is declaring the ideological Cold War over. Red-baiting didn't work. Socialism and American liberalism are different ideologies with different aims. Ironically, the taboo on discussing socialism has been lifted. The taboo that remains is frank discussion of capitalism.
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Algernon D'Ammassa writes the "Desert Sage" column for the Deming Headlight and Sun News papers. Write to him atDesertSageMail@gmail.com