By David K. Shipler
Cynicism
about politics appears not to be genetic. It has to be relearned generation
after generation, election after election. So it is that voters who are fed up
with ineffective or unjust government, and by politicians who promise what they
don’t deliver, are flocking to two candidates who cannot possibly deliver what
they are promising: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
The attraction,
at each end of the spectrum, seems to run beyond protest or anger. Not only do
Trump and Sanders supporters know what they dislike, they also know what they
want to believe is doable: “Make America great again,” says Trump. “Make
this political revolution a reality,” says Sanders.
Polling
shows that only six percent of voters “would consider voting for both men,”
Thomas Edsall reports in The New York
Times, based on recent NBC/Wall Street Journal surveys. But a few of their
policy proposals actually overlap: hitting corporations for taxes on overseas profits; eliminating tax loopholes for the very rich, opposing trade agreements that have facilitated the American job
drain; raising the wages required for foreigners who get H-1B work visas; and
increasing spending on mental health treatment for veterans, for example.
Trump also favors letting vets use
their Veterans Administration cards for private physicians, outside the system,
who accept Medicare. Sanders takes credit for a law that “makes it easier for
some veterans to see private doctors or go to community health centers,” his
website declares.
If you take time to drill down into
the positions detailed by both candidates, you’ll find that while both offer
some concrete specifics about how they would accomplish their goals, Sanders’s
are more solidly documented. Some liberal economists have questioned his math,
but there is no doubt that his proposed tax increases would generate hundreds
of billions in additional revenue. All he’d need is a Congress that looks
nothing like the one we’re fated to have.
