Protest vote

A phrase I haven't heard in a long while popped into my head a few days ago and I think it captures the current mood of US voters: it's "protest vote". It's a vote not so much for something as it is against the status quo, a vote that people know won't count in the end but provides a way for them to vent their frustration at the current state of affairs.

Trump's support falls into that category, as - if one is honest - does Sanders'. Neither really have a clear coherent plan for achieving the vision they are setting out.

That's a pity because realistically we will be left in November with a choice between two fairly similar results while Clinton and Rubio (or possibly Cruz) differ vociferously on many things neither will do anything significant on campaign finance, lobbying, the power of special interests, or health care, poverty, education, inequality and  inequality of opportunity. 

Something else I realized too, is that as unlikely a candidate as Sanders seems to many Americans, many of his supporters were born after the Berlin Wall fell. The visceral loathing of socialist government that the cold war stirred up is foreign to many of them, a distant echo of an older generation.

And finally, it dawned on me that the reason none of the central themes of  Sander's campaign seem odd is that they were all things that Britain had when I was growing up: free higher education, universal health care and an electoral system free of the overly corrupting influence of political advertising, money, and the revolving door between the private and the public sector (at least there was a sense that where it did go on, it was improper).  He's campaigning for the kind of government (pre-Maggie) I grew up with; not in the least bit extreme, just the way it was...