The year of the political scientist
For parents who had doubts that a liberal arts education would pay off for their children, here’s hoping you raised them to be political scientists and not lawyers or doctors.
Over the past decade, books about economics have dominated the best-seller lists and American culture as a whole, given the collapse of Western economies in 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession. Those experts who professed to be economists needed to explain what they got wrong, what happened and what could happen in the future. Even Hollywood took this normally dry “dismal science” and made a series of feature films highlighting ordinary citizens becoming victims of economic forces not easily explained.
The academic world must now prepare for a major attention shift from an enthralled public. This year and beyond will be a time when political scientists lead the academic discussions that matter in America. We’re not talking about the television pundits who jabber on endlessly about the upcoming election, but real academic heavyweights who are trained to analyze data.
Political science, by its nature, is observational. It seeks to reveal the relationships under the surface of political events and, from these revelations, attempt to construct formulas about the way politics works. Donald Trump has given these specialists something to observe that is unlike anything in the last several decades. No political theory or hypothesis in our pluralistic democracy predicted his rise. Now the experts must figure it out.
One can almost predict the topics of the best-selling tomes that will hit the bookshelves by early 2017, after the data is complied and theories developed: “America’s Move to an Illiberal Political Order, Thriving on Anti-Immigrant Sentiment and Islamophobia”; “Trump’s Success and the New Media”; “The Demise of America’s Traditional Two-Party System”; “Celebrity and Politics in America”; and many more.
In many respects this election season, which is now remarkably longer than the professional football season, is actually similar in some ways to football. In football, the goal is to deconstruct the winning team in order to mimic or defeat it. In 2016, it appears copying the formula President Obama used to win re-election four years ago will not be enough. Trump has sent all participants back to the drawing board. This is what makes 2016 such an exciting time to be a political scientist.
For all the attention it gets, American politics is normally a study in incremental change. The success of Trump and Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders guarantees that 2016 marks a radical shift. Dwight Eisenhower, who once said, “I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center,” would be appalled. The center is under attack from angry isolationists on the one side and progressives on the other.
The only thing that is certain is that political scientists will figure it out after the dust has cleared.
Gary Stout is a Washington attorney.