THE YEAR OF THE POLITICAL SCIENTIST

You parents who had doubts that a liberal arts education would pay off for your children; here is hoping you raised them to be political scientists and not lawyers or doctors.  

   

Over the past decade, economics has dominated the best seller list, speaker forums and overall American culture.  This has been necessary and predictable given the collapse of Western economies following the 2008 recession. Those experts who professed to be economists needed to explain what they got wrong, what happened and to set out their plan for the future.  Even Cinema took this normally undramatic “dismal science” and made a series of feature films highlighting ordinary citizens getting screwed by economic forces not easily explained.

The academic world must now prepare for a major attention shift from an enthralled public.  2016 and beyond will see a time that political scientists lead the academic discussions that matter in America.  We are not talking about the television pundits who jabber on endlessly about the election, but rather real academic heavy weights who are trained to analysis data before and after elections take place.

Political Science by its nature is observational. It seeks to reveal the relationships underlying political events and conditions and from these revelations it attempts to construct principals about the way the world of politics works.  Donald Trump has given these specialist something to observe, unlike anything in their collective lifetimes.  No political theory or hypothesis in our pluralistic democracy predicted his rise to capture the Republican Nomination.  Now the experts must figure it out.

One can almost predict the topics of the best selling tomes that will hit the book shelves 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.”;.  No one would have predicted these trends a short time ago.

In many respects this election season, which is now remarkably longer than the NFL season, is similar from an analytical perspective.  In football the goal is to deconstruct the winning team in order to mimic or defeat it.  In 2016 it appears that copying or defending against the Obama formula from 2012 will not be enough.  Trump has jumped the shark, not unlike a good NFL Patriots team, sending 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 case study in incremental change. Not only Trump but also the Sanders phenomenon has guaranteed that 2016 is different. 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.