This presidential race has created much hand-wringing over the term "establishment."
Not too many years ago, being associated with the word establishment was seen as being a sellout, part of an old boys’ network that was intransigent and out of touch.
To capture anti-establishment votes, Republicans have distanced themselves from this idea.
The Grand Old Party was grand, however, because it was the establishment, the embodiment of an ideal, the guy sporting a blue blazer and tasseled loafers. Maybe we didn’t like him, but we could trust him to run a bank.
As it turns out, the Democrats have an establishment too, fronted by Hillary Clinton. Rather than representing the tie-dyed, free-love crowd of the ‘70s, the Dems’ pant-suited stalwarts seem wedded to the notion of incremental change and are OK with making a killing on what was once the public good.
But wasn’t having an establishment what divided government and universal suffrage was supposed to avoid?
Those rules were created by white, landowning men who formed the establishment of the time, though, so maybe the current crisis over how we define the establishment indicates a fundamentally American ambivalence toward power.
