This presidential election, every candidate both left and right seems allergic to the word “establishment.” This is a little bizarre since they are all desperate to be elected to the most establishment job in the world. But I get it: if the electorate is in an anti-establishment mood, presidential candidates will hide their resumes, instead of touting them, if that will bring home the win.
As an epithet, “establishment” has a useful plasticity which allows governors to lob it at senators and for the senators to lob it right back. But this does give us a moment to think about what “establishment” really means in the context of elections and political power in the US.
One measure of how engrained you are in the establishment is longevity. After the 22nd Amendment and the experience of the four-term presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, presidents are term-limited at eight years and so too are most governors. In a few states governors can only serve a single four-year term at a time. So the leaders of executive branches are perhaps the most temporary fixtures on the establishment spectrum.
Congress, by contrast, has no term limits. Attempts by certain states to impose term limits on their congressional delegations failed judicial review including at the Supreme Court, so at least in temporal terms, a popular legislator can get reelected for decades. For instance, Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) has been in office for 38 continuous years, and he only ranks third in seniority. And even Bernie Sanders has served in Congress for 26 years.
But we should not lose sight of the larger context as candidates throw insults at each other like a half-chewed chicken wing at a cafeteria food fight. The bigger context is most elections in America are privately financed. Even compared to a successful multi-decade career of a Senator, the private interests lobbying and financing elections have an even longer time line.Take for example, the US Chamber of Commerce which was founded in 1912: giving it…