By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

For months I’ve been reading, hearing, and viewing commentary regarding how unusual this election cycle is. Columnists, critics, and pundits talk about voter anger, unpredictable election outcomes, repudiation of party leaderships, quirky candidates, and many millions in campaign spending that accomplish nothing.

But among all these opinions, I’ve not heard one that explains the underlying reason for, and connections between, these unanticipated phenomena. So I will offer my own opinion. I believe that what we’re observing is the outcome of a critical mass of Americans losing faith in our political and economic institutions.

By “losing faith,” I don’t mean what Gallup has been measuring since 1973 in its confidence-in-institutions surveys, although these data are good indicators. They report confidence levels at historic lows, with only Congress scoring lower than big business. (Small business and the military score the highest.)

Instead, I’m talking about a profound loss of innocence that goes deeper than the taken-for-granted cynicism that I have always heard in conversations regarding government and business. I’m talking about about a loss of capacity to believe what was inculcated in most of us from infancy regarding the essential legitimacy, efficacy, and justice of the American system as it is currently configured.

This loss often remains beneath the conscious level. Conscious or not, it motivates voter segments.

Media accounts of angry voters focus on Trump and Sanders supporters. But the discontent is much more pervasive. Trump and Sanders loyalists can feel their anger because their respective candidates give them hope. Even though anger is a healthy response to mistreatment, in the absence of hope it feels…hopeless.

The shared sentiment that our country is being stolen from us has produced different results within the Republican and Democratic Parties, given their differing histories and constituencies. In the 1930s, the Democratic Party restored Americans’ lost faith in their institutions by transforming them. It held that faith and dominated national government until its commitment to the civil rights acts of the 1960s alienated Southern voting majorities.

Meanwhile, the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful business interests dominated the Republican Party, at least since it repudiated Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency. But for much of that time, the wealthiest Americans felt some loyalty to their nation and their communities.

Globalization, financialization, and the shift from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism required them to abandon all stakeholders—employees, communities, suppliers, and their nation—other than investors and senior management.

Nevertheless, they succeeded in cobbling together a coalition of racially threatened Whites, cultural conservatives, libertarians, Christian fundamentalists, and corporate interests that dominated public policy for something like forty years.

The ongoing mantra that proclaimed their shared identity as the only true patriots, lovers of God, protectors of family, and defenders of freedom diverted attention from the misalignment of these disparate segments’ best interests—and from the understanding that “freedom” meant freedom from paying living wages, providing pensions and health insurance, observing health and safety regulations, and paying for the infrastructure, education, research, and social programs that keep America a going concern. It also diverted attention from the absence of any historical evidence that their policy prescriptions, like trickle-down economics, did anything but make matters worse for most of us.

Middle-age white working Americans. a critical segment in the Republican coalition, have been devastated by these policies. Their life expectancy is declining, suicide rates increasing, and drug abuse skyrocketing. Unlike their parties’ leaders, they want to protect Medicare, fight fewer wars, and reduce immigration. They are pissed, and Trump is their man, despite his inconsistencies and character flaws.

While the Republican Party was growing in influence, the Democratic Party was capitulating. Ever solicitous of financial support from the wealthy, it gradually reconstituted itself as “Republican Light.” During the Clinton years, the gradualism became outright betrayal of Democratic principles in matters of trade, social welfare, financial industry regulation, and criminal justice.

In his insightful new book, Listen Liberal, Thomas Frank documents that, “the socioeconomic group whose interests [the Democrats] represent most enthusiastically—the satisfied and prosperous professional class—simply doesn’t care that much about income inequality.”

Many in the millennial generation feel this intuitively. They are told that they need a college degree to succeed. But if they are not among the elites, they cannot find employment that pays compensation sufficient to service bloated student-loan debt while covering escalating costs of living.

The our-institutions-are-the-greatest paradigm never had a solid hold on them because the evidence of their own lives does not support it. Bernie Sanders is their man, and they form the core of his constituency. His policy proposals seem reasonable to them because such policies are routine in other developed countries. Hillary’s seem to be just more of the same. And Donald’s seem preposterous, unachievable and hateful.

But Bernie’s insurgents have been less dominating than Donald’s, in part, because the Republican constituencies have fragmented, and the Democratic establishment remains more cohesive.

So we have one presumed presidential nominee who cannot clearly and compellingly state what she aspires to do as President. And we have another who demonstrates all too clearly and compellingly what he aspires to be as president. She proposes putting Band-Aids on cancer. He proposes metastasizing the cancer.

Americans dislike both of them more than they have disliked either party’s presidential nominees in the history of opinion polling. And last week’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that they are now running even, within the poll’s 3.1-point margin of error, while Sanders is running fifteen points ahead of Trump.

Over my lifetime, I’ve never seen such a widespread loss of faith in our institutions. But America has.

In each case, a president, coordinating his actions with a movement, led the nation in institutional transformation. Abraham Lincoln, the Abolitionist Movement, and the Union Army ended the institution of slavery. Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement ended the Gilded Age, broke up the too-big-to-fail corporations, instituted worker and consumer protections, fought corruption, proposed a graduated inheritance tax, and conserved our natural resources.

Franklin Roosevelt and the Socialist and Union Movements brought us Social Security, organized labor protections, infrastructure investment, financial industry regulation, tax equity, and home ownership opportunity.

Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Movement achieved change, not so much because Americans had lost faith in their institutions, but because they came to see that those institutions could accomplish so much more. The accomplishments included the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, PBS, and a host of programs that reduced poverty.

Whether a coalescence of a president and a movement can produce institutional transformation in the near term is unpredictable. The extent and depth of citizens’ estrangement from their institutions defines a new historical moment in which received verities such as “Donald Trump is unelectable,” or “Hillary’s pragmatism can accomplish more with a Republican Congress than Bernie’s idealism,” no longer apply.

Trump has momentum relative to Clinton. Trump and Sanders are both supported by what looks like nascent movements. Clinton is not. And if elected, she would have to overcome widespread and lingering bitterness among losers in both parties.

Nor is it clear that the currently accepted paradigm regarding government’s role and responsibilities could shift quickly enough, among enough Americans, to enable either a President Trump or Sanders and their respective movements to prevail on policy matters. What is clear is that growing numbers of Americans reject the traditional paradigm implicit in Hillary Clinton’s policy prescriptions.

Also clear is that younger voters are increasingly accepting of Bernie Sanders’ social democratic paradigm. And that is significant.

Thomas Kuhn popularized the term “paradigm shift” in his great work on the history of scientific revolutions. What many who now use Kuhn’s term don’t remember or never knew is Kuhn’s finding that paradigms did not change because those advocating the new one persuaded those who held the old one. They changed because those who held the old one died.