Outliers
It is intriguing that the Republican presidential candidate who’s leading the polls and the Democratic candidate who’s close to tying the front-runner are both outliers. Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers, defines the word as “something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body.” Outlier Donald Trump is as dismissive of other Republican candidates as he is of Hillary Clinton; he had to be pressured to state that he would not run against his own party. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, is more to the left than party-line Democrats. Both seem to be running against their own parties.
What’s going on? Perhaps the candidates are simply expressions of American individualism, something that’s been both our strength and also our vulnerability from the earliest days of the Republic. In his new book, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783–1789, Joseph Ellis chronicles how the first Americans weren’t sure they wanted to be part of a national entity. People identified instead with the colony, or later the state, in which they lived. When asked their nationality, most responded that they were Pennsylvanian, Virginian, or from New York. The loose confederation of colonies that declared and won its independence from Great Britain was made up of separate, sovereign states that resisted anything that looked or felt like a unified national entity.
During the Revolution, state legislatures routinely refused to raise recruits for George Washington’s army or to pay for it. Washington repeatedly had to beg the states to pay their assessments to support the Revolution.
