With the triumph of Trump the media are now going into Deep Navel Gazing Mode. This is what they do whenever the conventional wisdom is upended as it has been this week.
In the New York Times there have already been two mea culpas (here and here) and one j'accuse.
Each of these accounts has merit. But what none seem to acknowledge is that the fundamental reason they got the outcome of the election wrong is that the model they carry around in their pockets is based on homo economicus -- rational man -- and he don't exist.
Trump's comments seemed insane to them as they would to any rational person. But the average voter is not rational. Voters go on instinct. And instinct is not rational, a point I have made over and over again.
You may be thinking that you didn't fall for Trump so therefore I'm wrong. But we are all irrational, if we're honest with ourselves. We are just irrational in different ways and to different degrees. Trump's appeals aren't going to resonate with people whose fundamental outlook is liberal. So he's not going to take in someone likely to be reading this blog. But liberals like me have our own blindspots.
Think back to the election of 2004 and the reaction of liberals to John Edwards. If you remember at that point he seemed very appealing, especially after he emphasized his working-class roots and his concern for the poor. How refreshing! What we didn't admit was that we also seemed to be enchanted with his looks. Like the irrational voters who fell for John Kennedy because he was charismatic, liberals (me too) fell for Edwards. It's hard to resist a politician who is both articulate and handsome who spouts views with which you agree.
Ah, you may be thinking, but what about 2016? This year liberals fell hard for an old man who's often kind of cranky. But the same irrationality was at work. This just happened to be a year when the anti-politician was cool. And nobody has seemed more anti-politician than Sanders. His age didn't work against him, it worked for him. It insulated him from the charge that he was just another ambitious career politician. His supporters haven't cared that his policy numbers don't pencil out, as the economists say. What mattered was that his heart was in the right place.
In short, we are all irrational, even when we try hard not to be. I thought the pundits finally were getting it. Alas, they still by and large seem clueless.
If you are a regular reader of my Facebook posts or this blog none of what I'm saying here is going to strike you as new. If, on the other hand, you have not been reading my posts, what I am saying must sound downright subversive.
Donald Trump now faces no serious rival in his campaign for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. As the party comes to terms with the news, three experts take the measure of his chances.
Republican meltdown, Democratic opportunity
Inderjeet Parmar, City University London
Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the Indiana primary election, coupled with the withdrawal of his principal rival, Ted Cruz, has made him the party’s presumptive presidential nominee. It has exposed a deeply divided Republican party whose leadership has lost all credibility and whose conservative philosophy, which it has held dear since 1980, is in tatters. The party’s very survival is now uncertain.
This near-apocalypse has been years in the making. The Tea Party insurgency has badly undermined both state and national party elites, driving the GOP further to the right and electing highly ideological congressmen and senators who refused to compromise with the Obama administration – not least Cruz, who defied the GOP leadership and forced the US government into a total shutdown in 2013.
But this collapse is also the fruit of decades of economic deterioration of the party’s white working-class voters, especially those without a college education. Compounded by the 2008 financial crisis, decades of deindustrialisation have left a legacy of unemployment, underemployment, falling living standards and expanding social and economic inequality. This has also hit middle-income Republicans hard. Many of them now support higher taxes on corporations and the very wealthy and back some kind of redistribution of income and wealth.
This is a rejection of the core principles of the Reaganite conservative consensus: low taxes, free markets, welfare cuts, laissez-faire government. Trump has also shown that social conservatism is not a prerequisite for victory in the GOP primaries, another blow to the party’s Reagan-era principles.
And so, is the GOP leadership left with no choice but to get behind Trump? There have been recent overtures. Some GOP stalwarts responded noticeably warmly to Trump’s first “serious” foreign policy speech, and Karl Rove’s well-funded campaign organisation has reportedly indicated that if necessary, it would back Trump against Hillary Clinton.
But Cruz’s verdict on Trump, which is shared by a majority of Republican voters, speaks to just how toxic the GOP’s presumptive nominee really is. “This man is a pathological liar, he doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies … in a pattern that is straight out of a psychology textbook, he accuses everyone of lying,” said Cruz on the threshold of the Indiana vote. “Whatever lie he’s telling, at that minute he believes it … the man is utterly amoral”.
The GOP civil war is unlikely to abate any time soon – and that’s a boon to Clinton. The big question now is whether Clinton can turn the other party’s crisis into the Democrats' opportunity. She must now fashion a message that inspires and unites her party for the general election – even as Bernie Sanders, her flagging but still formidable opponent, continues to win states and vows to continue his campaign against the party’s establishment.
Trump won the battle: can he win the war?
Leighton Vaughan Williams, Nottingham Trent University
Donald Trump has been declared the Republican Party’s nominee for the presidency of the United States – and for once, not only by himself. This victory defies all the laws of political gravity.
The traditional Republican way is to elect the establishment’s chosen candidate, generally someone who has served the party faithfully and well – and preferably someone plausibly electable against the Democrats' standard bearer. The nominee is expected to stick to mainstream conservative principles and to be broadly acceptable to those pulling the strings at Fox News.
Trump fails all these tests. And with his signature blend of populism, provocation and spectacle, he has driven the party into a schism, pitting conservative against conservative.
In the immediate wake of the Indiana result the audience of Fox news was treated to a downcast debate between the network’s two principal conservative voices, Bill O’Reilly and Charles Krauthammer. While O’Reilly tried to defend Trump as a misunderstood populist hero, Krauthammer declared himself implacably opposed to a man he declared was not a true conservative and who could not be trusted to defend conservative values.
The party shows no sign of being ready to unite behind Trump. The Hill, an influential political newspaper published in Washington DC, has even provided a list of Republicans who have declared on the record that they simply will not back him. The list is long, and includes some very influential conservative names.
These horrified “NeverTrumpers”, who’ve been pushing their own #NeverTrump hashtag, are all too aware that nominating “The Donald” would not only betray the party’s core principles, but possibly doom the GOP to electoral catastrophe. Disgusted conservatives might well decline to vote at all. That would contaminate Republican candidates across the country; the party would probably lose control of the Senate, and perhaps even of the House of Representatives.
So what exactly are Trump’s chances against Hillary Clinton? The Real Clear Politics average of the most recent half dozen polls has Clinton leading Trump by an average of 6.2% in a hypothetical (and now very likely) match-up.
Take out the poll by the Rasmussen firm, which has a very chequered history – not least projecting a Mitt Romney victory on the eve of the 2012 election – and Clinton leads by 7.8%.
The respected Sabato Crystal Ball project at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics offers another perspective. This uses expert judgement on a state-by-state level to assess the likely number of electoral votes that would be won in a match-up between Clinton and Trump.
The best estimate offered, as of today, is a projected 347 votes for Hillary Clinton in the electoral college, with 191 going to Donald Trump. A total of 270 votes is required to win the presidency. By way of comparison, Barack Obama won 332 electoral votes in 2012 to 206 for Mitt Romney.
The betting and prediction markets tell a broadly similar tale.
Finally, let’s look to the PollyVote project, which combines evidence derived from polls, expert judgement and prediction markets, plus a few other indicators, to provide an overall forecast of the likely outcome in November. As of today, the PollyVote predicts the Democrats to obtain 53.3% of the two-party popular vote, compared to 46.7% for the Republicans.
Trump stands today at the top of the Republican tree. He has won the battle. He will find it much harder to win the war.
Insurmountable obstacles
Matthew Ashton, Nottingham Trent University
Now that Trump has vanquished his Repubican rivals he can start setting out his stall for the general election and perhaps trying to pivot to the centre ground. But as a presidential candidate, his flaws are glaringly apparent.
Trump has burnt an unprecedented number of bridges within the GOP. Primary races are normally fairly rough-and-tumble affairs, but Trump has taken name-calling and mud-slinging to a whole new level. Given the level of vitriol he unleashed, it is difficult to imagine many of this year’s failed candidates enthusiastically endorsing him, as usually happens once a presumptive nominee emerges. This might in turn make finding a credible vice-presidential candidate difficult.
Equally, given some of his exceptionally provocative remarks, Trump will struggle to appeal to crucial voting groups – Latinos, African-Americans and women in particular. He’ll also struggle to attract independent and moderate voters while holding on to his more angry radical supporters.
In terms of organisation, Trump currently has quite a weak ground game. One of the reasons Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney back in 2012 was the fact that he arguably had the best campaign machine in history. While Hillary Clinton will inherit some of that equipment to augment her already formidable primary operation (and perhaps some of Bernie Sanders’s too), Trump is essentially starting from scratch. He’s shown the ability to adapt politically, but building a serious machine requires a lot of effort very quickly.
To compound all this, Trump will now come in for a lot more personal scrutiny. One of the arguments in favour of the primary system is that it means the eventual nominee will have been thoroughly vetted by the party establishment and media. But apart from in one or two cases, notably the brief flurry of stories about Trump University, they’ve given Trump a relatively easy ride on his record. With the Democrats prepared for the general election fight, that is going to change.
None of these obstacles are insurmountable, but they will demand monumental organisation and discipline. So far, Trump has demonstrated neither. And his temper and natural instinct to defend by attacking might be his biggest downfall.
While John Kasich garners more attention from the press for quitting his campaign than he ever did while stumping for president, here at Raw Story, we've gathered together a sort of greatest hits collection of the candidate's most awkward moments.
Choosing a single favorite was too difficult; thus, we offer an EP's worth of cringe-worthy moments from his aborted suspended campaign.
Pink Floyd fans wondered if they had landed on the dark side of the moon when Kasich promised to re-unite the band during an interview with CNN.
“And if I’m president, I’m am going to once and for all try to reunite Pink Floyd to come together and play a couple of songs,” he continued. “And since we have so much trouble in America with our finances, I’m going to start with a little song they created called ‘Money’.”
Kasich, who once vowed to ban teachers' lounges if he were king of the world, started musing about his love of Pink Floyd while explaining that "The Wall" was the best concert he had ever been to.
[caption id="attachment_779318" align="alignnone" width="615"] John Kasich gives a Bible lesson to Jewish voters in Brooklyn (YouTube/screen grab)[/caption]
“The great link between the blood that was put above the lamp posts,” he said, seemingly unaware that “lamp posts” were not in the Passover story. “The blood of the lamb, because Jesus Christ is known as the lamb of God. It’s his blood, we believe…" Raw Story reported.
In the Middle Ages, Christian clerics whipped up anti-Jewish hysteria by claiming that Jews were so envious of Christians that they ritually murdered Christian children. During Passover, it was claimed, Jews added blood to the matzoh to turn it into the Eucharist.
Samantha Bee, at Full Frontal, jumped all over his mangling of the Passover story during his "Birthright" tour of Brooklyn, "where he rained down condescension like a plague of frogs falling from the sky," before playing the clip of the "Blood on the Lamp posts" explanation from Kasich.
"Whaaat? Did John Kasich just fan fiction Jesus into 'the Passover?' Then, as she explains to Kasich why you don't talk about Christ's blood during Passover, woodcuts depicting Simon of Trent, a ritual murder accusation against the Jews living in Trent in 1475 whipped up by unhinged Franciscan cleric Bernardino da Feltre.
In another moment where Kasich alienated the very people he was attempting to woo, he declared that his campaign was running off the labor of "women who left their kitchens to go out and go door to door and to put yard signs up for me."
Perhaps realizing that referring to women in their kitchens wouldn't play well in 2016, Kasich quickly added that things had been different when he first ran for elected office. The fact that Kasich had just signed a bill, the weekend before this campaign stop, de-funding Planned Parenthood in Ohio, made for awkward questions from women in the audience. The backhanded longing for the days when women only ventured out from their kitchens to support his campaign combined with the de-funding of an organization that contributes to female independence revealed Kasich to be less "moderate" than his campaign staff had been painting him.
Kasich offered rape-prevention tips to a young woman at a campaign stop in Watertown, New York when she asked him for his plan as president to make her "feel safer ... [from] sexual violence, harassment, and rape."
"I will give you one bit of advice. Don’t go to parties where there’s a lot of alcohol," Kasich said. He also pointed out to her that rape kits and counseling service were available to rape victims.
And while it would be possible to continue the greatest hits to compile an LP, this playlist will stop with this last one. Kasich offered a plan to defeat ISIS (daesh) when Salon reported that he wanted to broadcast propaganda as a means of defeating "the darkness."
“We need to beam messages around the world about what it means to have a Western ethic, to be a part of a Christian-Judeo society,” Kasich said in an interview Tuesday with NBC News, announcing his plan to create a new federal agency tasked with supporting the Jewish and Christian traditions around the world. Kasich said his new agency would have a “clear mandate to promote core Judeo-Christian, Western values that we and our friends and allies share."
The question of whether real estate mogul Donald Trump will be the Republican Presidential nominee is yet to be determined, but the assumption is that Trump, if nominated, would lose the election in a landslide, taking the Republican Party down with him.
Some observers think he would lose so badly, that he could be one of the worst defeated Presidential nominees in American history, but that requires an analysis, state by state, of the likelihood of a total disaster. If one does that, it is clear that Trump would NOT be defeated by a political “earthquake,” and under the “right” circumstances, such as a major economic collapse, or a major terrorist attack such as September 11, could conceivably win the Presidency, as horrible as that thought is. But assuming no earthshaking event, here is one historian and political pundit’s view on the election.
If we examine the nation section by section, it seems clear that Trump would have little chance of winning the New England states or the Middle Atlantic States, with the exception of, in a major shock, the state of New York. Trump, being a native New Yorker who has played a major role in New York matters, despite his being controversial, COULD win the Empire State and its 29 electoral votes. He would be likely to win upstate and Long Island, but the issue is could he overcome the New York City Democratic stronghold? Let’s assume he wins New York. The rest of the Northeast would be unlikely to go to Trump. So figure one Northeastern state by a close margin and 29 electoral votes.
When we reach the Southern states, it is possible to imagine that Trump would win South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Kentucky, which would give him a total of 62 electoral votes. Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia would be harder to win for Trump, due to their growing Latino population and would be likely to go to Hillary Clinton. On the other hand, Texas would be easier for Trump to win, although the Latino population is growing, but not enough to stop the Republican nominee, so if Trump won Texas, he would have 38 more electoral votes. Florida is much more of a battleground, but seems likely to go to the Democrats once again. So figure nine Southern and Border states in the Trump column and 100 electoral votes, and Hillary Clinton would carry two states, North Carolina, and Georgia, won by Mitt Romney in 2012, along with Virginia and Florida, won by Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.
Now to the Midwest, where Trump could win Indiana and Missouri for certain, but unlikely to win the upper Midwestern states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, or Illinois. Ohio would be a battleground, but seems likely to go Democratic once again, with Iowa also staying “Blue.” But gaining Indiana and Missouri would add 21 electoral votes to Trump, and a total of two states in the Midwest, and close races can be expected in many of the other states in the area. And in the Great Plains states, it seems possible to believe that all five of them—North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma—would go to Trump, adding 24 electoral votes to the total. So in the broad midsection of the nation, we could see a total of seven states added to Trump’s total and 45 electoral votes.
As we move to the Mountain West, it seems rational to say that Trump would win Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, while losing Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada, but with the five states mentioned, it would add 27 electoral votes to Trump, as would Alaska with its 3 electoral votes, making a grand total in the Mountain West of 30 electoral votes in the Trump column. But Trump would have no chance of carrying the Pacific Coast states, which would remain “Blue”—California, Oregon, Washington State and Hawaii.
Overall, Trump COULD win 23 states to the Democrats’ 27. The electoral vote total would be 334-204 in Hillary Clinton’s favor. The only gains for the Democrats would be North Carolina and Georgia, and the only loss would be New York. That means 31 electoral votes gained and 29 lost, so Clinton would win two more electoral votes than Barack Obama did in 2012, when the final totals were 332-206.
So Donald Trump would lose the Presidency, but would not be “wiped out” in the Electoral College, actually make it similar to what Mitt Romney gained in 2012, and better than John McCain did in 2008. And Trump would only carry “Red” states, with the exception of New York being the one unusual case due to Trump being a lifetime resident of the state. Of course, that would be a major slap in the face of Hillary Clinton on her way to the Presidency, and it is likely that the popular vote would be very close in the Empire State. The popular vote percentage would likely be 53-47 nationally, with the fact that the larger states in population would be primarily Democratic, except for New York and Texas. So all the “swing” states would continue as “Blue” and North Carolina and Georgia would be added to the status of “swing” states.
Were Ted Cruz to end up as the Republican Presidential nominee, the math would be different in a negative way, as Cruz would NOT carry New York, but everything else would be the same as this pundit projects, so that would mean an Electoral College vote of 363-175, a more substantial victory for Hillary Clinton, basically two-thirds of the electoral votes, similar to Barack Obama in 2008, and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996.
And if Governor John Kasich were to be the nominee, again the math would be different, with Kasich winning Ohio, his home state, but losing New York, changing the math to 345-193 for Hillary Clinton. So one “swing” state would go “Red” for its “favorite son.”
To sum up: Trump would do the best, followed by Kasich and Cruz, with Trump and Kasich winning 23 states and Cruz 22 states. However, IF Trump were to run as an independent third party candidate, or if some conservative Republican were to run against Trump on an independent third party line, then the situation would be even more disastrous for the GOP, and would insure that the Democrats would win by an even bigger margin of electoral votes. With a third party on the Right, it is possible to believe that Hillary Clinton would retain New York, and have a good chance of gaining Indiana, Missouri, Arizona, and Montana at the least, adding 64 electoral votes to her total of 334, making the number at least 398, with a total of 32 states. This would leave the Republicans and an independent candidate dividing just 140 electoral votes and 18 states.
So expect a somewhat competitive race, but no chance of Trump winning 270 electoral votes, unless there is a catastrophic event. The same would apply to Kasich and Cruz. The dominance of the Democrats over the Electoral College would be solidified, and last into the long term future, as long as the Republican Party does not reform its image of being racist, nativist, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic, and anti environment. And the likelihood of the dissolution of the Republican Party as we know it is highly likely, if Trump is in the race, either as the GOP nominee or as an independent third party candidate, or someone else runs as his opponent on an independent line.
Donald Trump could actually be the next president. Just let that sink in.
This is a man who actively demeans women, has encouraged violence at his campaign rallies, would ban all Muslims from entering the US and recently seemed undisturbed by an endorsement from a leader of the Ku Klux Klan. And yet Trump, a political outsider, is poised to grasp the highest office in the land.
It was never supposed to happen. But here we are. Tonight in Indiana, in the primary that nobody thought would matter, the thing that nobody thought possible a year ago, is really coming to pass. Donald Trump is going to clinch the Republican nomination. He is really winning, like he always says. Only it’s not a joke or catchy mantra – it’s reality.
And even he seems to understand how absurd that is. “It’s been an unbelievable day and evening and year,” Trump said at the beginning of his acceptance speech.
Unbelievable is one word for it.
After the race was called from Trump on Tuesday night, Ted Cruz, the only thing standing between him and the nomination, suspended his campaign.
This was never supposed to happen. Early polling had showed a tight race between Trump and Cruz. And Cruz had thrown everything he had at the contest, from money, to a newsy presidential pick and a non-aggression pact with John Kasich. Even up until tonight’s election, insiders continued to insist that delegate math protect the party from Trump’s nomination.
But suddenly with Cruz’s announcement, the specter of a contested convention fell away and the Republican primary was a one-man show. One big, orange, frightening one-man show.
Beaming at his audience on stage in the Trump Tower, he heaped lavish praise on people he’s disparaged the most, from women – he’s called them “dogs” and “fat pigs” – to Cruz himself, whom he recently declared “everyone hates.”
“He is a tough smart competitor”, Trump said of Cruz, a man he’d earlier said that everyone hates. Nevermind what’s honest, Trump has never been concerned with that .
The relationship between the two men has always been politically transparent , and tonight was no exception. After all, Trump will need to win over Cruz’s evangelical base if he’s ever going to beat Hillary Clinton in a general election. So with Cruz out of the race, he went from being Trump’s Opponent-in-Chief to being his Ally-in-Chief.
Not everyone’s on-board (Cruz, in one of his last acts as a presidential candidate, nuked the billionaire real estate mogul as a “pathological liar”), but it doesn’t matter anymore.
With all 57 of Indiana’s delegates under his belt, Trump has a breezy path to the 1,237 count he needs to steer clear of a contested convention in Cleveland this summer. And he doesn’t have an opponent in sight.
Indiana was the moment when Cruz said that, if Trump wins again, “America will plunge into the abyss.” Maybe he was right – November is still a long way off.
Meanwhile the new normal in America is a strange reality indeed. Donald Trump is winning and nobody – not Ted Cruz nor the entire Republican party working in concert (remember the #NeverTrump crusade?), can stop him.
This spring, over 2,000 Washington insiders, journalists and Hollywood elite filtered into the ballroom of the Washington Hilton to attend the White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner.
The first comedian to perform for the group was Mark Russell in 1983. His political songs were full of puns, satire and mugging to the crowd. He was funny and sharp, but hardly biting.
The same cannot be said for this past weekend’s comedian-in-chief, Larry Wilmore, the black host of Comedy Central’s “The Nightly Show.” Wilmore began his routine by dubbing President Obama’s opening act and his own “Negro Night.”
Wilmore ended his routine by emotionally describing the historical significance of the first African-American president before saying, “Words alone do me no justice. So, if I’m going to keep it 100 – Yo, Barry, you did it my n-gga.”
Some in the audience shrieked, others laughed and many murmured. To use the term to refer to the president of the United States was a huge risk, and The Twitterverse lit up seconds after Wilmore uttered it.
Former White House staffer Van Jones said the comment was “disgraceful” and he’d never appear on any show hosted by Wilmore.
Meanwhile, activist Al Sharpton called it offensive and in “poor taste.”
As a person who studies media representations of diverse people across time, I generally find the term objectionable. Still, in this one case, I’m OK with it. And it’s not simply due to the standard trope “He can say it, he’s black.” I excuse Wilmore because in this case, the “n-word” triggered a rare code shift for Obama – a breath of blackness that we have rarely seen from the president over the past eight years.
In this brief moment, Wilmore was able to connect with the president in a way that no previous headliner had. He also highlighted a type of tension that all African-Americans – including President Obama – can relate to: that being black and “being black” are two different things.
Navigating tricky terrain
Afterwards, Wilmore pounded his chest and pointed at the president. In response, the president thumped his own chest. With this gesture, Obama acknowledged his brotherhood with Wilmore, another black man from Chicago.
Black America has long had its own lexicon of coded language and symbols. But people of color that succeed in corporate or political life tend to pick up and drop the mannerisms, symbols or words that they have grown up with.
The phenomenon, known as code switching, can be thought of as acting differently in different situations. And to assimilate with those who wield power, we often feel pressured to be like them.
For example, historically, blacks in the workplace have felt pressure to change the way they dress, do their hair and even greet each other to make their presence more palatable to coworkers.
Sociologist Chandra Waring has noted that the ability to code switch can be an asset for black Americans. It’s part of how many blacks navigate American society: yielding to the expectations of the dominant culture, while still retaining credibility with other blacks.
While it’s unfortunate, there is a comfort that people of color give to white America by temporarily eliminating the affectations that can come with our culture. Since ascending to the presidency, Obama has rarely been seen connecting with his black constituents this way. After all, as president, he’s supposed to represent all of America. Regrettably, that has tended to mean defaulting to the white majority.
Being president while black
Every now and then, however, we’ll see President Obama being black. There was, of course, the famous campaign trail fist bump with Michelle in 2008. Then there were the different handshakes he deployed during a locker room meet and greet – one for a white guy and one for black basketball star Kevin Durant.
Certainly Obama’s singing Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” at a fundraiser at Harlem’s Apollo Theater was far more soulful than it would have been in a different setting, with a predominately white audience. And the president’s speech that culminated with a touching performance of “Amazing Grace” could have happened only in a Charleston church touched by racially charged violence.
Wilmore knows what all black men know: There are at least two guys lurking under the surface.
And after more than seven years, Wilmore wanted to be honest about it in a way that, while toeing a line between acceptable and objectionable, was culturally familiar.
Of course, the president had pulled off his own code switch at the end of his standup routine.
“Obama out,” he said, kissing the peace sign and dropping the mic.
In the final year of his administration, he reminded the room that even though eight years in the Oval Office may have aged him, he was still the cool black guy from Chicago.
And with Wilmore’s code switch, he was able to tell a president that has been criticized for being both “too black” and “not black enough” that black men are proud to be his brothers.
This week the world saw – via that new, visual means of wildfire gossip-mongering known as “trending on social media” – Lil’ Kim’s new face and hair. For anyone who doesn’t know Lil Kim, she isn’t a teenage Instagram model – born Kimberley Jones in 1974, she’s one of the most successful female rappers the world has ever seen. And, assuming it matters, she used to be a black woman.
But after years of plastic surgery and progressive skin-bleaching, and who only knows what she’s done to her hair, she’s not black any more. Kim, who seems like a genuinely sweet, if vulnerable woman, explained back in 2000 that she’d always been told by men – “even the ones I was dating” – that she wasn’t pretty enough. Well, OK. But I doubt there was a single black person on this earth – male or female – who didn’t look at Lil’ Kim’s new, white face and feel a deep, inscrutable pain. Because Lil’ Kim just announced to the whole world that as far as she’s concerned, Black just isn’t Beautiful.
— (@)
Now, we can blame “racist”, “sexist”, “heteronormative” society for this. We can blame Instagram. We can blame the unrealistic photoshopped advertising images that saturate our screens and, by extension, psyches. We can bleat about “intersectionality” and “patriarchy”. We can blame the music industry. We can blame Barbie, Mattel and Malibu Stacey. If we were really struggling we could do our best to blame Kim Kardashian.
But just for a moment, let’s not blame anyone for the fact that Lil Kim has such a compromised self-image – and let’s not equate Kim with Rachel Dolezal, the white NAACP leader who purported to be black, last year claiming a controversial “transracial” identity. Dolezal may have permed her hair but she never changed her features or her skin tone, nor was she filled with tragic self-loathing. Dolezal’s attitude was rather one of entitlement.
For now, let’s just accept all this without trying to blame anyone.
Wanting to be white
Unfortunately I understand all too well how Lil’ Kim (or Lil’ Vim, as someone I know unkindly dubbed her – referencing a brand of “extra-whitening” scouring powder) has ended up the way she has.
Lil Kim in 2001.
Everett Collection/Shutterstock.com
Kim and I are the same age; when I was a little girl, I also wanted to be white. And it wasn’t because I thought white people were “cool”. It was because I believed that not being white made me ugly by default. My (white) mother was so uncomfortable with my black genes that she told me I was of South American, rather than Jamaican (and ergo African), descent – and I believed her. Why wouldn’t I? I was in my teens before I found out the truth.
Rather than use make-up and plastic surgery to reconstruct a self-identity, I threw myself into books. Chiefly anything by or about Malcolm X, or any of the Black Panthers – aged 15 I read Roots, all 700 pages of it. When I was 16, a copy of Frantz Fanon’s 1952 classic Black Skin, White Masks was given to me by white schoolfriends amused by my new militant stance and whose motives, I suspect, were slightly tongue-in-cheek. Those books did for me what no amount of reconstructive surgery could have done. Fanon, a psychiatrist from the French West Indies, wrote about the psychology of blackness as a legacy of colonisation and white supremacy. What all those books told me was that: this internalised self-image of black ugliness, black inferiority – it’s a lie. And one that’s taken root inside, deep; like a particularly insidious form of brain cancer.
Although I read a lot, those were pre-internet days. It was only recently, via video footage, that I understood quite how aesthetically beautiful the Black Panther leaders were, in their black leather jackets and berets. Huey Newton was like a pin-up, Kathleen Cleaver and Angela Davis were not only beautiful women with fashionable afros – they were brilliant, articulate and outspoken women at the forefront of a thwarted revolution. In 1968 Kathleen Cleaver told an interviewer:
For so many, many years we were told that only white people were beautiful; that only straight hair, light eyes, light skin, was beautiful; and so black women would try everything they could to straighten their hair, lighten their skin, to look as much like white women. But this has changed, because black people are aware.
Well, I wish Lil’ Kim had been aware. Come to that, when I was ten years old, well after the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party, I wish I had been aware.
This year marks the 50-year anniversary of the birth of the BPP and the cry that “Black is Beautiful”. It’s not true to say that nothing has changed in the interim period – much has changed, although progress is never guaranteed to happen in a straight line. Perhaps what none of these writers and revolutionaries could have foretold 50 or 60 years ago was that the psychology of colonisation would persist, invisibly, even when laws and statutes are in place to protect the rights of all.
Without blaming, let’s just accept this fact for what it is. And now I ask you: is it acceptable?
Even though I have never liked the sound of the N-word, and have only ever personally experienced it in a negative context, I could not have been more moved by Larry Wilmore’s use of the word in his closing remarks as host of the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday night.
Wilmore said to President Barack Obama: “Yo Barry, you did it, my n---a,” fist pounding his chest and going in for the brother love embrace. Doing so, he broke comedic character to tell the president, to a large extent on behalf of black America, how meaningful it is for us to have seen him in office for the past eight years. Agree or disagree with his policies, as Wilmore noted earlier in his bit – “I agree with the policy that he’s black” – their embrace represented a moment filled with the vulnerability, truth and power of two black men seeing each other in an America that devalues, profiles, incarcerates and kills them at a startling rate.
I was introduced to the N-word long before I had any real understanding of its association with blackness and black culture. Certainly when I first heard it from the mouth of a white playground bully in the fourth or fifth grade, I knew it was not meant as a term of endearment. But as a black child adopted into a white family, the word and its meaning had never been discussed. It wasn’t until high school, after I’d read James Baldwin and other black writers, interacted with some black kids during summers out of town and listened to hip-hop did I come to realize that it was a word not merely complicated, but intensely fraught. The level of fraughtness is entirely reliant upon who says it and to whom.
But even after I understood that in hip-hop culture, and among many black Americans, the N-word is often used playfully, lovingly, and that Ta-Nehisi Coates told Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton of BuzzFeed’s popular podcast Another Round that “n---a” is his favorite word in the English language, as an adult and the parent of a 10-year-old son, I still don’t use it or want to hear it.
The obvious reason is that I never heard it spoken to me lovingly. The only context I know for that word is one in which I am being intentionally degraded by white people. The next time I heard it after the playground was in high school, when my boss a the local oil company called me a lazy n---er under his breath after I refused to clean the bathroom right after he’d used it. I was a receptionist, not a cleaning person. I believe the word belongs to black people and black culture – the agency and right to use it when or if or how we want to use it is important.
As much as I support and understand Wilmore’s use of it with President Obama, and respect that Ta-Nehisi Coates finds magic in a word many people cringe at, I have been very clear with my son that context matters. When he hears Kendrick Lamar say it, or Larry Wilmore, he knows that it’s their prerogative to use the word, and that they are communicating a very specific, deeply rooted kind of affection toward one another.
He also knows that white people are never allowed to use it. While I have been fairly strict with him about his own usage of the word – not in our house, not with his boys, not even singing along with hip-hop – the exchange between Wilmore and Obama reminded me of a moment I witnessed and wrote about in an earlier book of mine called Saving the Race, which looks at the legacy of WEB Du Bois in a contemporary context.
I was chatting to the journalist LeAlan Jones in New York’s Union Square last year when, when mid-sentence, almost as if it were part of what he was saying to me, LeAlan looked up past my shoulder and said, “Hey, Q-Tizzy, what up?” Then, in this one beautiful seamless motion, LeAlan and the man he had just greeted exchanged the graceful palm-to-fingers slide of a familiar handshake. The man kept walking, and LeAlan resumed the sentence where he’d left off with me. A little while later, having recognized the man he’d shaken hands with, I asked him: “So how do you know Q-Tip?” and LeAlan said: “I don’t.”
It’s not just a familiar handshake – it’s a black handshake. It’s the physical embodiment of the word “n---a” and it is ours. At a time of heightened awareness and receptivity regarding race and black culture, it felt like Larry Wilmore was saying: “You can keep degrading us, keep ignoring or killing us, keep pretending that conversations about race will get us where we need to get, but you cannot take this. Not this word, not this gesture. Not our recognition of each other.” And it made me feel a sense of pride – a sense of black pride.
Tonight I tried to give the HBO series Game of Thrones another chance--but when they entertained us by having a pack of vicious dogs tear apart a baby, they crossed a line, and I have ceased watching again.
When I've complained in print about a television program that is sadistic, using cruelty for entertainment without balance, without any real moral center, someone says, "But oh John, you have published some very dark fiction, some violent fiction indeed..." But you know, there were always lines I wouldn't cross, and there was always a moral center. Occasionally I probably got carried away with some act of Righteous Revenge in a story or novel -- but then I wasn't writing for a television show going out to millions of viewers and, anyway, I would never have a baby torn apart alive (or even dead) by vicious dogs.
Usually, at this point, someone says, “Oh, but Shakespeare was violent too!” But he never had a pack of vicious dogs tearing a baby apart. Shakespeare knew where the line was and, God knows, the man always had a real point to make.
The way sadistic violence is dramatized in Game of Thrones -- multiple rapes, and the extended torture of one of the characters that went on for many episodes, and now vicious dogs tearing apart a baby just off screen -- it just doesn't feel like a drama protesting the horrors innocents are subjected to in the world. It doesn’t feel meaningful. Nor does it feel like, for example, a dramatization of the doings of Caligula, though clearly that real-life sadistic Roman Emperor inspired two separate characters in Game of Thrones.
No. It feels like, just more entertainment -- just like the "useful torture" on 24 and Fear the Walking Dead, and like beloved series characters being eaten alive in extended excruciating detail on the original The Walking Dead.
One has to ask, why don't the producers of “Game of Thrones” in particular, simply see where the line should be, on this show. Why don’t they just know where that line is, as so many other people do, and simply choose not to cross it? The answer may be, "What does that line have to do with my paycheck and residuals?" They seem desperate to find new lines to cross. It’s easier than coming up with real drama.
You see, I think someone one the show does know where the line is. Apparently someone cleared their throat at the script reading, perhaps, and said, “We shouldn’t show the dogs tearing the baby and his mother apart onscreen. I know! Let’s put it just out of shot!” So they show the satisfied look on the face of the sadist, and we heard the screams and snarls and snaps. Why, what admirable restraint! We should all be grateful that they didn’t show the baby being torn apart. We should send them thank you notes. We only heard it, perforce imagined it, and enjoyed this much exploited character smiling in satisfaction. That way we can chuckle, and identify with his satisfaction.
I’m told the books by George R.R. Martin didn’t include most of the egregious acts of sadistic cruelty found in the television series. We might infer that someone administrative on the production encouraged the sadism, then gave the “green light” to using vicious packs of dogs tearing a baby apart as entertainment.
As seven billion people increase to 9 billion people on a climate-changed Earth where food will likely be scarce and billions pushed into desperate migration, empathy will become a rare gem. It will be around--but it'll be rare and precious. How long before we make this kind of amusement more than fictional television, and put the Romans to shame, leaving their timid little bread-and-circus entertainments far behind? Are we now engaged in a televised preparation for that society?
Do we really have to degrade ourselves in advance?
There’s a place on the internet where thousands of Americans across the political spectrum are hanging out together and not arguing – they’re actually having a great time.
The man responsible for this miracle is Bernie Sanders, but not in the way you might think. The only requirement for joining the subreddit Enough Sanders Spam is a hatred of overzealous Sanders fans and a willingness to put aside personal politics for the fun of roasting them. The low barrier to entry has, counterintuitively perhaps, made it one of the most collegial gathering spots in an increasingly divisive campaign.
So user globalglastnost created a forum to lampoon it. It has over 6,000 subscribers.
“I am in New England and have seen face-to-face what I call the ‘green tea bagger’ types,” globalglastnost told me in a private message on Reddit, describing green tea baggers to another redditor as, “very uncompromising, unapologetic and dogmatic.”
One of Enough Sanders Spam’s main targets is the subreddit /r/Politics , which is one of the site’s most popular, with more than 3 million subscribers. In the course of the campaign, it has become a second Bernie Sanders for President page. All stories about the candidate are positive, all stories about Hillary Clinton are negative, and all stories about anything else are few and far between. Commenters who criticize Sanders on /r/Politics are called “low information voters” or “Shillaries”. And when faced with a Democratic Primary loss, Sanders supporters cry voter fraud.
Here’s a characteristic comment posted on /r/Politics the night that Hillary Clinton won the Nevada Democratic caucus:
To all the Hillary gloaters, i’ll tell you one thing. r/politics is, and always will be, Bernie territory. OUR territory. The mods of r/politics have formally endorsed Senator Sanders for president. We will continue to control the front page with positive Bernie news. So before you start talking shit and bragging about your bitch’s win, I’ll have you know that we’re well versed in downvote brigades. Say RIP to your karma if you try anything cute. Assholes.
The site runs on user-submitted stories that everyone votes on to decide what gets shown on the front page, which is in turn fodder for much of what eventually filters onto mainstream news sites. Manipulating votes is against Reddit’s rules , but when it comes to the 2016 presidential race, all of that has gone out the window. So it’s led to a strange space where bipartisanism works in service of trying to push back against a giant Bernie bias.
There’s also a megathread from the night of the New York Primary which was the Christmas Eve of /r/enoughsandersspam: a night everyone looked forward to as the unofficial end to the Sanders campaign. There’s a comprehensive list with citations of the craziest things that Bernie Sanders has said (“I don’t believe in charities”).
But my favorite thing on Enough Sanders Spam has been the Upvotes Party they had after Hillary Clinton won the New York Primary. It really illustrated the cross-political nature of the sub. “As a Hillary supporter, I know this place can get very Hill-centric, so I wanted to throw out a CONGRATULATIONS Trump supporters on your victory tonight as well!!!” is just one characteristic example.
As the Sanders campaign winds down, (Bernie laid off hundreds of campaign staff last week after losing four out of five east coast primaries on Tuesday), even some Sanders supporters have found their way to /r/enoughsandersspam and, true to form, they’ve been welcomed with open arms.
“You don’t have to answer shit about your views,” redditor yzlautum wrote . “This sub is to just laugh at all the ridiculousness that occurs with Bernie, his campaign and his supporters.”
When I asked what will happen to /r/enoughsandersspam after Hillary Clinton becomes the presumptive Democratic nominee, globalglastnost pointed out that the sub has already been jokingly rebranded as /r/enough_jill_stein_spam on the subreddit’s main banner, a reference to Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who would be the natural progression for Sanders fans who swear they’d never vote for Clinton.
In what is, perhaps, America’s most polarized and unsettling presidential race to date, a love fest between conservatives and liberals turns out the be the sanest choice of all.
I was chatting with a friend recently – a successful actor who does abortion-rights advocacy on the side – about a big pro-choice fundraiser she’s currently orchestrating. It was past midnight at her house, but she was still up, still working, clacking away at her laptop, tying up loose ends, pushing ticket sales, gathering auction items – her “side” project looking suspiciously like a second full-time job.
“You’re a hero,” I said.
“No, I am not,” she snapped, vehement. “Somebody’s got to do it. It’s a fucking embarrassment that I have to.”
She was right. “Our country is a septic tank,” I sighed. “On fire.”
“Full-on fail.”
I still think that choosing to take on the exhausting, sisyphean, largely thankless work of abortion advocacy (we are not taught to say “thank you” for abortion; we are taught to never speak of it at all) is heroic. She could choose to leave that work to others, but she doesn’t. That’s significant.
But that reaction – somebody’s got to do it, so I do – triggered a familiar weariness in me. We shouldn’t have to spend our spare time working, pro bono, to remove stigma from a procedure so common that a full third of the women you know have had one ; or to raise money to help impoverished pregnant people travel hundreds of miles, to other states, to exercise a legal right; or to convince a supposedly free and enlightened nation, in 2016, that people with uteruses are autonomous human beings deserving of basic medical care. Each of these things should be a given, and we’ve been having this conversation since before my grandmother was born, so why are we still talking about it now? When will the “debate” end so that women can finally be fully invested in their work and passions and lives?
It was when I sat down to write about Donald Trump’s statement – he said: “Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5% of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the women’s card” – that I realised: it’s the same thing. How many times do feminists have to deconstruct and debunk the notion of the “woman card”? How many rounds are we going to go this time? How many thinkpieces do we need before society accepts that sexism is real and we can move on to the far more important work of repairing the damage it has caused? The next time some rightwing dillweed drops a turd like “woman card”, will anyone remember that women have already done this labour? Or will we just have to do it all over again?
What a tremendous, tedious, pointless drain on our time and energy. Imagine what we could accomplish if we were just allowed to do our jobs.
I hate this election. Everything about it makes me miserable. Donald Trump. Donald Trump’s fans. Twitter. Abortion. Xenophobia. That thing on Ted Cruz’s lip. The opinions in Ted Cruz’s brain . Walls. Refugees. Four hundred and ninety-seven thousand debates. My Bernie friends yelling at my Hillary friends. My Hillary friends yelling at my Bernie friends. Straight white men insisting that identity politics have no value. The random dude who yelled at me for tweeting that I liked that little bird that landed on Bernie Sanders’s podium , because he thought it sounded like I liked the bird better than Bernie, and none shall besmirch the honour of the Bern on Trevor’s watch. (“I get it,” he said. “You have a vagina.”)
But maybe what I hate the most about this election is thinking about all the goddamn writing I’m going to have to do for the next four (or, potentially, eight) years if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency. Misogynist rhetoric is going to reach levels of frenzy heretofore unknown to science, and with misogynist rhetoric comes feminist outcry, and with feminist outcry comes dopey faux-confusion: “I don’t get why this is sexist. Explain it to me. Debate with me. Help me. Convince me.” There is no sense of memory, of the fact that all of this has been explained many, many times before. Because why would they want to remember? The incessant demand that women “debate” and defend our own humanity is a deliberate diversion meant to hobble our power – part of the mechanism of sexism itself.
Do you know what I care about? Young-adult fantasy novels, detective shows and writing comedy with my husband. Do you know what I spend my time writing about? Abortion, online harassment and rape, over and over, around and around. Not that I’m not passionate about those issues – I am, deeply – but my passion is born of necessity. I would love to not have to care.
“Hopefully, we won’t have to do many more of these,” my friend said of her fundraiser, “but you should come next year!” Hopefully, some day, abortion will be affordable and accessible everywhere, and we can go back to whatever we were doing before we were forced to fight for our lives. Hopefully, we won’t have say this all over again. But we know we will.
At a recent “Town Hall” debate Hillary Clinton announced that she would appoint a cabinet that is half female if she is elected president. When questioned by MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, Clinton pledged: “Well, I am going to have a cabinet that looks like America, and 50% of America is women, right?”
Given that Clinton is the Democrats' almost-certain nominee and is given a healthy chance against any likely Republican contender – Trump in particular – 2017 could be the year that America inaugurates its first female president, and has its first gender-parity cabinet.
This would be a first for America. In total, of the 558 Americans who have served in the US cabinet since 1776, only 29 have been women. Just four of the 15 current cabinet secretaries are female.
Internationally, pre-election pledges for gender equality in the most powerful offices of state have become increasingly common. In 2004, Spanish prime ministerial hopeful Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero made this pledge before his election and went on to appoint Spain’s first gender-parity cabinet. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau famously pledged in 2015 that half of his cabinet would be female. He made good on that pledge, and when asked why, simply replied: “Because it’s 2015.”
Yet deploying cabinet appointments as electoral strategy is not just the province of the left. David Cameron also pledged in 2008 that one third of his cabinet ministers would be female by the end of his first term in office – and once he had control of all cabinet appointments in 2015, that standard was met.
But why has Clinton felt the need to join the fray? Clearly she feels the pressure to demonstrate her commitment to gender equality, so the particular politics of the 2016 race are at work here.
Clinton has struggled to win over young female progressive voters from self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders, and now his chances of winning are fading away, the pledge will fit well into her push to win them over for the general election.
However, Clinton has also felt this pressure simply because she’s a female candidate. Whereas she declined to allude explicitly to her gender for most of the 2008 campaign, Clinton has been clear about her perception of feminism, and has sought to use her female identity in her electoral strategy. Donald Trump and other Republicans have derided her use of the “woman card”, but she’s managed to turn it into a compliment.
There is also an important political contrast to be drawn here. It’s highly unlikely that we’ll see such a commitment from Trump or his principal Republican rival, Ted Cruz. Clinton, by contrast, isn’t just positioning herself as the “woman candidate”, she’s trying to set herself apart from the hard-line conservatism of her opponents.
Under pressure
Women’s representation in government has become an important measure of a leader’s attitudes to equality and diversity in representation more generally, and executive appointments all over the world are increasingly scrutinised for their gender balance. If enacted, Clinton’s pledge will also bring the US up to par with the aspirations of other countries' party leaders, especially on the progressive side.
More than ever, party leaders, national media, and electorates expect that the cabinet will represent the gender balance of the nation, and whether the women appointed actually hold power equivalent to their male colleagues. (Just ask British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.)
So what are the numbers Clinton is looking at? A US president’s cabinet comprises the heads of 15 executive departments, the vice-president, and seven additional cabinet-rank positions. There has been speculation that Clinton will choose a female running mate, which would leave seven cabinet secretary positions to be allocated to women.
Clinton, herself only the third female secretary of state, will be conscious of the fact that the senate, whatever its makeup in January 2017, will have to approve all of her cabinet nominees. But there’s no shortage of competent female candidates for these roles, and with the increasing probability that the Democrats will take control of the senate once again, this should not be such a hurdle.
The real test isn’t just whether Clinton can keep her promise, but whether candidates in future elections find themselves under pressure to follow her lead. And now she’s gone on the record with her commitment, Clinton will certainly be held to account for it if she’s elected.
When asked to choose between the candidacies of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, remarked,
It’s like being shot or poisoned. What does it really matter?
But, in fact, it really does matter for the Republican Party.
Based on a survey taken before the Iowa caucus, voters see Cruz as the most orthodox neoconservative candidate on issues such as trade liberalization, taxes and shrinking the role of government. Simultaneously, he represents a slightly less authoritarian choice. By contrast, Trump is seen as taking a more moderate economic stance on trade and taxes, but a more extreme position on authoritarian values.
Most importantly for the electoral fortunes of the GOP, both candidates are located some distance away from the position of the median American voter.
Clearly, candidate positions evolve. Nominated candidates usually pivot toward the center in the general election. Nevertheless, candidates are often unable to ditch the image about their positions which were first formed in the public mind during the primary season.
If there is a contested Republican convention – a prospect which looks increasingly unlikely – delegates will probably support a candidate based on their positions and who is regarded as the least-bad electoral risk.
Two rival interpretations about the basis of support for the candidates are commonly heard. Let’s consider both:
Interpretation #1: It’s the economy
Numerous commentators regard both Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders as economic populists with strongest support among those who are economically struggling and dissatisfied with growing social inequality.
Economists like Dani Rodrik blame globalization for rising populism and the politics of anger. In this thesis, blue collar and less educated voters have grown weary of growing income disparities, stagnant or falling wages, lack of corporate accountability for the 2008 financial crisis and the continued exodus of manufacturing jobs overseas. Researchers at The Hamilton Project found that American men without a college degree, in particular, have fared poorly in loss of real wages since 1990.
Washington Post reporters Max Ehrenfreund and Scott Clement found that Republicans worried about maintaining their economic situation are more likely to support Trump. It is thought that anti-establishment pitchforks are directed against both parties because Congress is perceived to continually promise job growth and rising living standards while in practice kowtowing to corporate donors, favoring trade liberalization and expanding tax loopholes for the rich.
From this perspective, Cruz provides an extreme version of Reaganesque economic orthodoxy on free trade, while Trump has trampled upon these neoconservative nostrums, such as by suggesting taxes on Chinese imports.
Likewise among Democrats. Sanders' appeal to white, younger voters is often attributed to his progressive economic mantra of tackling income inequality, cleaning up campaign finance, reducing student debt and taking on Wall Street. His campaign has been a one-note angry shout for the “have-nots” against the “haves.” Hillary Clinton’s speeches have gradually tacked closer to Sanders on these issues, although she is saddled with her husband’s legacy of NAFTA.
Interpretation #2: It’s cultural backlash
The alternative argument suggests that popular support for Trump taps most deeply into a cultural backlash, rather than any economic issue. In this view, authoritarian populism in the U.S. and other Western democracies has been driven most strongly by cultural values. Trump’s rhetoric stirs up a potent mix of racial resentment, intolerance, American First nationalism and isolationism. It emphasizes mistrust of outsiders, misogyny and sexism, attack-dog politics, and racial and anti-Muslim animus.
Racial politics are clearly part of this witch’s brew. Nat Cohn found that support for Trump was strongest in areas with measures of racial animosity. Survey data point toward the same conclusions. Jason McDaniel and Sean McElwee have shown that racial animosity is a critical driver in Trump’s support.
But American racial attitudes are arguably part of a broader phenomenon. My book comparing support for the radical right in many countries found that authoritarian populists typically scapegoat outsiders. Populists favor nationalism, social conformity, order and strong leaders.
Taking up this broader theme, Matthew MacWilliams in his research found that support for authoritarian values was one of the best predictors of Trump’s support.
Trump’s willingness to trample upon “political correctness” is thought to be catnip for less educated, older, blue collar Americans. This group finds themselves stranded like fish losing oxygen in a shrinking pool on the losing side of cultural tides, powerless to push back against long-term social evolution transforming the diversity of peoples and values in the United States. Meanwhile, Trump’s speech is anathema to civil discourse among educated liberals and establishment Republicans like Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney.
Survey on favorability
For evidence of which interpretation is right, we can dive into the American National Election Study, conducted in January 2016, just before the first votes were cast in the Iowa caucus.
The survey of 1,200 American citizens monitored candidate preferences by asking “Regardless of whether you will vote in the Democratic primary this year, which Democratic candidate do you prefer?” An equivalent question was asked for Republican contenders.
This does not imply that sympathizers necessarily cast a primary ballot for these candidates. Rather, the questions tap into overall favorability toward the candidates before the first vote was cast.
The position of the candidates can be assumed to reflect that of their sympathizers. These positions can then be compared with the median voter.
Economic values
What does the NES survey say about the economic issues interpretation of candidates' appeal?
Lib Con.
Author provided
The chart above shows two classic indicators of these positions in the survey, including where supporters of each candidate placed themselves on the liberal-conservatism scale and whether they favored less or more government services and spending.
The evidence suggests that among Democrats, both Clinton and Sanders sympathizers saw themselves as liberal and favoring an expansion of government services and spending. Surprisingly, Clinton supporters were slightly more left wing than Sanders supporters.
Among Republicans, those most favorable toward Jeb Bush placed themselves remarkably close to the Democrats. Supporters of the other Republican candidates were all on the right of the median voter. Most supporters of the GOP candidates were fairly close to the median voter – with the exception of those most sympathetic toward Trump and Cruz. Cruz supporters were the most extreme and farthest from the average American on economic issues.
Cultural backlash?
What does the evidence say about the appeal of authoritarian values in America?
Author provided
The chart above taps into social tolerance (how favorably respondents felt toward Muslims) and attitudes toward authority (how favorably they felt about the police).
The results provide a perfect snapshot of the range of choices on cultural values in the 2016 primary campaign. As expected, Sanders sympathizers show least support for authoritarian values. They are followed by Clinton supporters, who were closest to the mainstream position of the average American.
By contrast, supporters of most of the Republican candidates clustered together as more favorable toward these authoritarian populist values. Bush sympathizers were predictably more liberal than those of Cruz.
The most striking outlier concerns supporters of Trump, who displayed the strongest sympathy toward authoritarian populist values. This reinforces the notion that his distinctive brand of populism strikes a chord among less educated and older voters, who regard social diversity as a threat to traditional American values.
These factors continue to predict favorability toward Cruz and Trump even after controlling for other factors associated with political attitudes and electoral choices, including the age, gender, race, education and income of voters.
With Trump versus Cruz, the GOP faces a Hobson’s choice between two types of extremes. Which is the riskier bet for the future of the party – and indeed for America and the world?
Cruz’s support now appears to be lagging, while Trump has surged in recent primaries, so Trump may get a majority of delegates in the first round at the Republican convention. If the contest goes into a second round, however, the answer for Republican delegates probably depends upon whether they are most fearful of the dangers of authoritarian populism or neoconservatism.
Pippa Norris, ARC Laureate Fellow, Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney and McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics, Harvard University
