DAN BALZ, WASHINGTON POST
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Trump and so-called Trumpism represent an amalgam of long-festering economic, cultural and racial dissatisfaction among a swath of left-out Americans who do not fit easily into the ideological pigeonholes of red and blue, right and left.
James W. Ceaser, a professor in the politics department at the University of Virginia, describes the eruption behind Trump as less an “ism” and more “a mood” that has been at a near-boil for some time. But why has it hit with such force in this election? “They have a leader who can articulate it,” Ceaser said.
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In scores of interviews across the country in recent months, supporters often echoed one another in describing what they like about Trump: He isn’t afraid to say the things they also say, even if those things are deemed racist, sexist, xenophobic or politically incorrect. He’s a businessman who will aggressively negotiate for people like them, not big donors. A family man, a truth-teller, an entertainer and a fearless outsider who is not afraid to attack the media, the establishment and even the pope.
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In the 1970s and 1980s, white working-class voters in the north fled a Democratic Party they saw as too liberal on cultural and racial issues and migrated to the Republicans. Once a linchpin of the Democratic coalition, they later were dubbed Reagan Democrats, but the migration began long before his presidency. They joined white Southern conservatives who had earlier defected from the Southern Democratic Party to become Republicans.
Many of these white, working-class voters coexisted uneasily with the party establishment and at times with the purer strains of conservatism. “The white working class left the Democratic Party because it concluded that the party was committed to groups and objectives that were inimical to their economic interests,” said William Galston, a Brookings Institution scholar and former White House domestic policy adviser in the Clinton administration. “The Republican Party promised to do better, but it never delivered.”
Trump wasn’t the first to tap into this anger. Galston points to the 1992 and 1996 presidential candidacies of Patrick J. Buchanan. The conservative commentator challenged Bush in the 1992 primaries and in 1996 led a populist revolt he described as “peasants with pitchfork.” He ran on a platform similar to that of Trump today: anti-free trade, tough on immigration and focused on the plight of the white working-class ethnics.
“Trump stood up and said in effect [to the white working class], these Republican elites, they haven’t done squat for you,” Galston said.” If you want someone who will stand up and defend your values and interests, here I am.”
The Republican Party was absorbing these voters as part of its coalition at a time when economic conditions pressed harder and harder on their financial well-being, and the gap between the wealthiest and the rest of society widened, resulting in a hollowing out of the middle and working classes.
A Pew Research Center study late last year found that the share of income accounted for by the middle class has plummeted since the 1970s. The past 15 years have been especially harmful to the economic standing of these Americans, thanks to the recession of 2001 and the financial collapse of 2008.
Meanwhile, Republican economic orthodoxy continued to prescribe tax cuts that gave the biggest benefits to the wealthiest, arguing that this was the most effective way to stimulate economic growth, which in turn would help all segments of the population.
Katherine Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has been conducting extended conversations with people in her state since 2007 as part of her studies of public attitudes and opinions. The expressions of anger and frustration heard at Trump rallies represent the kind of resentment she has heard for years.
“I think of them as folks in the middle, not devout Republicans, but people who are feeling economically pretty stressed,” Cramer said. “I see the Trump phenomenon coming out of rising income inequality and the leftovers of the Great Recession. They are feeling unheard and kind of disrespected by typical powers that be.”
Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution wrote “What did Trump do but pick up where they left off, tapping the well-primed gusher of popular anger, xenophobia and, yes, bigotry that the party had already unleashed?”
Trump’s constituency is not limited to the white working class, but it is within that group that he draws his strongest support, according to exit polls from the primaries this year.
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Beyond economic issues, Trump has tapped fears about a changing America, a country that is increasingly diverse and culturally tolerant. These voters see the deterioration of values they believe are essential to the character of the country.
Trump also has spoken to continued worries about terrorist threats. It was perhaps no accident that, after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., Democratic strategists saw in their focus groups a spike in support for Trump.
“It is a group of people who are uncomfortable with changes in the social order or threats from the outside world,” said Marc Hetherington, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University. “They favor strong leaders and aggressive tactics to snuff these threats out.”
Democrats in particular see a racial component in Trump’s appeal, which they say has intensified since Obama was first elected. ...Trump played to those attitudes by questioning whether Obama was American born and a Muslim, not a Christian.
Read more at DAN BALZ, WASHINGTON POST
MICHAEL TOMASKY, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Donald Trump’s rise has taught us a few things about him, chiefly his instinct for dominating the daily news; but mostly it has taught us what the central voting issue of conservatives in the Obama era really is. It’s not taxes or terrorism or even abortion rights. It is that we have been letting in too many undesirables who reject conservatives’ values, compete for jobs, and are changing the country radically and irreparably for the worse.... for the base of the party he has popular views on Latino and Muslim immigrants, whom he wants respectively to deport and keep out of the country altogether.
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The fury that led to Trump’s rise has three main sources. It begins with talk radio, especially Rush Limbaugh, and all the conservative media—Fox News and, now, numerous blogs and websites and even hotly followed Twitter and Instagram feeds—that have for years served up a steady series of stories aimed at riling up conservatives. It has produced a campaign politics that is by now almost wholly one of splenetic affect and gesture. If you’ve watched any of the debates, you’ve seen it. The lines that get by far the biggest applause rarely have anything to do with any vision for the country save military strength and victory; they are execrations against what Barack Obama has done to America and what Hillary Clinton plans to do to it.
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| The Koch Brothers |
A second important factor has been the post–Citizens United elevation of megarich donors like the Koch brothers and Las Vegas’s Sheldon Adelson to the level of virtual party king-makers. The Kochs downplay the extent of their political spending, but whether it’s $250 million or much more than that, it’s an enormous sum, and they and Adelson and the others exist almost as a third political party.
When one family and its allies control that much money, and those running want it spent supporting them (although Trump has matched them), what candidate is going to take a position counter to that family and the network of which it is a part? The Kochs are known, for example, to be implacably opposed to any recognition that man-made climate change is a real danger. So no Republican candidate will buck that. This extends, of course, to practically the whole of Capitol Hill. Not long ago, I talked with Democratic Senator Al Franken of Minnesota, who explained how the Republicans’ fear of facing a Koch-financed primary from the right, should they cast a suspicious vote on climate change, prevented them from acknowledging the scientific facts. And what percentage of them, I asked, do you think really accept those facts deep down? “Oh,” Franken said, “Ninety.” He explained that in committee hearings, for example, witnesses from the Department of Energy come to discuss the department’s renewable energy strategy, “and none of them challenge the need for this stuff.”
This fear of losing a primary from the right is the third factor that has created today’s GOP, and it is frequently overlooked in the political media. Barney Frank put the problem memorably in an interview he gave to New York magazine in 2012, as he was leaving office:People ask me, “Why don’t you guys get together?” And I say, “Exactly how much would you expect me to cooperate with Michele Bachmann?” And they say, “Are you saying they’re all Michele Bachmann?” And my answer is no, they’re not all Michele Bachmann. Half of them are Michele Bachmann. The other half are afraid of losing a primary to Michele Bachmann.3
Few Americans understand just how central this reality is to our current dysfunction.All the pressure Republicans feel is from the right, although they seldom say so—no Republican fears a challenge from the center, because there are few voters and no money there. And this phenomenon has no antipode on the Democratic side, because there exists no effective group of left-wing multimillionaires willing to finance primary campaigns against Democrats who depart from doctrine. Very few Democrats have to worry about such challenges. Republicans everywhere do.
This creates an ethos of purity whose impact on the presidential race is obvious. The clearest example concerns Rubio and his position on immigration. He supported the bipartisan bill the Senate passed in 2013. He obviously did so because he calculated that the bill would pass both houses and he would be seen as a great leader. But the base rebelled against it, and so now Rubio has reversed himself on the question of a path to citizenship for undocumented aliens and taken a number of other positions that are designed to mollify the base but would surely be hard to explain away in a general election were he to become the nominee—no rape and incest exceptions on abortion, abolition of the federal minimum wage, and more.
All this appears to have had the effect in this election of lowering the percentage of Republican primary voters who are willing to support the most electable candidate. In the past, for all the ideological teeth-gnashing, Republican primary voters have ultimately sent forward John McCain, Mitt Romney, Bob Dole. ...We will see in due course if we have finally reached the point where the nihilists outnumber the pragmatists.
Read more at MICHAEL TOMASKY, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS