March 7, 2020

Does Anyone Have a Clue About How to Fight Back Against Trump’s Racism? Moderates and progressives have a lot to lose by ignoring each other on this crucial question.


THOMAS B. EDSALL, NY TIMES




Can Democrats diminish the bigotry that Donald Trump has unleashed in this country?

Stung by the success of Trump’s anti-immigrant, racist campaign themes in 2016, left-of-center advocacy groups — think tanks, unions, progressive academics and Democratic consultants — are developing tools this year to counter the continuing Republican assault on liberal values, based on the optimistic assumption that the reservoir of white animosity is not so deep that Trump is assured re-election.

These efforts on the left challenge the long history of Republican success in exploiting race and a host of ancillary issues — crime, welfare, social disorder, family breakdown, homelessness — a history that includes Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1988 and Donald Trump in 2016.

That history points to the relentless power of racial resentment in American politics. Despite polling that shows greater acceptance of racial equality, this issue is as potent a source of political strength for Trump today as it was for Nixon a half century ago.

There are myriad studies, as I have noted (along with many others) that show the continuing effectiveness of race and immigration as wedge issues. These studies continue to appear at an alarming rate.

Take “The Trump Effect: An Experimental Investigation of the Emboldening Effect of Racially Inflammatory Elite Communication” published earlier this month by four political scientists.

The authors, Benjamin Newman, Jennifer Merolla, Sono Shah, Loren Collingwood and Karthick Ramakrishnan, all at the University of California-Riverside, and Danielle Casarez Lemi of SMU, wrote:

We find that exposure to racially inflammatory statements by Trump caused those with high levels of prejudice to be more likely to perceive engagement in prejudiced behavior as socially acceptable.

In other words, if the president of the United States denigrates Muslims, or Hispanics, or African-Americans, then anyone can.

Significantly, Newman, Merolla and their colleagues determined that

“the magnitude of this effect is enhanced when exposure to inflammatory speech by Trump is coupled with information that other political elites tacitly condone his speech,” as leading Republicans have done through their continuing acquiescence.

While Trump’s rhetoric improved his prospects in 2016, Merolla wrote by email, in 2020 the result may be mixed:

When individuals experience feelings of anger in relation to the political environment, they are more likely to participate in politics so I suspect that it did help drive increased turnout. However, his rhetoric has also led to increased anger on the other side of the aisle, so it has also likely driven higher turnout on the left, especially during the 2018 midterm election.

A forthcoming paper by Desmond King and Rogers M. Smith, political scientists at Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania, “White Protectionism in America,” makes a strong case that Trump, unlike his Republican predecessors in the White House, has gone far beyond rhetoric and token gestures to substantively address the concerns of his anti-immigrant and socially conservative supporters.

King and Smith catalog in great detail Trump’s success putting in place policies

favored by racially conservative Americans but with a new focus on active white protection, rather than simply colorblind efforts to constrain positive governmental actions. Trump has fanned the anger of many white supporters convinced that post-1970 federal policies have unjustly favored people of color.

Trump has fueled this anger and solidified his support among “his anti-immigrant and socially conservative supporters,” combating this “alleged white victimization,” King and Smith argue, by requiring:
protectionist measures including tolerating racial profiling in policing and reversing some extant civil rights policies; subverting others through deregulation or neglect; and favoring measures which go beyond colorblindness, such as stop-and-frisk practices and demands for identification triggered by racial and ethnic identities, as well as anti-Muslim immigration restrictions.

In an email, Smith wrote that he and King “can’t estimate how effective the white protectionist message will be for Trump,” but

You don’t need to specialize in quantitative analyses of elections to know that the cult of personality Trump has inspired means that he is a far more effective voice for this view than anyone else in American politics. Having him at the top of the ticket this time around has to help in advancing white protectionist messages and policies successfully.
Now let’s look at some of the Democratic and liberal thinking focused on undermining Trump’s divide-and-conquer strategy.
On Wednesday, for example, the liberal Century Foundation issued a lengthy study, “How Progressives Can Recapture Seven Deeply Held American Values.”
The authors, Simon Greer, founder of Cambridge Heath Ventures, and Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the foundation, note that
Working-class Americans do not want to be lectured about what their motivations are, and ascribing misogyny or racial animus to any group of potential voters is not a winning strategy for building a coalition.

One of the authors’ central arguments is that liberals have ceded to conservatives a monopoly on such themes and values as faith, family, country and law and order. They have done so because Republicans have “added a meanspirited twist to these mainstream values” as a way of attacking women’s and gay rights, blacks, antiwar protesters and single mothers.

“Because progressives appropriately reject the harsh right-wing interpretations of these values,” Greer and Kahlenberg write, many progressives have “stopped talking about these ideas altogether, sticking to a discussion of public policy solutions and an array of facts, rather than the powerful values that underlie them.”

In support of their argument, they cite research by two sociologists at Stanford, Jan G. Voelkel and Robb Willer, who argue in “Resolving the Progressive Paradox: Conservative Value Framing of Progressive Economic Policies Increases Candidate Support,” a paper that was published last year, that voters are less concerned with candidates’ specific policies than with the values they espouse:

We found that a presidential candidate who framed his progressive economic platform to be consistent with more conservative value concerns like patriotism, family, and respect for tradition — as opposed to more liberal value concerns like equality and social justice — was supported significantly more by conservatives and, unexpectedly, by moderates as well.

Voelkel and Willer conclude by citing the “progressive paradox,” that Americans “support many core progressive economic policies at high levels, yet rarely elect progressive candidates, a paradox widely discussed in academic and popular literature.”

They argue, however, that

when progressive candidates frame their policies as consistent with conservative, as opposed to liberal, values, they receive greater support from conservatives and moderates.

Notably, they add, “there was no backlash to conservative framing among liberal participants.”

A second study of possible shifts in Democratic messaging strategies includes a set of relatively moderate proposals that are less challenging to the left wing of the party, but which still ran into opposition from more vocal liberals.

The Race-Class Narrative Project, a 2018 report, has become a strategic blueprint for many of the Democratic Party’s allied organizations, especially organized labor.

It’s based on the research of Ian Haney López, a law professor at Berkeley and the author of “Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America,” who worked closely with Anat Shenker-Osorio, founder of ASO Communications.

The Race-Class project, which was sponsored by Demos, a progressive think tank, argues that 59 percent of the electorate is neither reliably liberal nor reliably conservative, but in the middle, cross-pressured on issues of race. These voters are “persuadables.”

For Democrats, winning over a large share of the persuadable electorate in no easy task, according to the authors.

On the plus side for Democrats, persuadables agree

on ending racial discrimination, on the negative impact of divide and conquer tactics, on the value of working together, on the reality that African Americans face greater obstacles than whites.

On the negative side of the ledger, according to the report, these middle ground voters “have concerns about ‘reverse racism’ and discrimination against whites;” a sizable majority agree “focusing on race doesn’t fix anything and may even make things worse;” and “persuadable adults believe that people of color who cannot get ahead are mostly responsible for their own condition.”

In other words, these persuadable voters provide fertile ground for conservative appeals to racial resentment.

The Race-Class narrative makes specific recommendations on the language candidates should use when taking on issues of race.

Politicians, according the report, should say “our opponents point the finger for our hard times at blacks, new immigrants and Muslims” instead of saying “our opponents are racist against blacks, new immigrants and Muslims.” Why? “Framing scapegoating as tied to economic concerns allows audiences, including whites, to see that their well-being is tied to rejecting racial resentment.”

How effective would adoption of the recommendations in the Race-Class narrative report be?

One place where the Race-Class strategies were tried was in the 2018 state and federal elections in Minnesota. The results — a series of Democratic victories, some in the face of explicit Republican attacks on immigrants and urban crime — suggest that there may be significant value in the report.

Shenker-Osorio, noting the need “to be cautious about making unprovable statements about how any intervention can be credited,” wrote by email:

We won big in the state — flipping the Minnesota House, winning five of seven Congressional races, two State Senate seats, all of the state executive races and boasting the highest turnout of an election with noteworthy participation nationally. The coalition behind Greater Than Fear did impressive work, I say admittedly without objectivity.

Under the banners of “We Are Greater Than Fear,” the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, liberal interest groups and the candidates themselves explicitly rejected Republican attempts to capitalize on fears of Somali immigrants and claims that Muslim Democrats fostered terrorism.

In an ad shown during halftime at the 2018 Super Bowl, Tim Walz, the successful Democratic candidate for governor, praised the racial and ethnic mix of the state, the “immigrant farmers, lumberjacks and miners, champions of freedom and refugees, and people who’ve been here all along, the Anishinaabe and Dakota.”

“We’ve proven that when we come together as one Minnesota we can do anything. I’ve seen it,” Walz told viewers. “In this state we don’t fear the future, we create the future. And when we stand together, we win.”

In the race for state Attorney General, Doug Wardlow, the Republican nominee, running against Keith Ellison, a Muslim, wrote in a fund-raising letter: “As a Muslim, Ellison has hung around radical Islamic groups and defends known terrorists.”

Almost immediately, four religious leaders — Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman of Temple Israel, Pastor Laurie Eaton of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, Grant Stevensen, a pastor from St. Paul, and Imam Asad Zaman, of the Muslim American Society — denounced Wardlow. Ellison won.

A group of Democratic firms, led by Lake Research Partners in partnership with ASO Communications and Brilliant Corners Research and Strategies, poll-tested various Democratic messages on race for the Race-Class report. In addition to polling, they used focus groups equipped with hand-held dials to register favorable or unfavorable audience reaction to a liberal as opposed to a conservative, Republican message.

The most effective liberal-Democratic message read:

America’s strength comes from our ability to work together — to knit together a landscape of people from different places and of different races into one nation. For this to be a place of freedom for all, we cannot let the greedy few and the politicians they pay for turn what you look like, where you come from or how much money you have into reasons some of us matter and others don’t. It’s time to stand up for each other and come together. It is time for us to pick leaders who reflect the very best of every kind of American. Together, we can make this a place where freedom is for everyone, no exceptions.

The Republican opposition message, in its entirety, read:

Our leaders must prioritize keeping us safe and ensuring that hard working Americans have the freedom to prosper. Taking a second look at people coming from terrorist countries who wish us harm or at people from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs is just common sense. And so is curbing illegal immigration, so our communities are no longer flooded with people who refuse to follow our laws. We need to make sure we take care of our own people first, especially the people who politicians have cast aside for too long to cater to whatever special interest groups line their pockets, yell the loudest, or riot in the street.

In the polling done for the Race Class report, all the Democratic messages received higher ratings than the opposition message, but there was a clear warning signal. The Demos report found that the opposition message

is very strong with persuadables. Among persuadables the opposition message has the lowest convincing rating, but the average dial rating is higher than several of our messages. Several themes of the opposition message resonate with persuadables including ‘keeping us safe’ and “we need to make sure we take care of our own people first.”

Just as the Greer-Kahlenberg proposals would face opposition from the Democratic left, the same is true of the more moderate messages and themes suggested in the Race-Class narrative.

Ian Haney López, in his book “Merging Left,” noted when he outlined his proposals to various group, he

met rejection from race-focused advocates in my lectures on university campuses. As I came to see cross-racial solidarity as the key to both racial justice and economic fairness, I began delivering the same lecture I gave to the unions at colleges across the country. In those progressive settings, much of the pushback came from the students most committed to racial justice.

That is, the students most committed to racial justice were wary of any alliance with working and middle class whites.

Haney López elaborated in an email:

I’m using the students as a stand-in for the larger community of racial justice activists — people focused first and foremost on justice for communities of color who see the problems besetting these communities primarily through the lens of a racial analysis.

For this constituency, Haney López continued, “certainly one concern is whether a coalition is possible with work-a-day whites.” But, he added,

The deeper resistance of most racial justice activists to the race-class approach is rooted in frustration with the liberal whites who wield most of the power, formal and informal, in liberal institutions, from universities to unions, foundations to the media to the Democratic Party. From these liberal whites, racial justice activists have too often heard that they should wait, that their arguments are divisive and disruptive, that they should subordinate their concerns to larger goals.

For the Democratic Party, race and immigration remain crucially important in terms of both values and policy. The key question is whether the party is structurally capable — under an extraordinary barrage of hostility directed by Republicans at African-Americans and immigrants — of finding politically effective ways of addressing race and immigration. Has the left wing of the party become so discouraged, so defensive — and so embattled — that it now perceives a critical mass of whites as intractably hardened and unswervingly opposed to minority interests? If moderates and progressives are locked in on either side of such a chasm, what will it take to make peace?


Coronavirus: nine reasons to be reassured

Yes, Covid-19 is serious, but context is key and the world is well placed to deal with it
Passengers have their temperatures checked at a train station in Palembang, Indonesia.
 Passengers have their temperatures checked at a train station in Palembang, Indonesia. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

The coronavirus epidemic plainly poses an exceptionally serious global problem: in a few short weeks, it has spread from China to more than 80 countries, infecting more than 100,000 people so far and causing more than 3,400 deaths.
But as we are hit with minute-by-minute updates from around the world, experiencing the advance of Covid-19 in real time – news alerts, huge headlines, social media hysteria – there’s a risk that we might lose some essential context.
Yes, this virus is obviously a massive challenge: medical, political and – perhaps most strikingly at present – social and economic. But it is worth remembering the world has never had better tools to fight it, and that if we are infected, we are unlikely to die from it.
Here, courtesy of a number of scientists but mainly Ignacio López-Goñi, a professor of microbiology and virology at the University of Navarra in Spain, are what might hopefully prove a few reassuring facts about the new coronavirus:
  • We know what it is. As López-Goñi wrote for the Conversation France, the virus causing cases of severe pneumonia in Wuhan was identified within seven days of the official announcement on 31 December, and, three days after that, the gene sequence was available. The Aids virus, by contrast, took two years to identify after it first appeared in mid-1981, López-Goni noted. We also know the virus is natural, that it is related to a virus found in bats, and that it can mutate, but does not appear to do so very often.
  • We can test for it. By 13 January – three days after the gene sequence was published – a reliable test was available, developed by scientists at the department of virology at Berlin’s Charité university hospital with help from experts in Rotterdam, London and Hong Kong.
  • We know it can be contained (albeit at considerable cost). China’s draconian quarantine and containment measures appear to be working. On Thursday 120 new cases were reported in Wuhan, the lowest figure for six weeks, and, for the first time since the start of the outbreak, none at all in the rest of Hubei province. Several Chinese provinces have had no new cases for a fortnight and more are reopening their schools. In many countries, infections are in defined clusters, which should allow them to be more readily contained.
  • Catching it is not that easy (if we are careful) and we can kill it quite easily (provided we try). Frequent, careful hand washing, as we now all know, is the most effective way to stop the virus being transmitted, while a solution of ethanol, hydrogen peroxide and bleach will disinfect surfaces. To be considered at high risk of catching the coronavirus you need to live with, or have direct physical contact with, someone infected, be coughed or sneezed on by them (or pick up a used tissue), or be in face-to-face contact, within two metres, for more than 15 minutes. We’re not talking about passing someone in the street.

In most cases, symptoms are mild, and young people are at very low risk. According to a study of 45,000 confirmed infections in China, 81% of cases caused only minor illness, 14% of patients had symptoms described as “severe”, and just 5% were considered “critical”, with about half of those resulting in death. Only 3% of cases concern people under 20, children seem barely affected by the virus at all, and the mortality rate for the under-40s is about 0.2%. The rate rises in the over-65s, reaching nearly 15% in the over-80s, especially those with pre-existing heart or lung conditions. Calculating mortality rates during an ongoing epidemic is hard because it is not clear how many mild or asymptomatic cases have been tested for, but the best estimate we have for the coronavirus so far is 1.4% – somewhere between 1918 Spanish flu and 2009 swine flu.

  • Hundreds of scientific articles have already been written about it. Type Covid-19 or Sars-19 into the search engine of the US national library of medicine’s PubMed website and you will find, barely five weeks after the emergence of the virus, 539 references to papers about it, dealing with vaccines, therapies, epidemiology, diagnosis and clinical practice. That’s an exponentially faster publication rate than during the Sars epidemic, López-Goñi notes – and most publications’ coronavirus articles are free to access.
  • Vaccine prototypes exist. Commercial pharmaceutical and biotechnology labs such as Moderna, Inovio, Sanofi and Novavax, as well as academic groups such as one at the University of Queensland in Australia – many of which were already working on vaccines for similar Sars-related viruses – have preventive vaccine prototypes in development, some of which will soon be ready for human testing (although their efficacy and safety will of course take time to establish).
  • Dozens of treatments are already being tested. By mid-February, more than 80 clinical trials were under way for antiviral treatments, according to Nature magazine, and most have already been used successfully in treating other illnesses. Drugs such as remdesivir (Ebola, Sars), chloroquine (malaria), lopinavir and ritonavir (HIV), and baricitinib (rheumatoid polyarthritis) are all being trialled on patients who have contracted the coronavirus, some as a result of the application of artificial intelligence.

The Audacity of Hate: Trump has a knack for turning anger and fear into political power. And for turning the volume up to 11.






THOMAS B. EDSALL, NY TIMES


Karl Rove had a novel idea for how to organize President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign.

He and the chief campaign strategist, Matthew Dowd, decided on a “base strategy.” They reallocated the bulk of the campaign’s media budget to focus on social conservatives instead of on moderates — a decision predicated on the fact that the swing, or persuadable, share of the electorate had shrunk from one in five voters to less than one in 10. The most effective use of campaign funds, the thinking ran, was to invest in turning out more of the millions of white right-wing voters who needed to be motivated to show up at the polls.

The result was a shift that year from a traditional centrist strategy to an emphasis on anger and fear, a shift that turned out to have profound long-term consequences.

Campaigns in the past had relied on activating resentment and hostility, of course, but the re-election drive for Bush in 2004 was the first to make this the centerpiece of a mainstream presidential effort.



American politics were irrevocably transformed, polarization strategies became institutionalized and the stage was set for the explicit racial and anti-immigrant themes dominating Donald Trump’s campaigns for election and re-election.

Three major events over the next 10 years bridged the gap between the White House campaign of George W. Bush and the White House campaign of Donald J. Trump.

The economic meltdown of 2007-9 devastated faith in the American economic system and in the nation’s elected leaders — especially the Republican establishment.


In the midst of stock market losses of $2 trillion — a 40 percent plunge in the value of the Dow Jones — the country was hit by a catastrophic mortgage crisis, with nearly 10 million Americans losing their homes to foreclosure sales, according to Marketplace.org:


The effects of the subprime mortgage crisis are not only still being felt today, they have indelibly changed the way Americans view homeownership and the way we live.

In 2008, the country, reeling from economic chaos, elected Barack Obama — the brainy president of the Harvard Law Review and a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago — as America’s first black president.

A second response to intensifying fears, however, was the emergence of the Tea Party, which mobilized racially and financially apprehensive whites who felt abandoned by the Republican leadership.

Hostility to Wall Street, costly bailouts of banks, brokerages and the auto industry, played a role. But as the financial crisis played out, immigration and struggles over school integration compounded this unease.

Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard and a co-author of “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” told Mother Jones:


This was definitely a movement of people who are anxious about racial changes in the country, anxious about immigration, and were, in some cases, also Christian conservatives who felt very passionately about homosexuality and abortion and having laws against those Skocpol, who spent many hours talking with Tea Party members, added that veterans of the Tea Party movement “are the core of the most adamant of Trump’s supporters.”


The Tea Party changed what it was permissible to debate openly in contemporary politics. Within a few years, it enabled Trump to further erode the norms of political combat and more openly instigate partisan conflict based on racial and ethnic antagonism.

Under Trump, coded rhetoric like Reagan’s “welfare queen” and Nixon’s “silent majority,” was — and is — no longer coded.

Trump’s sudden emergence as a political player began in 2011 with his championing of the birther movement, promoting the false allegation that President Obama was born in Kenya.

In March 2011, as he contemplated a run for the presidency, Trump began to claim in television interviews that Obama


doesn’t have a birth certificate, or if he does, there’s something on that certificate that is very bad for him. Now, somebody told me — and I have no idea if this is bad for him or not, but perhaps it would be — that where it says “religion,” it might have “Muslim.” And if you’re a Muslim, you don’t change your religion, by the way.

Trump directly challenged the political calculations of Republican leaders who argued after Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012 that the party needed to make inroads among Latino, Asian and African-American voters.

Sean Trende, an election analyst at RealClearPolitics, Vox reported, “offered a different diagnosis: Romney’s real problem was ‘missing’ white voters who didn’t show up to vote,” and Trende was proved right: As the 2016 primary battle progressed, “those voters” were “no longer missing.” Trump had found them.



Trump didn’t just find the missing white voters. He found the voters who most strongly objected to immigration, responding positively to such survey questions as:

“Immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing and health care” and “It bothers me when I come into contact with immigrants who speak little or no English.”

More than any of his competitors for the nomination, Trump understood the underbelly of the white Republican electorate. Not only did he understand it, he was ready and willing to go where no other presidential candidate would venture.
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More than anything, Trump intuitively understood how polarization, and with it, the intense hatred among legions of Republican voters of liberal elites and of the so-called meritocracy could be a powerful tool to win elections.

Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at Brookings and the author, with Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, of the book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,” was blunt in his assessment of the broad contemporary political environment.


Partisan polarization has become hard-wired in the American political system and is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future. Our constitutional system is not well matched with our current party system. Partisan asymmetry makes it even worse. The GOP has radicalized into an anti-system party that does not accept the legitimacy of its opposition and enables a slide toward autocracy. Very dangerous times for American democracy.

It is an environment in which negative campaigning, on TV and on social media, has become the instrument of choice, not a tool, but the beating heart of political partisanship.

Two political scientists, Gaurav Sood and Shanto Iyengar, describe this shift to antagonistic campaigning in “Coming to Dislike Your Opponents: The Polarizing Impact of Political Campaigns


Negative ads are especially effective in increasing partisan affect. A strong negativity bias influences information processing, making people more likely to attend to negative rather than positive appeals.

The rise in hostile views of the opposition candidate, the two authors argue, “is not primarily due to learning about real ideological positions of the candidates and the parties.” Instead, they write, the more likely explanation is that the effectiveness of these campaigns is in reminding “partisans about the negative traits of the out-party candidate, and positive traits of her own party.”

Sood and Iyengar see the use of divisive campaign tactics increasing in the future:


It is likely that as a consequence of the data revolution, and burgeoning social scientific research, campaigns will learn to target individuals better, and will be able to deliver more “potent” messages to them.

In this climate, penalties for intraparty dissent are quick and brutal. Take a look at what happened to Justin Amash, of Michigan, once a Republican in good standing, one of the founders of the conservative Freedom Caucus, who was sent to political purgatory (and eventually exile from the party) after he suggested that Trump had committed impeachable offenses as president.



“I don’t think we’ve seen the worst of it,” Douglas Ahler, a political scientist at Florida State University, emailed in response to my inquiry, adding:


When you take today’s urban-rural divide, couple it with the most engaged citizens’ tendency to live in echo chambers, and add accelerants in the forms of identity politics and misinformation campaigns, you have a house waiting to go up in flames.

“We identify three possible negative outcomes for democracy,” the political scientists Jennifer McCoy and Tahmina Rahman of Georgia State and Murat Somer of Koç University Istanbul, wrote in their 2018 paper, “Polarization and the Global Crisis of Democracy.”

The three negative outcomes, according to the authors, are gridlock; democratic erosion or collapse under new elites and dominant groups; and democratic erosion or collapse under old elites and dominant groups.

With few exceptions, political scientists are pessimistic about both the short- and long-term prospects for amelioration of hostile partisan division. It is probably best not to take comfort in experiments that reveal that, under certain circumstances, it is possible to lessen polarization.

Ethan Porter, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, for example, wrote me that his work with Thomas J. Wood, a political scientist at Ohio State, shows that


when factual misinformation is corrected, people tend, on average, to be made more accurate. People are hardly invulnerable to factual corrections; on the contrary, whether Republicans or Democrats are exposed to corrections of their partisan leaders, they generally respond by becoming more accurate.

In practice, however, the rise of newspaper fact-checking would appear to at least partially achieve the goal of correcting misinformation, even as the rise of mutual hatred between Democrats and Republicans has accelerated.

Similarly, Joshua Kalla and David Broockman, political scientists at Yale and Berkeley, argued in their January 2020 paper “Reducing exclusionary attitudes through interpersonal conversation,” that “exclusionary attitudes — prejudice toward outgroups and opposition to policies that promote their well-being — are presenting challenges to democratic societies worldwide,” but, what they describe as “non-judgmentally exchanging narratives in interpersonal conversations can facilitate durable reductions in exclusionary attitudes.”



But, it is difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of circumstances under which Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, or Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump, would “non-judgmentally” exchange “narratives in interpersonal conversations.”

Nate Persily, a professor of law and political science at Stanford, wrote me that the most significant damage resulting from negative partisanship and polarization is


that the normal methods of accountability in a democratic society cease to apply. It used to be that people, regardless of party, believed government statistics about the employment rate and other metrics of progress and national well-being. Now, our interpretation of the basic facts of whether we are going in the right or wrong direction is dominated by whether expressing such an opinion is consistent with that which would advantage our tribe.

This extends to the legitimacy of elections, Persily continued, adding that


trust in the electoral process is now contingent on who wins. That is, losers will cry ‘fraud’ and consider the president illegitimate, even if the election is well-run. This is the kind of dynamic we see in the developing world and unstable democracies. It is a recipe for disaster.

Alex Theodoridis, a political scientist at the University of California-Merced, argued that instead of being an aberration, polarization may now be the norm, the default political environment:


Many look back fondly on the middle part of the last century when political party, ideology, and a host of social categories were not strongly aligned the way they are today and, thus, partisan polarization was far less pronounced.

But, he continued,


it is more likely that that bygone era was the aberration and today’s hyperpolarization is what we should expect in equilibrium. In other words, we probably ought to accept the current state of affairs as the new normal. The mutual dislike and distrust between Democrats and Republicans is likely to persist without a dramatic party realignment.

In fact, nothing would make Trump happier than to have Theodoridis’s belief that polarization is the new normal or to see Persily’s warnings of lost legitimacy proven true. Trump thrives when the climate is chaotic and disruptive and he is the prime example of lost legitimacy in American politics.

Trump Names Mark Meadows Chief of Staff, Ousting Mick Mulvaney


Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump on Friday pushed out Mick Mulvaney, his acting White House chief of staff, and replaced him with Representative Mark Meadows, a stalwart conservative ally, shaking up his team in the middle of one of the biggest crises of his presidency.
Mr. Trump announced the change on Twitter after arriving in Florida for a weekend at his Mar-a-Lago estate, choosing to make one of the most significant switches he can make in his White House on a Friday night when most of the country had tuned out news for the weekend. As a consolation prize, the president named Mr. Mulvaney a special envoy for Northern Ireland.

I am pleased to announce that Congressman Mark Meadows will become White House Chief of Staff. I have long known and worked with Mark, and the relationship is a very good one....

29K people are talking about this
Mr. Trump’s decision to push out Mr. Mulvaney came as the president confronted a coronavirus outbreak that has unsettled much of the country, threatened the economy and posed a new challenge to his re-election campaign. But the decision was seen as a long-delayed move cleaning up in the aftermath of the Senate impeachment trial as he shuffles his inner circle for the eight-month sprint to Election Day.

In taking over the White House, Mr. Meadows, 60, a retiring Republican from North Carolina, becomes Mr. Trump’s fourth chief of staff in 38 months, the most that any president has had in such a short time. His arrival almost surely signals more changes to follow, as most of Mr. Mulvaney’s deputies and others on his team are expected to leave, too, possibly including Emma Doyle, his top lieutenant, and Joe Grogan, the domestic policy adviser.

Hope Hicks, one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted advisers, returns on Monday in a new role working for Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser. Mr. Mulvaney, who technically retained his post as budget director while serving as acting chief of staff, will surrender that, too, and the acting director, Russell T. Vought, appears poised to take the job permanently, an appointment he has quietly lobbied for for months.
The change has been a long time coming. The president soured on Mr. Mulvaney a while ago but was warned by advisers not to get rid of him until after his Senate trial, which ended with Mr. Trump’s acquittal on Feb. 6. Throughout the impeachment battle, Mr. Mulvaney was at near-open war with the White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone, at one point seen as a potential successor as chief of staff.