Hacker and Pierson stress the long backstory of right-wing populism in the US. An ‘immense shift’, as they put it, preceded the rise of Trump, who must be understood as ‘both a consequence and an enabler’ of his party’s steady march to the right. As with other scholars of American politics, Hacker and Pierson emphasise how much further the Republican party is to the right than its ‘sister’ parties in Europe—more like the French Rassemblement national than Britain’s Conservatives. (The Democrats, meanwhile, retain the profile of a fairly typical centre-left or even centrist party). [...]
Republican elites were aided in their ability to organise and mobilise angry white voters by ‘aggressive and narrow groups’ specialising in ‘outrage-stoking’ and the ‘politics of resentment’, such as the National Rifle Association and the Christian right. They were also aided by the rapidly growing ‘outrage industry’ of right-wing media, which proved extremely effective at ‘escalating a sense of threat’. And if all this proved insufficient to garner a majority, Republicans resorted to dirty tricks, ‘from voter disenfranchisement to extreme partisan gerrymandering, to laws and practices opening the floodgates to big money’. [...]
Moreover, while it is true that the right-wing economic policies pursued by the Republican party diverge from the centre-left economic preferences of a majority of voters, it is also true that a majority of US voters have preferences on social and cultural issues which diverge from those advocated by the Democratic party—as demonstrated by the same surveys on which Hacker and Pierson rely. This is also true for European voters, a majority of whom are to the right of social-democratic and other left parties on social and cultural issues.
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