Political Critique: Surfing the wave. How conservative populists hijack politics

Not every group mentioned shares the same agenda, but similarities exist that outline a common ideology. These Conservative populists (Conpops) resemble classical conservatives in their belief that Society’s strength comes from its traditions which must be preserved. Conpops add to this a belief that establishment politicians have sold out to globalization and its actions the source of all the country’s ills. The solution is a return to traditionalism, accomplished by ethnic unity, restrictive immigration, strict gender and religious hierarchies, and a reclamation of national sovereignty. These ideas and Conpops’ aversion to liberal democratic norms places them somewhere between center-right parties and far-right Fascists. [...]

Conpopism is popular because it offers an authentic vision for the future. Voters have so little trust in politicians that someone who has firmly held beliefs simply stands out. But either you’re sincere or you’re not and surfers by definition aren’t.  They can’t simply jump on hoping to hijack a movement. Voters will either reject them outright or punish them once they’ve shown their true colors. Prior to Brexit, Boris Johnson was known as a slightly left-of-Conservatism politician who was a Conservative Party loyalist. He, however, saw an opportunity for self-promotion and took a prominent role in the pro-Brexit campaign. Since the Brexit Referendum, however, the public has turned and Johnson’s approval ratings have sunk like a lead weight thrown from Big Ben. The movement he hoped to appropriate has thrown him out as an establishment interloper and he has been left without a leg to stand on. [...]

They haven’t. Instead, mainstream parties have attempted to cling to power by either surfing or offering the same stale politics. In the Dutch 2017 General Election, Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV) were only narrowly defeated by Prime Minister Mark Rutte. But Rutte pivoted hard during the election, even taking out enormous newspaper ads, calling for immigrants who “don’t respect Dutch customs” to leave the country. Some infractions? Homophobia, Sexism, and calling Dutch people racist. By winning using a strategy that blames immigrants for intangible ills in society, Rutte placed himself in a horrible bind. Either he follows through, forcing immigrants to leavE the Netherlands and the Dutch economy implodes (Immigrants are 11% of the population) or Rutte completely backtracks and loses all credibility. Meanwhile Wilders’s ideas have been completely normalized and his party has secured itself as the second largest in the country. Other European parties should take a long look at the Netherlands before adopting similar rhetoric.

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The New Yorker: The Trump Era After Bannon

This week, Steve Bannon was ousted from his position as the executive chairman of Breitbart News, the self-described “platform for the alt-right.” Andrew Marantz joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the rise of the alt-right movement, and what Bannon’s downfall means for Trump and nationalist economic populism.

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Politico: Republicans warn Trump of 2018 bloodbath

The backstage talks provide a window into how those closest to Trump are bracing for a possible bloodbath in the 2018 midterms, which could obliterate the Republican congressional majorities and paralyze the president’s legislative agenda. The potential for a Democratic wave has grown after Republican losses this fall in Virginia, New Jersey and Alabama, and as the president’s approval ratings have plummeted to the 30s.  [...]

Among GOP leaders, however, there is widespread concern heading into 2018. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said privately that both chambers could be lost in November. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has told donors that he fears a wave of swing district Republican lawmakers could retire rather than seek reelection. [...]

Trump is well aware of the dangers his party faces in 2018, those who’ve discussed it with him say. During political briefing sessions, top aides highlight positive developments — but also more concerning ones, such as his declining numbers among well-educated voters and higher earners. He has peppered advisers with questions about his approval ratings, and about whether he is getting enough credit for his accomplishments. [...]

“There are 10 months to improve the fundamentals here, and the Senate map is, on paper, good. But maps don’t make majorities and I think there’s a realization that there’s at least a 50 percent chance one or both chambers could fall,” Jennings said. “In less than one year, this first term could be, for all intents and purposes, over if the Democrats take control of either chamber.”

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Salon: Black voters won Alabama for the Dems. Here’s what they need in return

According to exit polls, 30 percent of the over 1 million people who participated in this election were black, and 96 percent of black voters supported Jones. In short, in an election where Jones’ margin of victory was less than 2 percent, Alabama’s near-unanimous black voters were the deciding factor. [...]

Poverty is probably top on that list of concerns. Alabama is the sixth poorest state in the nation, with a poverty rate of 18.5 percent. In some counties more than 40 percent of people live in poverty. Alabama’s rural areas have been said to show “the worst poverty in the developed world.”

Most of those areas are in the state’s so-called “Black Belt.” In Wilcox County, for example, the white poverty rate is 8.8 percent, but the black poverty rate is 50.2 percent. Nearby Lowndes County has the lowest white poverty rate in the state — 4.1 percent — but almost 35 percent of black people there live in poverty. [...]

Entrenched poverty means that health care access for black Alabamians is also dismal. The Black Belt region has fewer primary care physicians, dentists, mental health providers, and hospitals than other parts of the state. It has a much higher rate of uninsured people than other regions. In most of its counties, more than 25 percent of residents lack access to health care — and that’s with the Affordable Care Act in place. [...]

Finally, black Alabama voters have expressed concern about crime and punishment in the state. Just 26 percent of Alabama’s population is black, yet more than half its prison population is, according to the Sentencing Project.

At the same time, in 2016, Alabama also had the third-highest homicide rate in the U.S., after Louisiana and Missouri, data from the Death Penalty Information Center shows. More than 71 percent of homicide victims were African-American.

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Vox: Trumpism never existed. It was always just Trump.

Trumpism was made out of whole cloth, by his supporters and by his detractors, cobbled together from an amalgamation of The Art of the Deal and divinations of Trump’s innermost thoughts based on his staffing decisions and tweets. Trumpism was less an interpretation of another language than a wholly invented phrasebook for a language that was never real in the first place. Trump’s genius was in letting millions of people largely believe what they wanted to believe about his policies and preferences and refusing to get in the way. [...]

This is the reason why so many GOP members of Congress have voted with Trump in 2017: Not because they are supporting a Trumpian agenda, but because Trump has largely governed as a pretty standard conservative Republican. While conservative priorities — like deregulation and nominating conservative judges — have been more or less successfully brought to fruition, the last remaining fragment of “Trumpism” appears to be Donald Trump’s exceedingly pugnacious Twitter feed. [...]

“Trumpism” wasn’t an ideology. It was a means to an end, the promises one makes when trying to win an election, not change the face of politics. And only Trump could use it. Only Trump could tell Americans that America wasn’t great and be greeted with rapturous applause by those most in touch with their patriotism, though Roy Moore tried. Only Trump could make promises so grandiose that they exceeded the very boundaries of fact-checking.

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The Atlantic: The Growing Partisan Divide Over Feminism

At my request, researchers from the Schar School broke down the answers by party and gender. The results: Party mattered far more. Republican women in Alabama were only four points more likely than Republican men to believe Moore’s accusers. In fact, Republican women were 40 points less likely to believe Moore’s accusers than were Democratic men. All of which points to a truth insufficiently appreciated in this moment of sexual and political upheaval: It’s not gender that increasingly divides the two parties. It is feminism. [...]

In other words, Clinton, along with Donald Trump, has done for gender what Barack Obama did for race. Obama’s election, UCLA political scientist Michael Tesler has argued, pushed whites who exhibited more racial resentment into the Republican Party and whites who exhibited less into the Democratic Party. Something similar is now happening around gender. But what’s driving the polarization is less gender identity—do you identify as a man or a woman—than gender attitudes: Do you believe that women and men should be more equal. Democrats aren’t becoming the party of women. They’re becoming the party of feminists. [...]

But when it comes to the political reaction to sexual harassment, gender identity matters less and gender attitudes matter more. “A sizable minority of American women,” note Huddy and Willmann, “do not believe in the existence of gender discrimination, think that women who charge men with gender discrimination are trouble makers, and are inclined to side with a man accused of discriminatory behavior.” And Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy seems to have made these women more staunchly Republican. [...]

Feminist theorists have long sought to explain this. In a recent essay, Marcie Bianco of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University cited Simone de Beauvoir’s argument that women are more likely than other oppressed groups to defend the hierarchies that subjugate them. Women, de Beauvoir wrote, have “no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. … They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men—fathers or husbands—more firmly than they are to other women.” In her 1983 book, Right-Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin argued that female anti-feminism was an understandable, if tragic, strategy of self-protection. “A woman,” she wrote, “acquiesces to male authority in order to gain some protection from male violence. She conforms in order to be as safe as she can be.”

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The Guardian: Alabama election: Democrats defeat Roy Moore, dealing huge blow to Donald Trump

Alabama has long faced a profound racial divide, which was reflected in the results. According to an exit poll, Jones won 95% of the African-American vote but only 27% of the white vote in the Yellowhammer State. However, widespread African-American turnout on Jones’s behalf overcame Moore’s margins in rural, predominantly white parts of Alabama. 

Jones also made significant inroads among college-educated whites. He won well-educated Madison county by a margin of 57-40. A center of the aerospace industry, the county voted for Trump by a margin of 55-38 in 2016.  [...]

The Democratic victory will reduce the Republican majority in the Senate to 51-49 once Jones takes his seat on Capitol Hill. This significantly reduces the margin for error as Republicans attempt to push through a major corporate tax cut. [...]

Moore’s defeat also marks a major personal blow to Trump, who endorsed the Alabama Republican and held a rally on his behalf just over the state line in Pensacola, Florida. Although most national Republicans rushed to distance themselves from Moore in the aftermath of the allegations, Trump reaffirmed his support through tweets and public statements. [...]

Bannon and his allies are planning a series of primary challenges against establishment Republicans in 2018. Moore’s defeat significantly reduces their leverage as the joint efforts of Bannon and his rightwing news website, Breitbart, could not elect their preferred candidate in a state that Trump won in a landslide in 2016.

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FiveThirtyEight: The Values That ‘Values Voters’ Care About Most Are Policies, Not Character Traits

“Values voters” — a label that emerged to describe conservative Christians during the 2004 election — are sometimes held up as prioritizing candidate character, meaning whether a candidate personally embodies Christian values such as kindness, honesty and forgiveness. But although personal character is important, evangelicals’ first priority is to elect politicians who will fight for them and advance their agenda on the issues they care about. [...]

According to a 2015 survey conducted by the Barna Group, a research organization that focuses on Christian trends, 58 percent of evangelicals said that candidates’ stances on the issues were a key factor for their presidential vote, while less than half said the same of a candidate’s character (46 percent) or religious faith (45 percent). Robert Jeffress, a prominent Christian conservative supporter of Donald Trump, told The Washington Post that for evangelicals, character matters, but “leadership, experience, morality and faith are all important, and the rank of those changes according to circumstances.” [...]

The policy goals that fall under the umbrella of “family values” or “moral values” are largely social and cultural, and they remain high political priorities for evangelicals. When asked in the same Barna survey which issues will have “a lot” of impact on candidate selection, evangelicals were about as likely to cite abortion (64 percent) and religious liberty (67 percent) as the economy (69 percent). [...]

On the campaign trail, Moore has denied the existence of evolution (57 percent of evangelicals do as well). He has said that Ronald Reagan’s famous statement about the Soviet Union being “the focus of evil in the modern world” could apply to the U.S. — when asked for an example, he pointed to the legalization of same-sex marriage. Moore has suggested that the 9/11 attacks may have been a punishment from God because abortion and sodomy are legal. He called the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage “even worse” than the 1857 decision in the Dred Scott case, which found that African-Americans were property and not citizens. The idea of electing a senator who does not oppose abortion appears to be particularly troubling for some Alabama evangelicals. “I don’t want to vote for a creep, but I also don’t vote for Democrats,” Charlene Buttram, who is married to a pastor in a town southeast of Birmingham, told the Los Angeles Times. “I don’t believe in abortion.”

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