Politico: ‘Extraordinary change’: How coronavirus is rewiring the Republican and Democratic parties

Last week, Republicans joined Democrats — and in some cases got in front of them — in calling for direct payments to Americans to help cope with the economic fallout from the pandemic. The Trump administration, after laboring for years to repeal Obamacare, said it was considering creating a special enrollment period for the program due to the coronavirus. When Donald Trump himself suggested the government could take equity stakes in private companies that receive federal aid, it was a Democratic governor, Colorado’s Jared Polis, who accused the president of being a socialist.[...]

He predicted that new normal including paid sick leave, and even guaranteed income of some kind. “In other words,” Richardson said, “the era of big government is back, and both parties are going to embrace it to resolve problems. And [the change] is caused by the virus.” [...]

But unlike many past crises, the coronavirus pandemic has caused turmoil in the economy, public health and politics all at once. The death toll is rising. The stock market is in freefall. The virus has consumed Trump’s presidency and his re-election prospects, and it has all but frozen the Democratic presidential primary in time.

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The Guardian: Trump's America will be saddled with debt – just like his bankrupted hotels

Once upon a time, conservatives said they hated Barack Obama because of his budget deficits. They said he was destroying America and its future, which made them very angry indeed. They were so mad about all those Obama debts that they invented a new party, and named it after the revolutionaries who opposed a nasty British king. The Tea Party was a collection of strange people, including one candidate who promised she wasn’t a witch.

But the strangest thing happened after Obama moved out of the White House, and an orange man moved in. That was when conservatives all across America decided they didn’t actually hate debt and deficits after all. [...]

Even the prayer people were happy to set aside their morals. They know that Trump’s kind of magical thinking is precisely what the world needs right now, otherwise everybody would get very upset at the way the planet is warming, the threat of nuclear war, and the global refugee crisis. Right now we obviously need the kind of leader who is completely ignorant about the consequences, and just lives in the moment.

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The Guardian: How violent American vigilantes at the border led to Trump’s wall

The border before Trump was no idyll. Conflict grew especially acute in California in the early 1970s. As San Diego’s sprawl began to push against agricultural fields, racist attacks on migrants increased. Vigilantes drove around the back roads of the greater San Diego area, shooting at Mexicans from the flatbeds of their pickups; dozens of bodies were found in shallow graves. Anti-migrant violence was fuelled by angry veterans returning from Vietnam, who carried out what they called “beaner raids” to break up migrant camps. Snipers took aim at Mexicans coming over the border. Led by a 27-year-old David Duke, the KKK set up a “border watch” in 1977 at California’s San Ysidro point of entry, finding much support among border patrol agents. Other KKK groups set up similar patrols in south Texas, placing leaflets with a printed skull and crossbones on the doorsteps of Latino residents, warning “aliens” and the federal government to fear the klan. Around this time, agents reported finding pitfall traps, modelled on the punji traps Vietnamese troops would set for US soldiers, in the swampy Tijuana estuary, an area of the border vigilantes began calling Little ’Nam. [...]

Separating migrant families was not official government policy in those decades. But border patrol agents left to their own devices regularly took children from parents, threatening that they would be separated “for ever” unless one of them confessed that they had entered the country illegally. Mothers especially, an agent said, “would always break”. Once a confession was extracted, children might be placed in foster care or left to languish in federal jails. Ten-year-old Sylvia Alvarado, separated from her grandmother as they crossed into Texas, was kept in a small cinderblock cell for more than three months. In California, 13-year-old Julia Pérez, threatened with being arrested and denied food, broke down and told her interrogator that she was Mexican, even though she was a US citizen. The border patrol released Pérez into Mexico with no money or way to contact her US family. [...]

In neighbourhoods filled with undocumented residents, the patrol operated with the latitude of an occupying army. Between 1985 and 1990, federal agents shot 40 migrants around San Diego alone, killing 22 of them. On 18 April 1986, patroller Edward Cole was beating 14-year-old Eduardo Carrillo Estrada on the US side of the border’s chain-link fence when he stopped and shot Eduardo’s younger brother, Humberto, in the back. Humberto was standing on the other side of the fence, on Mexican soil. A court ruled that Cole, who had previous incidents of shooting through the fence at Mexicans, had reason to fear for his life from Humberto and used justifiable force. [...]

But the occupations did go wrong. Bush and his neoconservative advisers had launched what has now become the most costly war in the nation’s history, on the heels of pushing through one of the largest tax cuts in the nation’s history. Yet news coming in from Baghdad, Fallujah, Basra, Anbar province, Bagram and elsewhere began to suggest that Bush had created an epic disaster. Photographs from Abu Ghraib prison showing US personnel cheerfully taunting and torturing Iraqis circulated widely, followed by reports of other forms of cruelty inflicted on prisoners by US troops. Many people were coming to realise that the war was not just illegal in conception but deceptive in its justification, immoral in execution, and corrupt in its administration. [...]

As the power of Ice and the border patrol grew, its impunity continued unabated. Since 2003, patrollers have killed at least 97 people, including six children. Few agents were prosecuted. According to a report by the ACLU, young girls have been physically abused and threatened with rape, while unaccompanied children apprehended by the border patrol experienced “physical and psychological abuse, unsanitary and inhumane living conditions, isolation from family members, extended period of detention, and denial of access to legal medical service”. It’s difficult to process this litany of abuse. The horrors blend into one another, as if the closing of the frontier has brought about a collapse of a sense of time. The violence that had been associated with moving outward in the world, which gave the illusion of leaving problems behind, now just accumulates. “We slash their bottles and drain their water into the dry earth,” writes a border patroller, describing what he and his coworkers did when they came upon a stash of supplies tucked away by hiding migrants. “We dump their backpacks and pile their food and clothes to be crushed and pissed on and stepped over, strewn across the desert and set ablaze.”

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The New York Review of Books: Mitch McConnell, Republican Nihilist

Writing for the Review last fall, the American historian Christopher R. Browning said of the Senate majority leader, “if the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell.” In Browning’s view, McConnell is not dissimilar from the German conservative politicians, who in the 1930s brought Adolf Hitler to power, “thinking that they could ultimately control [him] while enjoying the benefits of his popular support.” With Hitler as Chancellor, the conservatives saw their fulsome policy agenda enacted: rearmament, suspension of civil liberties, the outlawing of the Communist Party, and the abolition of labor unions, among other moves. But as they would later find out, controlling the monster they put in power would be something else altogether.[...]

What separates McConnell from other destructive political actors, such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his fellow congressional Republican revolutionaries, or President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, is that McConnell’s political actions are unmoored from ideology and policy. For McConnell, politics is fundamentally about accruing political power for the sole purpose of accruing more political power.[...]

McConnell seemed almost to relish the anger his positions engendered. When reformists began referring to him as Darth Vader, he appeared at a press conference toting a light saber. In playing this part, McConnell earned the gratitude of his fellow Republicans, something that would pay off when he sought to become the party’s leader in the Senate. McConnell would adopt a similar position in 2009 after Barack Obama’s inauguration. He became the public face of opposition to Obama’s policies, as he expertly wielded the Senate’s limitless tools for obstruction and delay to block the new president’s legislative goals. In his willingness to again play the role of villain, McConnell displayed a unique understanding of how modern American politics works: the more liberals hated him, the more Republicans loved him.[...]

There was, however, a political downside to McConnell’s unrelentingly rejectionist approach: it played directly into the hands of the extremists in his own party. Indeed, the Senate GOP’s inflexible opposition to Obama, the venomous attacks of Republican partisans (including questions about Obama’s birthplace and religion), and McConnell’s declaration that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president” gave oxygen to the fledgling Tea Party movement. In 2010, the victory of extremist conservative Republicans in party primaries would help cost McConnell the chance to become majority leader in the Senate (postponing that outcome until 2014).

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Vox: Paul Ryan’s long con

To understand the irony and duplicity of that statement, you need to understand Ryan’s career. After the profligacy of the George W. Bush years and the rise of the Tea Party, Ryan rocketed to the top ranks of his party by warning that mounting deficits under President Obama threatened the “most predictable economic crisis we have ever had in this country.” Absent the fiscal responsibility that would accompany Republican rule, we were facing nothing less than “the end of the American dream.” [...]

I was among the reporters who took Ryan’s reboot seriously. “To move us to surpluses,” I wrote of his 2010 proposal, “Ryan’s budget proposes reforms that are nothing short of violent. Medicare is privatized. Seniors get a voucher to buy private insurance, and the voucher’s growth is far slower than the expected growth of health-care costs. Medicaid is also privatized. The employer tax exclusion is fully eliminated, replaced by a tax credit that grows more slowly than medical costs.” [...]

But more important than the differences between Ryan and Trump are the similarities. Yes, Ryan is decorous and polite where Trump is confrontational and uncouth, but the say-anything brand of politics that so outrages Trump’s critics is no less present in Ryan’s recent history. How else can we read a politician who rose to power promising to reduce deficits only to increase them at every turn? Or a politician who raked in good press for promising anti-poverty policies that he subsequently refused to pass? [...]

In important ways, Trump is not a break from the Republican Party’s recent past but an acceleration of it. A party that acculturates itself, its base, and its media sphere to constant nonsense can hardly complain when other political entrepreneurs notice that nonsense sells and decide to begin marketing their own brand of flimflam.

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UnHerd: What’s driving this French revolution?

The protesters range from the middle class suburban elderly to the rural poor. Most road-blocks were good-humoured and well-behaved, although there was a scattering of racist and homophobic attacks on drivers who refused to halt, including an incident near Lyon where demonstrators snatched away the head-scarf of a muslim woman.

The uniform of the revolt is the yellow hi-vis jacket, or gilet jaune, which French drivers must carry in their vehicles by law. The protest has no formal leaders or organisation and has refused help from political parties or trades unions. It is predominantly rural and outer suburban, anti-Metropolitan and anti-politician but cannot easily be dismissed as a populist trend of hard-Right or hard-Left. [...]

The French sociologist Alexis Spire cautions that these parallels, as well as comparisons with protest movements in other countries, are misleading. Poujadism, like the Tea Party movement in the US, was an attack on the state and on public spending. The yellow jackets are anti-government-as-usual, but they are pro-state and pro-state-spending. They complain that Paris does not spend enough on rural and suburban roads, public transport or hospitals – while piling heavy, new taxes onto non-Metropolitan France. [...]

This pattern is not entirely new. In the last 25 years, Presidents Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande have suffered the same catastrophic collapse in popular support soon after their election. This can, in part, be explained by a characteristically French brand of perversity. The country cries out for “reform”, in the abstract, but opposes all “reforms”.

Something new is happening, however. The yellow jacket protests expose fault lines that stretch well beyond France:  motorists v environmentalists; cities v the countryside and outer suburbs; the working class, the struggling middle, the middle-aged and the old v the Metropolitan and the enterprising young. [...]

But there is also a deeper and older issue: a sense that tens of thousands of French people are being left behind, ignored or exploited by the thriving world of Metropolitan France, which includes not just Paris but Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Grenoble and many other cities. François de Rugy, France’s environment minister – or “minister for ecological transition” – sums up the issue well.

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The New York Times: Rick Scott Wins Florida Senate Race After Recount

The win in Florida gives Republicans a 52-to-47 margin in the Senate. If the party also retains the Senate seat in Mississippi after a Nov. 27 runoff, it will have a 53-to-47 edge, a two-seat pickup for the 2018 cycle. [...]

For now, Republicans will savor another victory by Mr. Scott, who has mastered the ability to eke out wins. No politician in the state’s recent history has as enviable a record: Mr. Scott is unbeaten in three consecutive statewide contests, two for governor and one for senator.

His margin has shrunk with each victory — he beat Alex Sink by 1.2 percentage points in 2010, Charlie Crist by 1 point in 2014, and Mr. Nelson by 0.1 of a point. But this year, for the first time, he obtained a majority of the vote, 50.1 percent.

Behind Mr. Scott’s victories lies his vast personal wealth. He and his wife, Ann, put more than $70 million into his first campaign for governor and nearly $13 million into his second; this year, Mr. Scott spent more than $50 million on the Senate race. But as a candidate, Mr. Scott, who is not known for his charisma, did more than just open his checkbook: He campaigned incessantly and stayed relentlessly on message, casting Mr. Nelson as a do-nothing has-been who had to be retired. [...]

During the campaign, Mr. Scott carefully distanced himself from Mr. Trump in an election that turned heavily on voters’ dislike for the president’s administration. Over the course of his eight years as governor, he also tempered his Tea Party conservatism somewhat, shifting to support more moderate measures on guns and immigration. But he embraced Mr. Trump’s bombastic style after Election Day, when it came to claiming rampant fraud nobody could prove.

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The New York Review of Books: The Menace of Eco-Fascism

Across Europe, for example, a longstanding cultural relationship between Nature and Nation permeates environmental debate with a nativist sentiment stronger than is typically visible in the United States. In Germany, beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, die Wandervögel (the hiking birds) began to coalesce around a disdain for modernity and a romantic conception of the nation’s Teutonic agrarian past. The Hitler Youth eventually appropriated a lot of the Wandervögel aesthetic—including its early use of the swastika and its militant Boy Scout look—and the movement’s ideological obsessions; the way it tied local ecology to ethnicity in a “Blood and Soil” mythology is still echoed today by many on the far right. (The German Green Party has been periodically plagued by this tension, sometimes leading to the creation of splinter groups such as the Unabhängige Ökologen Deutschlands, the Independent Environmentalists of Germany, whose platform pairs ecological goals with the protection of “cultural identity” and racial purity.)

Russia today is seeing the rise of a similar eco-nationalist homesteading movement, sometimes dubbed “Ringing Cedars” after a series of fantasy novels by the Siberian author Vladimir Megre, whose mysticism and Old World nostalgia inspired readers to go “back to the land.” The catalyzing force of a popular fantasy series is oddly something that the Ringing Cedars communities share with the United Kingdom’s mid-century Green movement, which arose in tandem with a largely conservative longing for the English countryside, rekindled by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. [...]

In that disturbing and carefully calibrated statement, Spencer clearly hoped to bridge the divide between those on the far right who believe that climate change is a hoax, that the environmental movement is a crypto-socialist bid for state intervention (effectively, the Koch-funded Tea Party line), and those who actually find the science undergirding environmental causes persuasive (even if they ultimately care more about intrusions into their own personal sphere, like GMO crops and fluoridated water, than international problems like rising sea levels and ocean acidification). Spencer’s goal here is to build a consensus on preserving the natural environment—for the privileged ownership, use, and pleasure of Western ethno-states. [...]

There’s a strain within environmentalism that shares this primordial outlook, holding fast to a belief in “climax” or “deep ecologies”—perfectly balanced states of nature that would be enduring and eternal were it not for the interference of man. The unresolved tension surrounding this concept has been a feature of ecological debates since at least the early twentieth century, when the English botanist Arthur Tansley sparred with American ecologist Frederic Clements over the latter’s view of the ecosystem as organism, striving for total symbiotic balance. Finally putting this to rest, with the help of decades of continuing research, will probably be an essential step toward saving the cause of environmentalism from one of its more dangerous foundational myths.

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FiveThirtyEight: We Looked At Hundreds Of Endorsements. Here’s Who Republicans Are Listening To.

The Republican Party is a coalition of overlapping factions — pro-business types, libertarians, evangelicals, populists, single-issue advocates and more — but to whom does it really belong? To many, the answer is clear: Donald J. Trump. And the success of Trump-endorsed candidates in the Republican primaries this year seems to bear that out — but, according to our research, that’s only part of the story. [...]

Let’s start with the kingpin of the Republican Party, the president himself. Trump endorsed 17 candidates in open Republican primaries this election cycle, and 15 of them won. That 88 percent win rate is the highest of any person or group we looked at. In early August, Trump tweeted, “As long as I campaign and/or support Senate and House candidates (within reason), they will win!” It was a bit of an exaggeration, but his success rate has certainly been high so far. [...]

Trump’s win rate may also be inflated by the type of candidate he endorses. For example, several of the candidates he endorsed didn’t face truly competitive primary opposition, including U.S. Senate candidates Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Mitt Romney, who is running in Utah. Other candidates he backed are less firebrands in Trump’s own image and more straitlaced establishment types with broad appeal. Trump has repeatedly cautioned Republican primary voters to “remember Alabama” — where a Republican Senate candidate lost to a Democrat in a deep-red state after the GOP nominee was embroiled in a sexual misconduct scandal involving minors — and vote for a candidate who can win a general election. [...]

Although the tea party appears to have largely gone out of style, we’d be remiss if we didn’t look at the endorsements of the individual power brokers most closely associated with the movement: the Koch brothers. Charles Koch (his brother David has retired) and groups affiliated with the Koch family, like Americans for Prosperity, continue to spend money and political capital on candidates who support their limited-government priorities. And it looks like they still have plenty left in the tank: This year, the Koch political network backed 21 candidates, 86 percent of whom won their races. That’s especially interesting given the Kochs’ opposition to Trump’s trade policies and Trump’s public feud with the brothers. In fact, Trump has bragged on Twitter that the Kochs’ “network is highly overrated, I have beaten them at every turn.” But at least in the open primaries we looked at, the two have not supported opposing candidates this year. By contrast, they’ve actually supported the same candidates in eight open races.11

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Al Jazeera: The Soros obsession: Why far-right conspiracy theories prevail

Alexander Reid Ross, author of Against the Fascist Creep, explained that "Soros conspiracies have always been a marker for the radical right as opposition to mainstream conservatism".

Explaining that such theories found currency among some leftists in the past, Ross noted that Soros has been blamed for economic crises, the tanking of currencies worldwide and backing an uprising against Serbia's former ultra-nationalist ruler Slobodan Milosevic, who was toppled in 2001. [...]

"In a way, he fits the perfect sort of historic epistemological category in the national socialist tradition," Reid Ross told Al Jazeera. [...]

According to Reid Ross, this rhetoric became prevalent among the far right during the era of the Tea Party, the ultra-conservative movement that sprung up in the wake of Barack Obama's 2008 election.

In 2010, the once popular right-wing Fox News commentator Glenn Beck aired a now infamous series deeming Soros as "the puppet master" pulling the strings behind global political developments.  

Pushing the conspiracy that Soros was complicit in the Holocaust, Beck said he had bankrolled civil society and liberal organisations as part of a plot to "form a shadow government, using humanitarian aid as a cover".

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Associated Press: End of an era? Tea party class of House Republicans fades

By some measures, the tea party Republicans have been successful. The “Pledge to America,” a 21-page manifesto drafted by House Republican leadership, outlined the promises.

Among them: “stop out of control spending,” ″reform Congress” and “end economic uncertainty.”  They forced Congress into making drastic spending cuts, in part by threatening to default on the nation’s debt, turning a once-routine vote to raise the U.S. borrowing limit into a cudgel during the annual budget fights.

Republicans halted environmental, consumer and workplace protection rules, and that rollback continues today.

Perhaps most notably, the GOP majority passed $1.5 trillion in tax cuts that Trump signed into law, delivering on the tea party slogan penned on so many protest signs: “Taxed Enough Already.” [...]

In fact, there are an unusually high number of House Republicans retiring this year, including nearly a dozen from the tea party class. Several are running to be governors or senators, though some have already lost in primaries. Others, including Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., another rising star, are simply moving on. Some resigned this year amid ethics scandals.

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The New Yorker: How Paul Ryan Got It Wrong

The Tea Party has been a major force in American politics for nearly a decade now, stretching back to the victories that it brought Republicans in the midterm elections in 2010. Ryan did not create the movement, but he did more than any other sitting politician in Washington to welcome it into the Republican fold, to insist that it shared with the G.O.P. establishment an ideological core: that its fury was just atmosphere, and that at its essence was the same stringent set of beliefs—about small government and low taxes—that Ryan himself had grown powerful professing. When the acrimony between the upstarts and the old guard split the House caucus and deposed Boehner, Ryan was the one figure who could repair the breach—who could look at the Tea Party and see his own image—and so he became Speaker of the House. With the rise of Donald Trump, he tried to repeat this maneuver. The new President was bestowed a chief of staff (Reince Priebus) and a press secretary (Sean Spicer) selected from the ranks of Ryan’s Wisconsin allies. And Ryan began insisting to the public that this new regime was headed not toward serial, incandescent feuds but toward tax reform, Obamacare repeal, and entitlement reform—that the order was regular, that the Republican Party was not materially changed. [...]

The country will be better off now that Ryan has less influence. The major accomplishment he claimed on Wednesday morning was the tax bill that he and his colleagues passed last year, a piece of legislation loaded with giveaways to corporations and the wealthy, and which will only escalate the country’s profound inequalities. Whether his party will be better without him is not as clear. In Washington, insiders believe the next Speaker will be either the transactional House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy, of California, or the more stringent conservative Whip, Steve Scalise, of Louisiana, who last year was shot in an assassination attempt at a congressional baseball practice. Ryan was adept at finding euphemisms for his party’s aims, even as many members of his caucus devoted themselves to making a cult of victimized white men. They now find themselves under pressure—facing protests and electoral challenges—from coalitions organized largely by high-achieving women.

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The Guardian: Trump's America will be saddled with debt – like his bankrupted hotels were

The Tea Party was a collection of strange people, including one candidate who promised she wasn’t a witch. But the strangest thing happened after Obama moved out of the White House, and an orange man moved in. That was when conservatives all across America decided they didn’t actually hate debt and deficits after all. [...]

Grand Wizard Trump first learned his magic debt spells when he built a palace called the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. He called it the eighth wonder of the world, and it certainly was wonderful how the business went bankrupt a year after it opened. Five other Trump palaces went bankrupt the next year, but he waved his wand and everything turned out fine. For him. [...]

Normal people find it hard to borrow money or run businesses after so many bankruptcies. But they don’t know the magic spells that Trump knows, and they don’t have a TV show that makes any buffoon look like a real businessman. They also don’t have Russian wizard friends who buy lots of their property at ridiculously high prices because that’s how they do something they call “laundry”. [...]

And he was right. Nobody but Trump could have imagined that Republicans would vote for a trillion-dollar monster after so many years fighting a religious war against Obama for precisely the same thing. Nobody but Trump could have sold the idea of debt so well to the very people who said they hated it.

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The Guardian: We need to rethink our resistance to Donald Trump’s ideas

Every day some terrible fact is exposed and social media rouses itself and ... nothing much happens. We are caught in a cycle of ineffectual reaction. Can this man really be in charge of pushing the nuclear button, we ask, every single time he pushes our buttons? Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury was going to bring it all tumbling down. It is a belting read, in a-bucket-of-KFC way; greasy and ultimately unsatisfying. Hillary Clinton reading bits of it out at the Grammys is surely the ultimate signifier of impotence.

Let’s all laugh at him, us who are so much better.  As a collective strategy, this is proving as futile as my pathetic tweets. The Republican party keeps him in power. The Democrats still appear to be in a state of post traumatic stress disorder, stuck in the loss, unable to put it in the past. Trump has delivered to the right, to the Tea Party element, to the so-called “nativists” (also known as racists). He has cut taxes in ways Mitt Romney lost the nomination for talking about. The liberal revulsion to his misogyny and racism has been mistaken for opposition. It is not enough.

Gary Younge’s recent reporting from Muncie, Indiana, where he also spent a month before Trump’s election, revealed that most Trump voters think he is doing OK (and these people are not even his core supporters). Tax cuts, deregulation and a conservative in the supreme court are all cited as achievements. The underlying forces that propelled people to vote for Trump – a belief he would smash up the system and, yes, racism, are still there. The narrative of a maverick who works against the mainstream media operates successfully in a huge country where news remains suprisingly local.

The focus on his ludicrous ego and ignorance may make us feel superior. But that is all it appears to be doing. He will not be toppled by us jeering at a picture of his enormous arse or reports of his word salad on climate change, his links to Russia and his comments about pussy-grabbing. Not as long as he is supported by racists, the far right, Christian fundamentalists, the global business elite and his own party. And he is. It is time to get serious about what drives this presidency. At the moment, the joke is on us.

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Haaretz: The Israeli Settler Elite's Fake Libertarian Agenda

The love affair of the settler elite with libertarianism of the American Tea Party type did not begin with the Shaked family’s Italian vacation. Dozens of institutions across Israel – think tanks, journals, training programs – are engaged in imparting the doctrine of the unrestrained market to the young generation of the national-religious public. More often than not, their funding derives from conservative American Jews and evangelical Christians. For Shaked and her party’s leader, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, that imported worldview is particularly profitable. [...]

Let’s begin with the self-evident: A party whose basic principle is the perpetuation of military rule over millions of people cannot evoke the concept of freedom as the rest of humanity understands it. The economic thinkers of the right whom Shaked quotes would, if forced to choose, probably prefer to sing the “Internationale” in the town square than to validate the occupation project, which undermines all rights that underlie the principle of Western liberty. Friedrich Hayek lauded the free market not out of concern for the right of hoteliers trying to save a few shekels on lifeguards, but because they wanted to protect citizens from the unlimited power of the state.

But the absurdity goes deeper than that. An examination of the record of Habayit Hayehudi reveals that the party is an enemy not only of the principle of freedom, but also of the free market that Shaked purports to sanctify. As minister of economy, whenever a factory in the Negev or Galilee ran into difficulties, Bennett declared that the government must not support a workplace that cannot stand on its own feet. But for some reason, when it comes to the settlement project – another enterprise that is unable to stand on its own without assistance – his approach is the polar opposite.

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The New Yorker: The Danger of President Pence

If the job is a gamble for Pence, he himself is something of a gamble for the country. During the tumultuous 2016 Presidential campaign, relatively little attention was paid to how Pence was chosen, or to his political record. And, with all the infighting in the new Administration, few have focussed on Pence’s power within the White House. Newt Gingrich told me recently that the three people with the most policy influence in the Administration are Trump, Chief of Staff John Kelly, and Pence. Gingrich went on, “Others have some influence, such as Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn. But look at the schedule. Pence has lunches with the President. He’s in the national-security briefings.” Moreover, and crucially, Pence is the only official in the White House who can’t be fired. [...]

On Election Night, the dissonance between Trump’s populist supporters and Pence’s billionaire sponsors was quietly evident. When Trump gave his acceptance speech, in the ballroom of the Hilton Hotel in midtown Manhattan, he vowed to serve “the forgotten men and women of our country,” and promised to “rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, and hospitals.” Upstairs, in a room reserved for Party élites, several of the richest and most conservative donors, all of whom support drastic reductions in government spending, were celebrating. Doug Deason, a Texas businessman and a political donor, recalled to me, “It was amazing. In the V.I.P. reception area, there was an even more V.I.P. room, and I counted at least eight or nine billionaires.” [...]

Cecil Bohanon, one of two adjunct scholars at Pence’s think tank, had a history of financial ties to tobacco-company front groups, and in 2000 Pence echoed industry talking points in an essay that argued, “Smoking doesn’t kill. In fact, two out of every three smokers doesn’t die from a smoking-related illness.” A greater “scourge” than cigarettes, he argued, was “big government disguised as do-gooder, healthcare rhetoric.” Bohanon, who still writes for the think tank’s publication, also has ties to the Kochs. Last year, John Hardin, the head of university relations for the Charles Koch Foundation, told an Indiana newspaper that the Kochs had been funding Bohanon’s work as a professor of free-market economics at Ball State University “for years.” [...]

Pence, who had called global warming “a myth” created by environmentalists in their “latest Chicken Little attempt to raise taxes,” took up the Kochs’ cause. He not only signed their pledge but urged others to do so as well. He gave speeches denouncing the cap-and-trade bill—which passed the House but got held up in the Senate—as a “declaration of war on the Midwest.” His language echoed that of the Koch groups. Americans for Prosperity called the bill “the largest excise tax in history,” and Pence called it “the largest tax increase in American history.” (Neither statement was true.) He used a map created by the Heritage Foundation, which the Kochs supported, to make his case, and he urged House Republicans to hold “energy summits” opposing the legislation in their districts, sending them home over the summer recess with kits to bolster their presentations. [...]

But conservatives blocked the idea, and Pence threatened to veto any such legislation. “With Pence, you need to look at the framework, which is abstinence,” Clere said. “It’s the same as with giving teen-agers condoms. Conservatives think it promotes the behavior, even though it’s a scientifically proven harm-reduction strategy.” In March, 2015, Clere staged a huge public hearing, in which dozens of experts and sufferers testified about the crisis. Caught flat-footed, Pence scheduled his own event, where he announced that he would pray about the syringe-exchange issue. The next day, he said that he supported allowing an exchange program as an emergency measure, but only on a temporary basis and only in Scott County, with no state funding. Clere told me that he spent “every last dime of my political capital” to get the bill through. After Scott County implemented the syringe exchange, the number of new H.I.V. cases fell. But Republican leaders later stripped Clere of his committee chairmanship, a highly unusual event. “I commend Representative Clere for the efforts to help the state deal with this,” Kevin Burke, the health officer in neighboring Clark County, told me. “But he paid a price for it.”

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FiveThirtyEight: Trump Voters In Alabama May Be About To Teach Trump A Lesson

Endorsements, if they work at all (and often they don’t), work best when they give an ideological cue to a voter that they wouldn’t have otherwise had. That’s why endorsements rarely matter in general elections: Most voters already fit into one of the partisan camps and are going to cast a ballot based solely off party label. In a primary, on the other hand, the candidates are more ideologically similar, and so an endorsement can help voters make a choice.

In 2010, for example, Sarah Palin endorsed fellow tea partyer Christine O’Donnell over the more moderate and well-known Mike Castle in the Delaware Republican Senate primary. Palin’s endorsement of O’Donnell specifically highlighted O’Donnell’s conservative positions, and though it may not have won O’Donnell the primary, according to polling data, it certainly helped her along. [...]

The lesson of these different endorsements should be fairly clear: Trump voters aren’t mindless drones. They’ll take cues from the president when he’s selling them on something it makes sense for them to back.2 Indeed, much of the reason Trump won in 2016 was because he defended positions that were already popular among the base, even if they weren’t popular among the party elite. On one of the biggest issues of the 2016 primary, illegal immigration, Trump staked out a hardline position that was already highly correlated with vote choice in previous primaries. (More anti-immigration Republicans did better, on average, in GOP primaries.) He took that position when one of the so-called frontrunners for the GOP nomination, Jeb Bush, was known for being soft on illegal immigration. Trump found a lot less success when he was pushing a health care bill this past spring and summer that went against his promises to Republican voters in the primary.

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Jacobin Magazine: Populist Billionaires

The paradox at the heart of these populist right-wing movements is that while they are products of popular anger — and appear a rejection of the globalized, hyperconnected world extolled by the elite — it’s also segments of this elite that are helping power these movements.

These aren’t outliers. A study last year found that just ten wealthy donors made up more than half the donations for EU referendum campaigns, with pro-Brexit donors making up six of those ten. One of these donors was Peter Hargreaves, the founder of a financial services company, who donated £3.2 million to the Leave.EU campaign. [...]

This isn’t limited to the United Kingdom. In the Netherlands, the largest donor to Geert Wilders’ far right Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) is the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an American organization that funds various conservative and Islamophobic outlets, including Jihad Watch. The center gave the PVV €108,244 in 2015, the largest individual contribution in the Dutch political system in a single year, though it’s donated to the party over the course of a number of years, as well as paying for Wilders’s trips to the United States. [...]

All this at first seems counter-intuitive. After all, it’s generally assumed that xenophobic and anti-immigrant attitudes are the domain of the white working class, which goes to explain the success of Trump and Brexit among such voters. But data analyses like this one from Vox paint a more complicated picture. It suggests that the most active elite donors have significantly harsher anti-immigration and authoritarian views than others, including other wealthy people who aren’t political donors. 

None of this is to say that these movements and ideas are simply astroturfed. They’re not. Nor is it to say that the far right would be unsuccessful without the backing of big donors. A party founded by actual Nazis nearly won the Austrian elections despite the country’s public funding of elections, and Marine Le Pen had tremendous success despite the strict restrictions on French campaign finance laws (though she, too, comes from less than humble beginnings).

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Vox: Want to see what protests can be? Look at what they have been.

The most successful protest movements in history have been the ones that have set their own agendas. Whether abolitionists, women’s suffrage advocates, or civil rights activists, progressive change movements have gained influence by disrupting politics as usual — not by slavishly aligning themselves with electoral parties. [...]

Comparisons to the Tea Party also are of limited utility. Current protesters need not mimic the goals and tactics of the Tea Party, as observers fixated on electoral dividends of activism have recommended. Initially a product of populist anger, the Tea Party evolved into a “grasstops” endeavor funded by Washington lobbyists and think tanks and aligned with the Republican Party. [...]

Current demonstrations are part of a wave of activism that stretches back to the anti-World Trade Organization protests of the 1990s and includes the battle for a $15-an-hour minimum wage, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and grassroots anger over big bank bailouts that gave rise to the early Tea Party movement. Like these predecessors, the current wave of activism bespeaks many Americans’ sense that electoral politics — and the political process and policies that result from it — are ineffective and, in some instances, rotten to the core. [...]

Because the protests are a byproduct of the popular disdain for politics as we know it, it is perverse to view the new waves of activism only in terms of what they mean for the two major political parties. For many of those who have turned to the streets to protest, the major parties are a part of the problem — not the solution to what ails society.

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The Atlantic: The Souring of American Exceptionalism

But most of the compliments Americans paid themselves half a century ago ring hollow in the 21st century. In 2010, as a rising star in the Tea Party movement, Marco Rubio delivered the keynote address at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. He told his own inspiring personal story and credited it to the unique opportunities of the United States. "The result is an America where—which is the only place in the world where it doesn't matter who your parents were or where you came from. You can be anything you are willing to work hard to be. The result is the only economy in the world where poor people with a better idea and a strong work ethic can compete and succeed against rich people in the marketplace and competition.” None of that is true, and in important ways it is the opposite of the truth. Who your parents were and where you came from matters probably more in the United States than in most other advanced economies, at least if statistics on upward mobility are to be believed.

America’s uniqueness, even pre-Trump, was expressed as much through negative indicators than positive. It is more violent than other comparable societies, both one-on-one and in the gun massacres to which the country has become so habituated. It has worse health outcomes than comparably wealthy countries, and some of them most important of them are deteriorating further even as they improve almost everywhere else. America’s average levels of academic achievement lag those of other advanced countries. Fewer Americans vote—and in no other democracy does organized money count for so much in political life. A century ago, H.L. Mencken observed the American “national genius for corruption,” and (again pre-Trump) Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index ranks the U.S. in 18th place, behind Hong Kong, Belgium, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany—never mind first-place finishers Denmark and New Zealand. [...]

Nor has that elite learned its lessons. Look at the progress of the Republican health-care bill through the House and Senate. The authors of the bill are acutely aware of how despised it is, how much more despised it will be once it goes into effect: That’s precisely why they have broken through all normal legislative processes, why they do not hold hearings, why they conceal its elements, why they outright lie about its effect. Even so, only fewer than one in five Americans support what they wish to do. Rather than make any attempt to build consensus—never mind to make adjustments that could gain broader consent—a small leadership group is pushing through. Some of those leaders are dogmatically sure that they are correct, no matter what anybody else thinks. Others are heedless of consequences for anyone but their supporters and donors. Still others feel cynically certain that if they can prevail now against the numbers, they can use the inertia of the American system to prevent the large majority who opposed them from reversing their actions.

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