5 September 2016
Vox: Why race and identity will remain the dividing line in American politics for a while to come
For the past half-century, the party system has moved from one organized around economics to one organized around social/identity issues. This transition has happened quite slowly, and for the past three decades these two issues have essentially fused along a single cross-cutting dimension for an unusually long time, which is probably the reason politics became so deeply polarized. [...]
For Democratic Party leaders, there are three benefits to maintaining race and identity as the primary dimension of conflict in American politics.
The first reason Democrats want to make politics about race and identity is that they probably hold the majority position, at least if the 2016 election cleavages hold. And going forward, the electorate is only going to grow more diverse and more highly educated, which means that if Democrats get to be the party of tolerance and cosmopolitan social values in a politics organized around these issues, they will be in a strong electoral position. [...]
If the Republican Party were just a party of strategic politicians who wanted to win elections, and had no constraints from activists, donors, or its own principles, its strategy would be very simple: Tone down the racism and identity politics, focus on the economic populism that Trump has at times channeled, and became a truly populist party. If Trump had run a strong populist, anti–Wall Street, anti-TPP, "end the crony corruption of Washington" campaign, he might be winning now. [...]
But perhaps the bigger obstacle keeping Republicans from moving into the potentially winning populist position is that the business and wealthy elites who have long controlled the Republican Party from the top would be horrified to see Republicans take a populist turn. [...]
A more decentralized Congress will likely produce more cross-partisan coalitions, and probably more legislation, but also more uncertainty and possibly chaos.
Vox: Donald Trump is doing worse with Latinos than the previous 6 Republican presidential candidates
The survey, by America’s Voice and Latino Decisions, found that if the election were held today, 70 percent of registered Latino voters would vote for Hillary Clinton. Only 19 percent would vote for Trump. About 2 percent said they won’t vote for president, 4 percent said they’d vote for someone else, and 4 percent said they’re undecided or don’t know. [...]
In 2000 and 2004, Bush got 35 and 40 percent of the Latino vote. That was up from the share of the vote that Ronald Reagan (35 and 37 percent), George H.W. Bush (30 and 25 percent), Bob Dole (21 percent) got. It was also higher than what John McCain (31 percent) and Mitt Romney (27 percent) got in subsequent elections.
Trump’s numbers, then, are below the previous six Republicans to run for president. And they’re especially low at a time when the Latino population has grown — from 14.8 million people in 1980 to 55.2 million in 2014.
The New Yorker: Obama the Conservationist
Last month, Obama designated eighty-seven thousand acres in central Maine as a new national monument. He bypassed Congress to make the designation, invoking the Antiquities Act, which was signed into law by Roosevelt in 1906. (The act allows the President to create national monuments “by public proclamation.”) And, on August 24th, he added almost three hundred million acres to the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, northwest of Hawaii; the additional acres made Papahānaumokuākea (pronounced “Papa-ha-now-moh-koo-ah-kay-ah”) the largest ecological preserve on the planet. Obama has now put more acreage under protection than any other President, though the bulk of it is underwater. The historian Douglas Brinkley recently dubbed him “a 21st-century Theodore Roosevelt.” [...]
For many in Congress, underfunding isn’t enough. Last summer, Representative Cresent Hardy, a Nevada Republican, offered an amendment to an appropriations bill that would have sabotaged the Antiquities Act, curtailing a President’s ability to create national monuments. (National monuments are a lot like national parks; most are managed by the Park Service, and many—including the Grand Canyon, first designated by Teddy Roosevelt—have gone on to become parks themselves.) The Hardy amendment was approved by the House but then dropped in the bill’s final version.
More recently, Representative Rob Bishop, a Utah Republican, who is the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, tried to prevent Obama from creating the preserve in central Maine. Bishop, too, has introduced legislation to undermine the Antiquities Act, which he has called “the most evil act ever invented.” (Last year, he was recorded suggesting that anyone who supports it ought to die.) The Republican National Committee’s 2016 platform—a hair-raising document if ever there was one—seems to subscribe to this sentiment. It calls on “national and state leaders and representatives to exert their utmost power and influence” to wrest land away from federal protection.
The New Yorker: Sun Wenlin and Hu Mingliang Want to Get Married
Like so many young people today in China, the two men met online. According to Sun Wenlin, a tech consultant and, at age twenty-six, the younger of the pair, it had been “love at first sight.” Hu Mingliang, who is thirty-seven years old and the more reticent of the two, works as a security guard. In June, 2015, on the first anniversary of the day they met, they walked to the local civil-affairs bureau to apply for a marriage license. They were turned away, but, unlike the tens of millions of Chinese who have resigned themselves to sexual identities unrecognized by the state, Sun decided to file a lawsuit. It was the first of its kind in China, and asked for the legalization of same-sex marriage. The case was rejected by the court, but not before garnering attention and support from around the world. Sun and Hu’s open appeal to the legal system was indisputably a step forward for L.G.B.T.Q. rights and a testament to their commitment to each other. And yet the two men—one from the country, one from the city—had taken somewhat different journeys, shaped not only by the contradictions of the country today but by the long history of homosexuality in China. [...]
“Chinese society has always prioritized the collective over the individual,” Yu Haiqing, a professor of Chinese culture and media at the University of New South Wales, told me. “People did what they did in private, but there wasn’t public protection for it, because it seemed irrelevant to the practical goal of perpetuating the family line.” One reason it has been difficult to discuss the codification of L.G.B.T.Q. rights is that the very notion of individual rights has been contested in recent years, and not just in the political realm. As Yu put it, “When you are living with multiple generations of your family and your life is enmeshed with theirs, it’s hard to imagine rebelling against the norm.” [...]
In some ways, Sun Wenlin and Hu Mingliang are the embodiment of this evolving China. Sun, the more urbane of the couple, was the one to insist on lodging the petition. His city-dwelling parents have been fully supportive of his legal battle, and he has rarely shied away from media attention. Sun has declared more than once that he does not want to be a spokesman for all gay people in China but is fighting for himself as an individual. By contrast, his partner, Hu, whose parents still live in the Hunan countryside, felt somewhat differently. Months before the two men filed their suit, Hu had brought Sun home to meet his family, and the experience left a deep impression. Prior to going home, Hu had felt trepidation about coming out to people he had known all his life. But his family and childhood friends did not reject him. “If you know someone who is gay, that changes your perspective,” Hu said, voicing his hope that the recognition of gay marriage might affect not only him but the country at large. “It just takes exposure.”
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