FiveThirtyEight: How Big Is The Bannon Wing Of The Republican Party?

Before we delve into the numbers, let’s first define what we mean by the “Bannon wing.” Generally, we’re talking about a more populist, nationalist and isolationist brand of Republicanism. More specifically, Trump voters who are pro-police, against free trade, against the U.S. playing an active role (militarily and diplomatically) in the international community, strongly against illegal immigration, and in favor of more infrastructure spending. There are obviously other parts of Bannon’s agenda, but these are among the defining features that help separate it from other wings within the Republican Party. [...]

Among Trump voters, approximately 15 percent supported all five positions, including a B or better for their local police. So let’s call this 15 percent the “core Bannon” voter. This isn’t a particularly large group. On its own, for example, it’s not enough to win a Republican primary. But it’s certainly big enough that Trump needs its continued support in order to survive a serious primary challenge in 2020 (if one arises). Remember Trump won only 45 percent of the national primary vote in 2016. To put this 15 percent in some additional perspective, the percentage of Hillary Clinton voters who were Hispanic in the general election, an important part of her coalition, was about 12 percent. [...]

About 50 percent of all Trump voters fall into Group No. 1 — they want the U.S. to be less active on the world stage. The pull of this group shouldn’t be too surprising given that even Clinton was forced to come out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and Trump made a point during the primary campaign of (falsely) claiming that he always opposed the Iraq War.

Group No. 2, nationalist Bannon-ites, make up about 45 percent of Trump voters, people who want to identify and deport all immigrants in the country illegally and give their local police a grade of above average or better. Trump’s appeal clearly went beyond voters with hardline positions on policing and immigration — issues that represented the starkest contrast with Clinton. But cultural conservatives are a substantial portion of Trump’s coalition.

read the article

The Atlantic: How to Repurpose a Bad Statue

When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, so did many of its statues, often in giddy, nighttime topplings—most notably, the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the ruthless Soviet secret police. These were often joyous, cathartic events, quick and tangible symbols of the end of a brutal and moribund regime, when everything else was changing far more slowly. In Moscow, the statues were then dragged to a grassy lot next to the brutalist Central House of Artists on an island in the middle of the Moscow River. For years, they lay there on the ground, a kind of graveyard of Lenins and Soviet crests and anonymous workers and peasants shorn of their pedestals. In recent years, the city of Moscow has turned them upright—and into an outdoor sculpture garden where the statues can be seen for the ghosts that they are. (I have walked past the garden many times, but found it hard to take interest in what were essentially tombstones with no graves beneath them: Unlike the long-overdue removal of Confederate statues, the removal of Soviet statues in Russia proved superficial and the celebration premature. The statues were yanked down, but the Soviet state didn’t really go anywhere; even the melody of the national anthem is the same.)

In 1997, Taiwan did a similar thing with the statues of nationalist dictator Chiang Kai-shek and his son, Chiang Jing-guo. Their likenesses were put into a green park on the bank of a lake, the Cihu Memorial Statues Park. Each statue has a description of where it originally stood. These parks deprive the statues of their context and their power; they may look like a brutal dictator, but here they are just stone.

There’s a reason statues can rouse such angry passions. They are designed to evoke emotion and memory in monumental terms. That’s the whole point. But they are not just symbols of what a society has decided is important. Often, they also serve as embodiments of the state, reminders of its presence even when one of its enforcers can’t be there. A statue can be an inanimate chunk of rock or metal in loco parentis. The Confederate statues, many of which went up well after the Civil War, were reminders of who was in charge, symbols not of an old master, but a new one: Jim Crow. Which is why statues can often become flashpoints of conflict, as they did in Eastern Ukraine in the wake of the Maidan revolution and Russian invasion of 2014. Ukrainians gleefully toppled Lenins all over their country, eager to shed their Soviet, Moscow-dominated past, and to move into the future. At the height of the Arab Spring, protestors in places like Syria defaced and brought down statues to the still-living dictators they couldn’t always topple.

read the article

Jacobin Magazine: What Is Trump Country?

Over the past few decades, the top 10% of income earners in the US have appropriated from the bottom 90% an amount of wealth four times greater than the American government’s debt to foreign countries. The majority of Trump’s supporters are within this top decile. [...]

Exit polls are imperfect. But according to the exit data we have, Trump did poorly among voters making less than $50,000 a year (roughly the poorest half of US society); Clinton won this group by roughly 11%.

Trump’s gains appear to have come mostly from the top half of income earners. In 2008, Obama and McCain each received 49% of the vote from people making more than $50,000. In 2016, Trump bested Clinton by 4% in the $50,000–100,000 income bracket, by 1% in the $100,000–200,000 bracket, by 1% in the $200,000–250,000 bracket, and by 2% among those earning more than $250,000. [...]

In America, the top 10% amounts to around 30 million people. A 2% gain among this politically influential group would be immense, especially in an election where Trump lost the popular vote by three million. [...]

For their part, wealthy Trump supporters appear suspicious of the value system that emerged alongside neoliberalization, favoring instead an intransigent conservatism and a less financialized capitalism. These wealthy Trump supporters, who formed the base of his support, are citizens neither of Paris nor Pittsburgh. They live in counties like Putnam and Suffolk: they’re white Americans upset that other Americans are no longer working for them, Americans whose wealth, status, and power have ostensibly been attacked and eroded over the past few decades. And they want it back — with the help of Donald Trump.

read the article

The New York Review of Books: What Makes a Terrorist?

Instead, it is better to think of radicalization as a phenomenon in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Multiple factors interact in complex ways that cause radicalization to emerge in individual people and groups. As with other complex systems, such as ecosystems, removing one factor does not cause the system to collapse but instead to evolve in ways that may be positive or negative. In the jihadist movement there have been many small tipping points, including the USSR invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and the Syrian civil war of 2011—each of which mobilized a new generation of fighters.

Profiles of jihadists have evolved over the years. Generally, revolutionary movements attract different kinds of recruits at different stages in their development. Many of the founders and leaders of the modern jihadist movement were educated members of the upper-middle or upper classes. Even many early foot soldiers were of above-average socio-economic status. Research on recruits to jihadist groups using data from the 1970s to 2010 found that members of these groups were six times more likely than the general population to have a bachelor’s degree. In the Middle East, engineering schools are often the most competitive programs and only take the best and brightest students; jihadists were seventeen times more likely to have an engineering degree. [...]

But as ISIS’s goals continued to evolve so too did their recruits. Few women from Europe ventured to Syria in the early days of the conflict, but by 2014 one in seven European foreign fighters were women, and by 2016 that number had jumped to one in three. Women didn’t become more vulnerable to radicalization over that period—instead, they were targeted for radicalization. Until 2014, ISIS’s local insurgency demanded mostly young men of fighting capacity and thus had little need for women. In June 2014, ISIS declared its so-called Caliphate and shifted its focus to state-building. In order to legitimize that state, the immigration of women, children, and families was explicitly sought after. Once the women arrived they began recruiting female friends, family members, and strangers over the Internet to pull in more “lionesses,” as they were often called, leading to the jump seen in 2016.

read the article

Vox: California has a climate problem, and its name is cars

The state’s pursuit of advanced energy has also yielded an employment bonanza. For every job in fossil fuels, the state boasts 8.5 jobs in renewable energy. And an innovation bonanza: California leads the 50 states in patents in most areas of clean energy.

Perhaps the most notable success of all is California’s incredible progress in becoming more energy-productive — that is, in squeezing more GDP out of every unit of energy consumed. It has recently become the most energy-productive major economy in the world. [...]

The culprit for the slowing decline is a spike in transportation emissions. There was a dip in transportation emissions starting around 2008, with the recession. And though vehicles have gotten more efficient and more hybrids and EVs are on the road since then, the number of vehicles and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) have begun rising again, overwhelming efficiency gains. [...]

The other solution to passenger vehicles is reducing commuting times by solving that housing crisis, and getting people out of their cars by increasing infill and density via building out proper public transportation systems (which themselves will need to be electrified). Unfortunately, cheap gasoline lately has meant a decline in per capita public transportation use in almost every major California city.

read the article