The Atlantic: People Voted for Trump Because They Were Anxious, Not Poor

After analyzing in-depth survey data from 2012 and 2016, the University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana C. Mutz argues that it’s the latter. In a new article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she added her conclusion to the growing body of evidence that the 2016 election was not about economic hardship. [...]

Mutz examined voters whose incomes declined, or didn’t increase much, or who lost their jobs, or who were concerned about expenses, or who thought they had been personally hurt by trade. None of those things motivated people to switch from voting for Obama in 2012 to supporting Trump in 2016. Indeed, manufacturing employment in the United States has actually increased somewhat since 2010. And as my colleague Adam Serwer has pointed out, “Clinton defeated Trump handily among Americans making less than $50,000 a year.”

Meanwhile, a few things did correlate with support for Trump: a voter’s desire for their group to be dominant, as well as how much they disagreed with Clinton’s views on trade and China. Trump supporters were also more likely than Clinton voters to feel that “the American way of life is threatened,” and that high-status groups, like men, Christians, and whites, are discriminated against.

This sense of unfounded persecution is far from rare, and it seems to be heightened during moments of societal change. As my colleague Emma Green has written, white evangelicals see more discrimination against Christians than Muslims in the United States, and 79 percent of white working-class voters who had anxieties about the “American way of life” chose Trump over Clinton. As I pointed out in the fall of 2016, several surveys showed many men supported Trump because they felt their status in society was threatened, and that Trump would restore it. Even the education gap in support for Trump disappears, according to one analysis, if you account for the fact that non-college-educated whites are simply more likely to affirm racist views than those with college degrees. (At the most extreme end, white supremacists also use victimhood to further their cause.)

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Social Europe: Hungary’s Lost Democracy

Despite the evident strength and sincerity of my companion’s convictions there is ample evidence to suggest that the truth is a great deal more complex. While Fidesz may have gained an impressive number of seats in Hungary’s Parliament, the election results show conclusively that the Party does not enjoy overwhelming support amongst the electorate. Without taking account of possible electoral irregularities – now the subject of mounting speculation – Fidesz-KDNP received one hundred thousand fewer votes than the opposition parties combined. Fidesz’s striking success, in terms of winning parliamentary seats, is far from an accurate barometer of its real approval ratings. Rather, the party’s two-thirds majority in the new Parliament is the product of Hungary’s spectacularly skewed election laws, which were designed by Fidesz and passed by a Fidesz-dominated legislature. As underlined by the historian and blogger, Eva Balogh, “many people underestimated…the devilish nature of the electoral system Viktor Orbán created.” [...]

Aside from alleged material inducements, occasional reports of pressure from employers on their workforce and, most worryingly, suggestions of serious election irregularities, including the contention that as many as 125,000 votes may have simply “vanished”, the governing party’s campaign was greatly helped by a range of dubious practices. In its preliminary report on the Hungarian elections, an OSCE Election Observation Mission noted: “the ability of contestants to compete on an equal basis was significantly compromised by the government’s excessive spending on public information advertisements that amplified the ruling coalition’s campaign message.” The Observation Mission also emphasised that, while the public broadcaster had “fulfilled its mandate to provide free airtime to contestants”, its “newscasts and editorial outputs clearly favoured the ruling coalition”. At the same time, most commercial broadcasters – the bulk of which support Fidesz – had been “partisan in their coverage”. These factors go some way towards explaining why Fidesz was able to attract significantly more votes than any other single party in the elections. Persistent and grossly biased media coverage – in combination with omnipresent state-funded “public information advertisements” that, in reality, simply reinforce the anti-migrant, anti-EU and anti-(George) Soros rhetoric of Fidesz – have helped to create and sustain a fearful social climate in which poorly educated, low-income citizens, in particular, especially in deprived rural areas, have grown to accept Fidesz’s fictive political narrative. As Balogh noted recently in Hungarian Spectrum, although opposition parties took most of the seats in Budapest, „[t]he inhabitants of villages, in fact, the poorest villages, voted in droves for Fidesz. They are under-educated, ill-informed, and brainwashed.” [...]

Strikingly, many educated younger Hungarians I encounter – most of whom have had little or no direct involvement in politics – no longer see a meaningful future for themselves in a Fidesz-dominated Hungary, where corruption and nepotism – as well as the continuing assault on civil liberties – are becoming the norm. Since 8 April, the talk amongst customers in the café where I often take breakfast has been almost entirely of emigration. Fidesz may have won the recent parliamentary elections but it’s Hungary, not only the country’s hopelessly divided and ineffectual opposition parties, that has lost.

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Al Jazeera: Cuba's economic future after the Castros

"What we can expect from Miguel Diaz-Canel is policy continuity and gradual economic reform, but no democratic political opening or Cuba's moving towards a more pluralistic political system," explains Diego Moya-Ocampos, a senior analyst at IHS Markit.

In general terms, "Canel is Raul Castro's boy, and change will continue being steered by Raul Castro, who'll remain the head of the Communist Party ... Canel will try to enable change in a way that it will not let the old Castro revolutionary guards or military establishment feel uncomfortable.

"The military and security apparatus play a key role behind the scenes, controlling the economy and any gradual opening of the economy will have to be done at the pace at which it will not increase the hopes or the expectations of the local population", says Moya-Ocampos.

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openDemocracy: Unsympathetic people: the overwhelming success of Poland's exclusionary agenda

According to a recent poll, the attitude of the Polish people towards other nationals changed dramatically over the period of just one year. Compared with 2017, Polish approval rates of many nations took a deep plunge. Sympathy towards Jews and Arabs, already low, dropped in 2018 by 13 and 6 percent, respectively. Given the persistent anti-Jewish and anti-Islamic propaganda in the Polish media, this is rather unsurprising. Approval of the Germans dropped by 16 percent, as if the difficult and protracted process of the reconciliation between Poland and its “eternal enemy” had never happened.

What is really puzzling is that Polish approval of their southern neighbours, the Czechs, took a nosedive by 15 percent; Italians, Russians, Vietnamese and Japanese by 13 percent, and the British by 8 percent. Even the Hungarians and Americans are liked less among Poles by 14 and 11 percent, respectively. [...]

Before attempting to provide one, we should note that while the rapid change in the attitude of Poles towards other nationalities is puzzling, we – the Polish people – are not alone in this. The public attitude towards other nationals nowadays is noticeably swinging in Hungary, Austria, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, as well as in the USA and Great Britain. [...]

As far as the reversal in the Polish attitudes towards their neighbours is concerned, I would like to suggest that its explanation is to be sought in the fact that, ever since the peaceful “Solidarity” revolution in 1989, Polish politics has been fuelled by the struggle over who truly takes credit for the successful overthrow of Communism. Driven by this, Polish politics became the arena for a struggle of personalities between its main actors, with ideology and political agendas playing an important, but ultimately secondary and instrumental role.

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Jacobin Magazine: Capitalism and the Family

Before I started studying women’s history in depth, I was trying to understand the development of racism from that perspective. For example, I was struck by the way that capitalism fostered a progressive ideology of equality, and yet actually helped produce a much more coherent and far-reaching ideology of racism than had existed in hierarchical precapitalist societies. I began to see racism as a way that people reconciled their material interests in slavery, or their acquiescence to its continuation, with their belief in equal opportunity. And I noticed a similar dynamic in the development of biological theories about women’s inability to participate in the freedoms supposedly being granted to men. [...]

My research increasingly changed my point of view. Working with an anthropologist colleague, I began to see that the very mechanisms that initially reproduced cooperation and reciprocity in early foraging and horticultural societies also undermined both social and gender equality. Obviously, the family has long been a source of coercion and domination of women. But it’s also been a way of dominating men. First because parental control over women’s mating choices was also a way of controlling young men, and much later in history, because men’s responsibility for women has kept their shoulder to the grindstone, so to speak. The family regulates and polices its members but also protects them in some ways. It’s a site of struggle and accommodation as well as a site of control. Families have been shaped by and for the existing hierarchies of societies but sometimes they have changed in ways that weaken or challenge those hierarchies. As I began to see how much family life has changed over time, and how complex its dynamics have been, it made me question whether something like marriage was an inherently oppressive institution. I no longer believe that it is, even though we still carry a lot of baggage from the days when it did serve as a major way of enforcing gender, racial, and class power relations. [...]

The seventeen and eighteenth centuries. The new ideology of democracy rejects the idea that some people must be subordinate to others because of a social hierarchy. And yet you do need women in the home and you’ve got this increasing division of spheres between husbands and wives. And you’ve also got a lot of anxiety about the love match — what will keep people from staying single if they don’t find love, or getting divorced if love dies? How will we maintain gender order if love is more powerful than parental authority? And gradually a new ideology emerges that says no, it’s not because women have to be subordinate to men that men are in charge of the outside world and women in charge of the home. It’s because men and women have totally different capabilities and needs. Men and women are total opposites, each incomplete without the other. In premodern Europe and colonial America, women were expected to be tough enough to wring a chicken’s neck and drive a hard bargain at the marketplace. It was not unmanly to weep, and men were in charge of arranging many social events, keeping track of kin, and arranging weddings. Women were actually considered the lusty sex, more prone to sexual error, and there was very little sentimentality about their maternal role. [...]

You can see this trade-off as early as the nineteenth century. Nancy Cott studied the diaries of middle-class women experiencing this transition to the idea of the nurturing female homemaker. 2 She found that their diaries (and I’ve seen this in the public writings of nineteenth-century women as well) reflect a new sense of themselves as morally superior to men, who are caught up in the impersonal world of materialism and cash exchange. But there is simultaneously a new self-doubt about the worth of the work they do at home — an anxiety to, so to speak, prove themselves worthy of their keep, since they’re not providing for the family. Women lose their sense of themselves as productive co-providers for the family. They have to make up for it in the realm of love.

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