RSA: US Election 2016: The Result | John Prideaux

US Election 2016: The Result with John Prideaux, US editor at The Economist. It may be a post-pollster, post-pundit, post-truth landscape – but can we predict where the world goes from here? An extraordinary US presidential election campaign has resulted in an outcome that few could have predicted at its outset: Donald J Trump will become the 45th US President of the United States.

The implications of this historic decision are, for now, highly unpredictable, and for many, deeply concerning, with many questions unresolved around the course of future US policy on the economy, security, environmental protection, and human rights.

Join our expert panel at the RSA to consider what a Trump presidency says about, and means for America and the world in the days, months and years to come.

Our panel of experts include: John Prideaux, US editor at The Economist; James O'Brien, LBC radio & BBC Newsnight; Professor Malcolm Chalmers, Deputy Director-General of RUSI; Melanie McDonagh, Leader writer, Evening Standard and contributor, The Spectator; Stephen Bush, special correspondent, New Statesman.

The Atlantic: The Cardinal Trying to Save Chicago

In many ways, Chicago is the American test case for Francis’s vision of the Church—one that is vibrant, energized, and focused on caring for those who have been thrown away by society. Many pastors, like Cupich, have welcomed this renewed call to “smell like the sheep” they tend in their churches. But the pope has his enemies, too; especially in America, not everyone agrees that Francis is taking the Church in the right direction. Cupich has made a dizzying ascent, earning a job that’s part Roman consigliere, part CEO, and part social worker. If he succeeds, his work will be a testament to Francis-style Catholicism. If he fails, though, the consequences won’t just be political. Cupich wants to lift people out of poverty, create better education systems, and bring an end to the gun deaths. But the city and the Church he serves are both struggling to hold violence at bay. [...]

It was during this time that he began building his reputation as a Church fixer. In 2002, the American church was just beginning to deal with the fall-out of the clergy sex-abuse scandal uncovered that year by The Boston Globe. Burke, then a justice on the Illinois Appellate Court, was part of the USCCB’s initial working group on the matter, and that’s where she first met Cupich. “We had a very difficult time with the bishops and cardinals, trying to get them to cooperate with our investigation process,” Burke said. Cupich “was a shining light in all of this, because he actually spent a lot of time talking to us and helping us with the whole investigation.” [...]

Cupich, however, is not primarily oriented toward opposing the secular pulls of modern life. As his political work across Chicago shows, he’s more interested in compromise in the hopes of serving the whole community, not just Catholics. “If you think we have what the culture needs, and that we can make our case, then you engage and persuade,” said Carr. “Francis is an engage-and-persuade leader. Cupich is an engage-and-persuade leader.” This attitude has seemed to help Cupich maneuver effectively within the city—he even impressed Preckwinkle, the Cook County Board president, who’s a Unitarian. “I think he has a much more open and inclusive attitude for the region in which he finds himself than his predecessor,” she said. Cupich is “surely more welcoming of people who are not Catholic, or people within the Church who may not have been as warmly received as in the past.”

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Jacobin Magazine: The Dangers of Anti-Trumpism

Trump and Berlusconi are both men who came to power from business rather than politics, and both have presented their inexperience with the political establishment as a mark of purity. They have both insisted on their entrepreneurial success as the most evident proof of their qualification to rule the country. Like Plato’s tyrant, they both exhibit an ethos based on a dream of continuous and unlimited jouissance and an aggressive and hubristic eros (though Berlusconi prefers to think of himself as an irresistible seducer rather than a rapist).

They both indulge in gross misogynistic and racist jokes and have reshaped public language by legitimizing insult and political incorrectness as acceptable forms of political communication and by embodying an exhilarating return of the repressed. They both revel in kitschy aesthetics and don the orange hue of artificial tanning. And they both allied with the far right in order to advance a political project of authoritarian neoliberalism and unbridled capitalism. [...]

Moreover, Berlusconi did not agitate for isolationism and protectionism, did not challenge international market agreements, and did not question Italy’s participation in the creation of the European Union and the eurozone — at least not until 2011. Finally, Italy does not play any hegemonic geopolitical role comparable to that of the United States. [...]

What seems to have delivered the victory to Trump is the combination of two main factors. One is, of course, a profoundly undemocratic electoral system, which the Democratic Party has never really challenged. A second factor resides in Trump’s ability to serve as a catalyst for entirely heterogeneous voting motivations. A significant part of his white electorate has certainly been galvanized by his appalling racism, homophobia, and misogyny and has identified Trump as the agent of revenge for the election of Obama and the nomination of a female candidate.

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The Huffington Post: Pope Should Declare A Ceasefire In Abortion War

A lot of Catholic reformers were relieved when Pope Francis seemed to be calling for a shift in focus away from speaking against abortion and contraception and towards promoting social justice and environmental stewardship. So it is disappointing when he seems driven to play to his base and single out abortion as a “very grave sin.” (In fairness, the Pope also made clear that abortion is a sin that can be forgiven like any other sin, through confession.)

But even if you agree with him, there are a lot of sins the Catholic Church has never asked governments to outlaw. There are no laws banning infidelity or premarital sex or greed or pride, which some theologians believe is the most serious sin of all. Indeed, the institutional church in the U.S. has worked hard to block lawmakers from strengthening statutes that would make it easier to prosecute priests who turn out to be sexual predators. [...]

Consider this: An estimated three-quarters of all women in the U.S. who underwent abortions in 2014 were either living in poverty or low-income, with household incomes for a family of one roughly between $11,000 and $22,000 annually. Nearly a quarter of women who had this procedure identified themselves as Catholic.

My beef with Catholic bishops is that they have rejected efforts to help avoid the need for abortions. In doing so, they have sent the message that the abortion war really is a war on women. I fear that the bishops believe pregnancy is the appropriate punishment for a woman who is sexually active.

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Nautilus Magazine: Why Presidential Elections Aren’t Really About the Candidates

But to do so is at least a little bit naïve, says Andrew Gelman, a statistician and political scientist at Columbia University. “The polls were off by two percentage points,” Gelman says. Trump was expected to win roughly 48 percent of the two-party vote and ended up with nearly 50 percent. “It just happened to be that this election, two percentage points, plus the distribution of where those points occurred”—errors were greater in states with large populations of white people without college degrees, for example—“were enough to sway the outcome. It was a consequential two percent, but to say the models were far off isn’t quite right.” [...]

Lichtman developed a list of 13 true/false questions, or “keys,” about the incumbent party’s performance in the White House, based on factors such as the administration’s major policy changes, foreign policy successes and failures, the short- and long-term economy, midterm elections, and third parties. Their answers determine the likelihood of the incumbent party staying in office. Answers of “true” to any of the questions favor the incumbent party’s reelection; if the answers to six or more of the questions are “false,” the incumbent party loses. Using this analysis, it became clear to Lichtman that the Democrats were very vulnerable this election cycle, despite what all the polling said. [...]

That’s not to say that polling data can’t be useful, he says. It can help determine whether a third-party candidate is likely to become significant in a given election cycle, or be used to assess public opinion on presidential initiatives (Lichtman cites the Iran nuclear deal by way of example). But polls have no place in helping to predict outcomes in national elections, and should not be used to do so in the media’s elections coverage, he says. “Next election, send all the pollsters off to a beautiful island. They can have a nice, long vacation.” 

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