What unites Trump voters?

[stpioc]

Yes, keep arguing we're all racists and deplorables while all we're doing is protecting our way of life. We don't want people like you tell us how to live, or share our communities with people who are very alien. This isn't racist.

No, not necessarily racist and I have some sympathy with the desire to preserve a way of life. What has to be pointed out is that conservatism and capitalism are really strange bedfellows. 

Capitalism is a very dynamic economic system, the creative destruction which it unleashes generates constant change which makes it extraordinarily hard to 'preserve a way of life'...

[Martin K]

No, not necessarily racist and I have some sympathy with the desire to preserve a way of life. What has to be pointed out is that conservatism and capitalism are really strange bedfellows. 

Capitalism is a very dynamic economic system, the creative destruction which it unleashes generates constant change which makes it extraordinarily hard to 'preserve a way of life'...

Yea, actually you have a point there, thanks for pointing that out. When you think of it, it's odd. If you are a free-marketeer, you subscribe to never-ending change, uprooted communities, and global capitalism (why should it stop at the border?).

What conservatives could argue is that it's conservative core values that should remain the same. But the Trump revolt doesn't strike me as being particularly informed by a desire for any moral renaissance, to be honest. If anything one could actually state almost the opposite. Anything seems to go. Facts don't matter..

[Admin]

According to Greg Valliere, the chief global strategist and longtime political analyst at Horizon Investments, it isn't particularly hard to glean the largest lesson from the election: don't short Trump. "There were many lessons from this election that won’t soon be forgotten," Valliere wrote in an analysis. "Perhaps the biggest: Do not bet against Donald Trump. His supporters are fanatically loyal, and he now has virtually unchecked power."

Lessons from Trump's election: Don't bet against him - Business Insider

He received the strongest support from white women without college degrees, 62 percent of whom voted for him. Although his supporters reported median household incomes of $70,000, the Trump campaign tapped into fears and frustrations among white working-class women about diminished possibilities for their husbands and sons to provide for their families. Many supporters’ families work in blue-collar occupations such as construction, transportation, and infrastructure; live in low mobility areas; and have little personal contact with immigrants. “Us vs. them” rhetoric framed diversity as an impediment to American greatness, and—consistent with historical racial and socioeconomic fractures—global trade and immigration, the increasing presence of white women and people of color in government, and “dangerous inner cities” emerged as threats.

Donald Trump: Who Are the Women Who Voted for Trump

[stpioc]

Krugman nails it, not for the first time..

Fast Food Damnation

Matthew Yglesias has an interesting post about the fast-food tycoon who has been nominated as Labor Secretary. Even aside from the fact that “when did you stop beating your wife?” would, in fact, be a valid question in this guy’s confirmation hearings, you might think that this nomination would be seen as a total betrayal of the working-class voters who went overwhelmingly Trump a month ago. He’s anti-worker, anti-higher wages, pro-immigration. Won’t there be a huge backlash?

What Yglesias suggests, however, is that his connection with fast food is itself a protection — because the white working class likes fast food, liberals don’t, and the former feels that this shows the latter’s contempt for regular people.

I suspect that there’s something to this, and that it’s part of a broader story. And I don’t know what to do with it.
What I see a lot, both in general political discourse and in my own inbox, is a tremendous sense of resentment against people like Hillary Clinton or, well, me, that isn’t about policy. It boils down, instead, to something along the lines of “You people think you’re better than us.” And it has a lot to do with the way people live.

If populism were simply about income inequality, someone like Trump should be deeply resented by the working class. He has gold toilets! But he gets a pass, partly — I think — because his tastes seem in line with those of non-college-educated whites. That is, he lives the way they imagine they would if they had a lot of money.

Compare that with affluent liberals — say, my neighbors on the Upper West Side. They aren’t nearly as rich as the plutocrats that will stuff the Trump cabinet. What’s more, they vote for things that will raise their taxes and cost of living, while improving the lives of the very people who disdain them. Objectively, they’re on white workers’ side.

But they don’t eat much fast food, because they believe it’s unhealthy and they’re watching their weight. They don’t watch much reality TV, and do listen to a lot of books on tape — or even read books the old-fashioned way. if they’re rich enough to have a second home, it’s a shabby-chic country place, not Mar-a-Lago.

So there is a sense in which there’s a bigger cultural gulf between affluent liberals and the white working class than there is between Trumpkins and the WWC. Do the liberals sneer at the Joe Sixpacks? Actually, I’ve never heard it — the people I hang out with do understand that living the way they do takes a lot more money and time than hard-pressed Americans have, and aren’t especially judgmental about lifestyles. But it’s easy to see how the sense that liberals look down on regular folks might arise, and be fanned by right-wing media.

The question is, what do you do? Again, objectively those liberals are very much on workers’ side, while the characters who play on this perceived disdain are set to betray the white working class on a massive scale. Is there no way to get this across other than eating lots of burgers with fries?

[Admin]

Hmm, not so good, this:

Following Donald Trump’s election, the media tried to identify several indicators for why he won. Was it the opioid painkiller and heroin epidemic? Poor health outcomes? The economy?

A new paper by political scientists Brian Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta puts the blame back on the same factors people pointed to before the election: racism and sexism. And the research has a very telling chart to prove it, showing that voters’ measures of sexism and racism correlated much more closely with support for Trump than economic dissatisfaction after controlling for factors like partisanship and political ideology:

Brian Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta
As the paper acknowledges, clearly economic dissatisfaction was one factor — and in an election in which Trump essentially won by just 80,000 votes in three states, maybe that, along with issues like the opioid epidemic and poor health outcomes, was enough to put Trump over the top. But the analysis also shows that a bulk of support for Trump — perhaps what made him a contender to begin with — came from beliefs rooted in racism and sexism.

Study: racism and sexism predict support for Trump much more than economic dissatisfaction - Vox

[Admin]

Charla McComic, a 52-year-old former first grade teacher, said that a steep drop in her recently unemployed son’s health-insurance premium was a “blessing from God,” and she credited Trump. In fact, an Obamacare subsidy was to thank for it. “So far, everything’s been positive, from what I can tell,” she said, waiting for Trump’s rally here to begin Wednesday night. “I just hope that more and more people and children get covered under this new health-care plan.” McComic says she has never trusted a president the way she trusts Trump.  In reality, tens of millions of Americans will lose insurance under the GOP’s proposed alternative.

Why Trump’s “Betrayal” of His Voters Won’t Stick | New Republic

[Admin]

How populism works elsewhere, like in India

The widespread disorder predicted last November, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi abruptly withdrew 86 percent of the cash in circulation, has come to pass. This poorly conceived and ineptly executed demonetization damaged above all the toilers in India’s large informal economy. Yet voters in Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s poorest states, rewarded Modi last week with an overwhelming victory in elections to the local legislature, making him the country’s most powerful politicians in decades. For those who predicted that Modi had committed political suicide with demonetization, the results may look like another example of voters acting against their rational self-interest. Certainly, any impartial analysis of Modi’s performance in office since 2014 would have to conclude that he hasn’t delivered on most of his promises, especially the most electorally profitable of them -- the creation of jobs for the one million Indians entering the workforce each month. Formal job growth under Modi is the weakest in seven years.

But those who seek to correlate voter choices with political and economic outcomes don’t quite grasp the emotional and psychological allure of a figure like Modi, a leader with a repertoire of masks and costumes. On the day of his election victory in 2014, I described Modi as “India’s canniest artist,” who knew that “resonant sentiments, images and symbols rather than rational argument or accurate history galvanize individuals.” In other words, Modi is someone who creates his own reality with powerful rhetoric and imagery, and then, using his mastery of digital communications, seduces many people into believing it.

Understanding Modi's Magical Appeal - Bloomberg View

[Admin]

But non-churchgoing conservatives didn’t flock to Trump only because he articulated their despair. He also articulated their resentments. For decades, liberals have called the Christian right intolerant. When conservatives disengage from organized religion, however, they don’t become more tolerant. They become intolerant in different ways. Research shows that evangelicals who don’t regularly attend church are less hostile to gay people than those who do. But they’re more hostile to African Americans, Latinos, and Muslims. In 2008, the University of Iowa’s Benjamin Knoll noted that among Catholics, mainline Protestants, and born-again Protestants, the less you attended church, the more anti-immigration you were.

America’s Empty-Church Problem - The Atlantic

[Admin]

Back in August 2015, when Donald Trump’s presidential ambitions were widely considered a joke, Russell Moore was worried. A prominent leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, Moore knew that some of the faithful were falling for Trump, a philandering, biblically illiterate candidate from New York City whose lifestyle and views embodied everything the religious right professed to abhor. The month before, a Washington Post poll had found that Trump was already being backed by more white evangelicals than any other Republican candidate.

As Trump continued gaining ground in the polls, Moore began to realize that the campaign represented nothing short of a battle for the soul of the Christian right. By backing Trump, white evangelicals were playing into the hands of a new, alt-right version of Christianity—a sprawling coalition of white nationalists, old-school Confederates, neo-Nazis, Islamophobes, and social-media propagandists who viewed the religious right, first and foremost, as a vehicle for white supremacy.

The election, Moore warned in a New York Times op-ed last May, “has cast light on the darkness of pent-up nativism and bigotry all over the country.” Those who were criticizing Trump, he added, “have faced threats and intimidation from the ‘alt-right’ of white supremacists and nativists who hide behind avatars on social media.”

Trump, true to form, wasted no time in striking back against Moore. “Truly a terrible representative of Evangelicals and all of the good they stand for,” he tweeted a few days later. “A nasty guy with no heart!”

In the end, conservative Christians backed Trump in record numbers. He won 81 per- cent of the white evangelical vote—a higher share than George W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney. As a result, the religious right—which for decades has grounded its political appeal in moral “values” such as “life” and “family” and “religious freedom”—has effectively become a subsidiary of the alt-right, yoked to Trump’s white nationalist agenda. Evangelicals have traded Ronald Reagan’s gospel-inspired depiction of America as a “shining city on a hill” for Trump’s dark vision of “American carnage.”

“The overwhelming support for Trump heralds the religious right coming full circle to embrace its roots in racism,” says Randall Balmer, a historian of American religion at Dartmouth College. “The breakthrough of the 2016 election lies in the fact that the religious right, in its support for a thrice-married, self-confessed sexual predator, finally dispensed with the fiction that it was concerned about abortion or ‘family values.’ ”

How Donald Trump Hijacked the Religious Right | New Republic

[Admin]

Political analysts will long debate over where Brexit, Trump and Le Pen came from. Many say income gaps. I’d say … not quite. I’d say income anxiety and the stress over what it now takes to secure and hold a good job. I believe the accelerations set loose by Silicon Valley in technology and digital globalization have created a world where every decent job demands more skill and, now, lifelong learning. More people can’t keep up, and clearly some have reached for leaders who promise to stop the wind.

Owning Your Own Future - The New York Times