Mark Blyth – Why People Vote for Those Who Work Against Their Best Interests

Mark Blyth’s best seller Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea https://amzn.to/2Lcw556 Mark Blyth is a British political scientist from Scotland and a professor of international political economy at Brown University.
.. Apple sits on the largest pile
of cash of any corporate in the world
they think it’s about a quarter of a
billion at the quarter of a trillion
dollars rather than using that they
borrowed money because it was so cheap
issued their own bonds which earns them
a premium on top of that took the cash
from that and then bought their own
shares but to boost the value of the
stock so they could reward themselves
even more money and we booked that as
investment so they don’t pay any taxes
does anyone else want to call that book
37:43
here’s a story when they did the Podesta
email Hawks when they got the Democrats
emails somebody took the data from
WikiLeaks and decided it was called geo
locate the data in other words what were
the place names that the leading
Democrats who are the last part of her
mentor represent all of us remember
right not the elite Republicans what
were the police names that he talked
about and their private communications
and their selection what was the number
one most frequently named place in their
communications can you guess have a
guess Martha Martha’s Vineyard yeah
number two Eastern Southampton then New
York then San Francisco then I think it
was Ellie in DC and the rest of the
country two standard deviations out so
what’s the imaginary of a party this
seeks to represent all if that’s all the
places did they talk about because
that’s where the money is and it’s not
just to castigate the Democrats the
British Labour Party was like this under
blare of the German SPD under shorter
it’s done that’s the left is
systematically failed the people that it
supposedly represents so why should we
be in the least surprised that they
defect and then go to any one at all
that actually says here I know that
everyone’s ignored you for 25 years I at
least hear the fact that you’re crying
and I understand why people’s everyday
experience is very different from a
national average walking out and telling
people that the price of iPods has
fallen which means that really they’ve
got more money than they think at a time
when they can’t afford to send their
kids to college or their kids would be
insane to take on that much debt because
it’s like having a house with no ASSA
it’s just parts on izing and the example
of immigration occupied to that one it’s
very different depending on where you
live
immigration to me is another person from
another interesting country who has a
phd but that’s what it means where I
live right but that’s because I’m in the
top 20% if you’re living in public
housing in France right and those
resources are been finite and those
resources are being cut and you’re the
ones are confronted with incredibly
different cultures coming and not
integrating with you taking the
resources from you at least as you
perceive it and that’s what’s been
narrated by the National Front don’t
expect them not to make end roads
because it gels with everybody’s common
sense regardless of whether we can say
well on average and migrants benefit the
economy no one lives in an average now
the problem here now close with us is
.. prompted the following response I think

the election of Trump has been good for
climate change because it stops the rest
of the world waiting around for America
to solve the problem
so if the gentleman’s and the Chinese
now get together and do technolog
greentech bring it to scale China for
example has installed more solar in the
past few years in the United States has
right if they end up doing that we’re
the suckers because we should have been
leading the investment we’ll be buying
it from them
but in a way if that forces them to do
that and that’s good in a global sense
go for it so does that mean Trump was a
good leader in that regard well that’s a
different question right but it can have
a positive effect so the mark like let’s
not summit all up to you know the one
leader the genius the charisma whatever
the doesn’t that’s not good we are
thinking about it they can’t make a
difference but the key thing is when
they’ve actually got the trust of
everybody who’s who wants them to lead
that’s when societies work better but
when you have leaders who are divisive
who pet people against each other I
never walk so for anybody that’s the
type of populism you want to avoid all

This Is a Warning About the 2 Sides of White Nationalism

The white supremacist terrorists and the white supremacist policymakers share the same mission.

Be warned: There is nothing soothing and uplifting in this column. I will not somberly mourn and point to our better angel and American resilience. This is not that kind of column.

I have a warning to deliver, a truth to tell, and it is as unsettling as it is obvious.

First, let’s start with the carnage that has unfolded over the last few days.

On July 28, a 19-year-old white man named Santino William Legan opened fire at a garlic festival in Gilroy, Calif., killing three people and injuring 13 others before taking his own life.

As the Daily Beast reported, just before the shooting Legan “posted a picture with a caption that told followers to read a 19th-century, proto-fascist book.” As the site explained:

“The book, which is repeatedly recommended alongside works by Hitler and other fascists on forums like 8chan, is full of anti-Semitic, sexist and white supremacist ideology. The book glorifies ‘Aryan’ men, condemns intermarriage between races, and defends violence based on bogus eugenicist tropes.”

As The New York Times reported, “Nineteen minutes before the first 911 call” about the shooting at the Walmart, “a hate-filled, anti-immigrant manifesto appeared online.” CNN reports that authorities are investigating the racist screed which “police believe” was posted by Crusius.

The manifesto is heavily anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic. It’s riddled with the fear of white “displacement” and fear that changing demographics will favor Democrats and turn America into “a one party-state.”

And then on Sunday, a 24-year-old man named Connor Betts opened fire in Dayton, Ohio, killing nine people and injuring at least 27 others. Most of those killed were black.

Are these shootings a gun control issue? Of course. We have too many guns, and too many high-capacity guns. We sell guns first designed for soldiers to civilians. We don’t do enough to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them and we do next to nothing to track guns once they are sold.

But, I think laying all the blame at their feet is too convenient and simplistic.

I think a better way to look at it is to understand that white nationalist terrorists — young and rash — and white nationalist policymakers — older and more methodical — live on parallel planes, both aiming in the same direction, both with the same goal: To maintain and ensure white dominance and white supremacy.

The policymakers believe they can accomplish with legislation in the legal system what the terrorists are trying to underscore with lead. In the minds of the policymakers, border walls, anti-immigrant laws, voter suppression and packing the courts are more prudent and permanent than bodies in the streets. But, try telling that to a young white terrorist who distrusts everyone in Washington.

As the writer of the El Paso manifesto points out, “The Republican Party is also terrible.” The writer goes on to explain:

“Many factions within the Republican Party are pro-corporation. Pro-corporation = pro-immigration. But some factions within the Republican Party don’t prioritize corporations over our future. So the Democrats are nearly unanimous with their support of immigration while the Republicans are divided over it. At least with Republicans, the process of mass immigration and citizenship can be greatly reduced.”

This is a reason these groups are often at odds. The white nationalist policymakers are annoyed and even incensed by the terrorists because they believe they besmirch the mission.

These terrorists want to do quickly what the policymakers insist must be done slowly, so the terrorists stew in their anger.

They are angry at immigrants because their numbers are ascendant — through both immigration and higher birthrates — and, those immigrants threaten an even more accelerated displacement of white people from a numerical majority.

They are angry at black people for even existing.

It is not lost on me that this summer is the 100th anniversary of the “Red Summer,” when violent anti-black white supremacists rioted in cities across the country, killing many, just as the Great Migration — the mass migration of millions of black people mostly from the rural South to the urban North — was getting underway. Violence is the way the white terrorists respond to demographic shifts and demographic threat.

It’s not simply a matter of whether Trump’s rhetoric, or that of any other politician, led these shooters to do what they did. Maybe. It is also about recognizing that all of these people are on the same team and share the same mission and eat from the same philosophical trough. It’s just that their methods differ. The white supremacist terrorists and the white supremacist policymakers are bound at the hip.

Donald Trump Is Not a Sinister Genius

His race-baiting is impulsive and unpopular, not a brilliant strategy to win white votes.

Some columns spring from inspiration, some from diligent research. And some you’re prodded into writing because of what the other columnists are arguing about.

This is the third kind. With the Democratic debates in the spotlight, there has been a lot written on this op-ed page about the Democratic Party’s ideological evolution, its leftward march on many issues, and how this might help Donald Trump win re-election. Which in turn has prompted a recurring argument from certain of my liberal colleagues that anyone writing about the supposedly extremist Democrats should be writing about Trump’s extremism and unpopularity instead.

So this will be, as requested, a column about Trump’s extremism and unpopularity. But it’s not going to be a mirror image of the columns about the Democrats’ move leftward, because I don’t think policy substance matters as much to Trump’s prospects as it might to the party trying to unseat him.

It matters less because Trump in 2020 won’t be a change candidate. Instead, like every incumbent, he’ll be a candidate of the policy status quo — only much more so in his case, because his legislative agenda dissolved earlier than most presidents and the prospects for continued gridlock are obvious.

That means Trump probably won’t be campaigning on what he promised across 2016 — the kind of infrastructure-building, “worker’s party” conservatism whose ambitions vanished with Steve Bannon. But he also won’t be campaigning on the Paul Ryan agenda that the Republican Congress pushed in his first year, or reviving unpopular Ryan-era ideas like entitlement reform on the 2020 trail.

Instead Trump’s policy argument in 2020 will be, basically, let’s keep doing what we’re doing. That status quo includes a

  • deregulatory agenda,
  • a tariff push and a
  • harsh border policy that are all unpopular.

But it also includes:

  • free-spending budgets,
  • easy money and a more
  • anti-interventionist (for now) foreign policy than past Republicans, all of which are relatively popular.

And in the context of a strong economic expansion, a Trump re-election effort that rested on this record while warning against Democratic radicalism could be plausibly favored.

Except that this isn’t the kind of campaign that Trump himself wants to run. He wants the

  • racialized Twitter feuds, the
  • battles over Baltimore and Ilhan Omar, the
  • media freak-outs and the
  • “don’t call us racist!” defensiveness of his rallygoing fans.

He feeds on it, he loves it, and he’s as obviously bored by the prospect of a safe, status-quo campaign as he is obviously uninterested in the conservative intellectuals trying to transform Trumpism into something intellectually robust.

And here I agree with the left that there’s a media tendency to give Trump’s race-baiting impulses more credit as a strategy than they actually deserve. After each Twitter outburst his advisers try to retrofit a strategic vision, to claim there’s a master plan unfolding in which 2020 will become a referendum on Omar’s anti-Semitic tropes or the Baltimore crime rate. And the press gives them credence out of an imprinted-by-2016 fear that the president has a sinister sort of genius about what will help him win.

But this is paranoia, and the retrofitting is Trumpworld wishful thinking. There was, yes, a sinister genius at work when Trump used birtherism to build a primary-season constituency in 2016. But since then, his race-baiting has clearly contributed to his chronic unpopularity, and his re-election chances would almost certainly be far better if he talked like George W. Bush on race instead.

Second, in 2016 Trump won many millions of voters who disapproved of him. But in recent 2020 polling, Trump is performing below his job approval rating in many head-to-head matchups, which suggests that voters who would be responsive to the “policy status quo” argument keep getting turned off by the president’s rhetoric. The supposedly-brilliant strategy of racial polarization, then, is probably just a self-inflicted wound.

None of this means that Trump cannot be re-elected. But it means that if he wins again, it will likely be in spite of his own rhetoric, not as the dark fruit of a white-identitarian campaign.

In this sense both NeverTrump-conservative and liberal columnists can be right about the basic situation. The liberals are right that Trump is defiantly outside the mainstream — that every day, in a particular way, he proves himself extreme.

But this is a fixed reality for 2020, and the NeverTrump side is right about the variable: The campaign may turn on how successfully the Democrats claim or build an anti-Trump center, as opposed to appearing to offer an unpalatable extremism of their own.