Donald J. Trump’s foreign policy proposals, like forcing Mexico to pay for a border wall or withdrawing from NATO, have drawn unprecedented condemnations as incoherent, contradictory and unrealistic.
Yet for all the boos they elicit from experts, they draw frequent cheers at his rallies.
Scholars of American politics say this is because Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is using international issues as a medium to connect with voters’ gut-level fears and desires
.. Studies show that most voters rank foreign issues low on their list of concerns, but they do listen and use those issues as a window through which they judge candidates’ values and ideology.
.. Mr. Trump has exploited this dynamic, offering ideas that experts consider unworkable, but that tap into some voters’ desire for a strong-handed leader.
.. “People tend to choose the candidate they like first,” and then take on that candidate’s views as their own, she added. “This is the way people make sense of a complicated world.”
.. Because foreign policy requires difficult trade-offs, conventional candidates are limited in how emotionally appealing they can make their plans while keeping them workable. They also need to appease the hard-nosed policy experts or party officials those candidates rely on to get elected — and, eventually, to govern. But Mr. Trump was under no such constraints.
The result: Mr. Trump’s foreign policy is not a foreign policy at all, but rather a vessel for reaching voters on a purely ideological level.
.. Mr. Trump’s message: “NATO requires cooperation. Cooperation is something you do if you’re weak. If you’re strong, people go along with you.”
.. Mr. Trump’s worldview demands and offers “a sort of Fortress America, or perhaps a gigantic gated community, separated from transnational dangers of all kinds by a series of walls.”
.. Mr. Trump alarmed those outside his rapidly growing base with proposals to kill the families of terrorists and with praise for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, as well as for China’s 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square.
But for supporters, these and other statements suggested Mr. Trump could be trusted to impose order on the chaos they see in a rapidly changing world.
.. when Mr. Trump promises to force Mexico to pay for a giant border wall or warns that Iranian boats will be “shot out of the water” if their sailors “make gestures” at American sailors, he is communicating that he understands that his supporters feel fearful and humiliated, and that he will punish those responsible.
.. Mr. Trump has tapped into what scholars call conservation values.
People who hold those values prioritize security, conformity and tradition. They also tend to fear physical threats and people they see as outsiders, whether that means foreigners or those of different races or religions. And they often express those values as a particular set of “hawkish” foreign policy views.
.. That hawkishness is very different from that of neoconservatives like President George W. Bush or interventionist Democrats like Mrs. Clinton. It is characterized by a desire to
- shut out the world,
- ruthlessly promote American interests,
- reject cooperation and
- meet threats with overwhelming force.
.. Voters who hold conservation values are drawn to such policies not out of a sudden interest in global affairs, but as a way to express their fear of change and desire for order at home, the researchers found. They desire a strong leader who will protect “us” against an ever-more-menacing “them.”
.. Mr. Trump, by redirecting voters’ anxiety about demographic, cultural and economic changes toward foreign policy, gives his supporters a clearer set of villains
.. Supporters do not primarily hear a policy agenda, but a promise: that Mr. Trump understands their fears and will protect them.
Why a Silicon Valley Founder Is Funding a Factory for Trump Memes
This is also why libertarianism mates well with computationalism (the idea that the world is best understood and operated through computers). Both adopt a burn-it-all-down attitude toward the institutions that have held them back. What is “disruption” but the act of stripping everything from society and reinventing it inside the computer?
.. It’s more surprising that everyone in the Valley doesn’t support Trump than that Thiel and Luckey do.
.. Successfully exerting force of any kind on the universe is the ultimate goal of nerddom. Silicon Valley just institutionalized the idea. That common mantra—“change the world”—means nothing more than “witness myself the force I can exert upon it.”
.. Those who see VR as a temporary, occasional tool for entertainment miss the obvious truth of its ambition. VR is a symbol of the misfit’s ultimate victory over a world that would hold him back from other victories. A tool with which to fashion virtuous, mediated lives outside the boundaries of cruel, brutish normalcy. The nerds never wanted to become popular. They want to end populism entirely.
The Trouble for Hillary
The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that I mentioned also found that 56 percent of respondents preferred a candidate who would bring sweeping changes to the way the government functioned, no matter how unpredictable those changes might be, while only 41 percent tilted toward someone with a steady and possibly incremental approach. That spread favors Trump over Clinton.
.. It also explains why Bill Clinton, in his Tuesday-night testimonial for his wife, kept praising her as a “change maker” and used the words “change” or “changes” more than a dozen times.
.. She’s right that we’re “stronger together.” But she can’t forget how weak many Americans feel right now.
Thanks, Obama
The Clintons, infuriated by the raft of Democrats who deserted them during the 2008 campaign, sneered at Obama’s hope and change message. Hillary protested, “We don’t need to be raising the false hopes of our country.” Bill groused, “This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.”
.. But in this election, Bernie Sanders’s idealistic young people were cast as unrealistic dreamers who wanted free stuff or, according to Gloria Steinem, dates.
.. The same Obama who sparked a revolution has now made it his mission to preserve the establishment for Hillary. He told Rutgers’s school paper in May that Sanders supporters needed to stop searching for silver bullets and recognize “we have to make incremental changes where we can, and every once in a while you’ll get a breakthrough and make the kind of big changes that are necessary.”
.. Yes we can — incrementally!
.. Showing his icy pragmatism, the president passed over his loyal vice president because he thought Joe Biden would not be as strong a candidate, given his tendency for gab and gaffes. (That was before Donald Trump made Biden seem exquisitely bridled.) When Biden didn’t take the hint, Obama sent his former strategist David Plouffe to break the bad news.
.. Emanuel, who was hosting a party at the convention that night, was rightfully upset. It was his job to warn the president of the political consequences, and after Obama decided, it was Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi who had to arm-twist the bill through with no Republican votes.