Populism is not an ideology but a strategy to get to power and to govern. Two of Latin America’s most influential populists, Juan Perón of Argentina and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, saw politics as a Manichaean confrontation between two antagonistic camps, just as Mr. Trump does. In their view, they did not face political rivals, but enemies who needed to be destroyed.
Populist leaders tend to present themselves as extraordinary characters whose mission is to liberate the people. To get elected they politicize feelings of fear or resentment. Once in government, they attack the liberal constitutional framework of democracy that they view as constraining the will of the people.
.. The enemies of Chávez and Perón were corrupt politicians, foreign-oriented economic elites, imperialism and the privately owned news media. In Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, Mexicans were cast as the anti-American other, and Muslims depicted as potential terrorists whose values are contrary to American Christianity. He painted African-Americans as delinquents or as victims living in conditions of alienation and despair. Mr. Trump’s enemies were also the news media, companies and countries that profit from globalization, and liberal elites that defend political correctness.
.. Populists make their own rules for the political game, and part of their strategy is to manipulate the news media. Chávez and Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s populist president, blurred the lines between entertainment and news, using their own weekly TV shows to announce major policies, attack the opposition, sing popular songs, and, naturally, fire people. They were always on Twitter confronting enemies, and television programs showcased their outrageous words and actions to increase ratings. Mr. Trump might follow these examples and transform debates on issues of national interest into reality TV shows.
Since Latin America’s populists feel threatened by those who question their claim to be the embodiment of their people’s aspirations, they go after the press.
.. Latin American populists also attack civil society. Similarly, Mr. Trump has used harsh language against civil rights groups like Black Lives Matter.
.. Latin American populists do not respect constitutional arrangements like the separation of powers. They attempt to control the judiciary, to take over all watchdog institutions, and to create parties based on the unconditional loyalty to a leader.
.. Chávez and Mr. Correa did not eradicate democracy with a coup d’état. Rather, they slowly strangled democracy by attacking civil liberties, regulating the public sphere and using the legal system to silence critics.
Once Upon a Time in America
Russian journalists belonging to the nationalist camp are somewhat confused. Although they advertised Trump for several months, his victory was not only unexpected, but also struck a blow at their worldview, since according to it Trump just could not win. The more correct his ideology was from the point of view of a Russian conservative, the fewer chances he had to achieve success in the corrupt liberal America.
.. The victory of an outsider, who opposed the establishment and the financial capital, proves that democracy exists in the US, even if it is limited by the size of the candidate’s bank account. But acceptance of this fact shatters the whole propagandist concept. Our conservatives did not criticize the power of money, they rather criticized the power of the liberal media establishment propped up by the might of the deep state, which decided not to allow a Trump presidency. Now they have to admit that either the deep state does not exist, or it is not as potent as they were trying to prove…
.. Trump’s victory is not a result of an unpleasant coincidence; it is a result of a systemic social-economic crisis due to the fact that the current capitalist model of development is completely exhausted. It is not that the system will collapse because of the Trump’s success, but rather his success is caused by the collapse of the system.
.. he won precisely because their time has gone, their methods and strategies stopped working. The public opinion was just a reflection, albeit a delayed one, of the changes in the economics and the real world.
.. It still may happen that it will be Russia controlled by oil tycoons that will stand as a last bastion of economic liberalism. But even here the positions of the ruling class will be weakening under the pressure from the new realities of the world markets.
.. if he will be even partially successful in fulfilling his promises and plans, it will not cancel the urgency of a large scale social modernization, including creation of universal and affordable healthcare and education systems, extension ofthe trade union rights, and expansion of the public sector. On the contrary, the economic growth will make these demands more convincing and popular, and will strengthen social movements advocating for the reforms.
Trade unions, workers’ movements and wage-earners feel much more confident in the conditions of the economic growth. The conflicts will not be fading away, they will grow.
.. Both Bernie Sanders’ campaign, and voting for Trump, demonstrated, the last one to a higher degree, that the lower classes of the society are willing to consolidate, independently from the appeals of the self-proclaimed “defenders of the minorities”.
An African-American laborer realizes that he has much more in common with a “white male” laborer than with a privileged liberal smugly reasoning about the need for political correctness. A single mother fighting for survival understands how alien are the interests and the views of a feminist who distributes multimillion gender related grants among her friends and clients.
.. The 2016 elections signified the collapse of the politics of political correctness, and created the preconditions of its substitution by the politics of solidarity.
How the System Is ‘Rigged’
In what sense is the system rigged?
Consider Big Media—the elite columnists and commentators, the dominant national press, and the national and cable networks, save FOX. Not in this writer’s lifetime has there been such blanket hatred and hostility of a presidential candidate of a major party.
.. There are more than 11 million illegal immigrants here, with millions more coming. Yet the government consistently refuses to enforce the immigration laws of the United States.
Why should those Americans whose ancestors created, fought, bled and died to preserve America not believe they and their children are being dispossessed of a country that was their patrimony—and without their consent?
.. In the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a Congressional majority voted to end discrimination against black folks.
When did we vote to institute pervasive discrimination against white folks, especially white males, with affirmative action, quotas and racial set-asides? Even in blue states like California, affirmative action is routinely rejected in statewide ballots.
.. We now know, thanks to leaked emails, that not only the superdelegates and the Obama White House but a collaborationist press and the DNC were colluding to deny Sanders any chance at the nomination.
The fix was in. Ask Sanders if he thinks the system is rigged.
.. If there is an issue upon which Americans agree, it is that they want secure borders and an end to trade policies that have shipped abroad the jobs, and arrested the wages, of working Americans.
Yet in a private speech that netted her $225,000 from Brazilian bankers, Hillary Clinton confided that she dreams of a “common market, with open trade and open borders” from Nome, Alaska, to Patagonia.
.. That would mean the end of the USA as a unique, sovereign and independent nation. But the American press, whose survival depends upon the big ad dollars of transnational corporations, is more interested in old tapes of the Donald on The Howard Stern Show.
.. And if they do, Middle America—those who cling to their bibles, bigotries and guns in Barack Obama’s depiction, those “deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic,” who are “not America” and are “irredeemable” in Hillary Clinton’s depiction—will have to accept the new regime.
This is the best book to help you understand the wild 2016 campaign
Yet there is strong political science evidence that football wins boost the president’s approval rating in the winning team’s media market while depressing it in the losing team’s market. The effect is short-lived, so the Bengals’ one-point win back in September won’t deliver Ohio to Clinton on Election Day, but it is true that if the Steelers and Eagles both win their November 6 games, that could meaningfully improve Clinton’s chances in a key swing state.
.. Back during the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush and Al Gore both blanketed swing states with ads touting the respective candidates’ positions on Social Security. Bush, riding the late ’90s wave of enthusiasm for stock market speculation, proposed allowing workers to invest a share of their payroll taxes in private accounts. Gore, counting on Social Security’s traditional popularity, characterized this as a risky scheme that would call Americans’ retirement security into question.
.. A folk theory account of Bush, Gore, and Social Security would say that voters who found Bush’s Social Security message persuasive gravitated toward him but those who liked Gore’s plan gravitated toward him. This is a view in which people’s policy beliefs come first and their political allegiances follow naturally.But it turns out that this isn’t really what happened. Gabriel Lenz did a more sophisticated study of voter dynamics and found that it’s actually the opposite. Rather than voters changing their minds about the candidates in response to information about their Social Security plans, voters changed their minds about Social Security.
A Bush voter who started the campaign leery of privatizing Social Security, in other words, was much more likely to respond to the dueling ad campaigns by deciding he liked privatization than to respond by deciding that he liked Al Gore. Attachments to political parties and particular leaders are simply more profound and more deeply held than attachments to issue positions.
.. Most of us know, on a gut level, that this rationalization process happens.
Back in 2008, Republicans were inclined to emphasize the risk of electing an inexperienced commander in chief, while eight years later Democrats are bragging about having the most qualified nominee ever. Simply put, for most people, attachments to parties and candidates are more profound and more fundamental than attachments to issue positions.
.. Indeed, Bartels and Achen show that in some ways, highly attuned voters are simply better at misinforming themselves. Back in the 1990s, for example, the budget deficit was falling rapidly, and Bill Clinton liked to tout this fact. Under the circumstances, it’s perhaps not so surprising that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to correctly state that the deficit was declining.
What is surprising is that, as Bartels and Achen showed in a classic 2006 paper, it’s not the uninformed Republicans who are more likely to have gotten this wrong. Instead, the more attention a given Republican paid to politics and political news, the more likely he was to mistakenly believe the deficit was rising during the Clinton years. Paying more attention to politics, in other words, didn’t make people more informed about the underlying issue — it made them more informed about partisan talking points.
.. The fact that citizens are getting their views on issues from the politicians they support and not vice versa — and that the most informed citizens are most likely to do so — is simply devastating to the folk theory. Voters cannot be selecting leaders whose stances they agree with if it turns out that voters are learning what stances they should agree with by taking cues from the leaders they support.
.. So what happened? Folk theory would predict the existence of some Wilson administration policy initiative that negatively impacted New Jersey beach communities. The truth is that a calamity did strike — a wave of unusual shark attacks against human swimmers.
.. Wilson was not, obviously, capable of controlling sharks’ migratory patterns or appetite for human flesh. Nor does it seem especially likely that Jersey Shore residents suddenly became confused about this fact. It’s just that the shark attacks were bad, they led to bad secondary effects, and those effects were especially salient in beach towns. People felt grumpy and panicked, so they voted against the incumbent.
- Voters appear completely blind to comparative issues. Incumbent governments all around the world were punished for the Great Recession with no consideration of whether their country did better or worse than the average country in navigating a global catastrophe.
.. Vox’s Trump Tax model, designed in partnership with a group of political scientists, suggests that Trump is polling about 5 percentage points worse than you would expect a generic Republican to poll given the overall political climate. Major election forecasts see a Trump win as unlikely, but still normally give him a 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 chance, meaning a Trump win would be the equivalent of a football team blowing an easy field goal — surprising, but hardly unheard of.
.. Most successful democracies have parliamentary governments — often backed by proportional electoral systems — leading to a politics that reenforces this tendency and avoids tipping points. In the American system, small shifts in public sentiment can lead to drastic changes — either Bush or Gore, either Clinton or Trump — whereas the Dutch or German electoral systems ensure that a small change in voting behavior leads to a small change in the composition of parliament. Any given party could put a fool or a knave forward as leader, and he might still win votes. But to exercise meaningful power he would need to negotiate with other coalition partners, which is hard to do if you’re a fool.
The American system has no such safeguard. If a fool or a knave secures the nomination of one of the major political parties, he has a pretty good chance of becoming president, at which point all bets are off.
When the office was originally designed by the framers of the Constitution, they meant for it to be an indirectly elected office whose holder would be selected by a collaborative meeting of Electoral College members, thus insulating it from popular whims.