This is the last presidential election in which two baby boomers will be running against each other. In the years ahead, politics will no longer be defined by the hidden animosities of the Vietnam era, by the sexual revolution/culture war issues of the 1970s.
.. The crucial social divide today is between those who feel the core trends of the global, information-age economy as tailwinds at their backs and those who feel them as headwinds in their face.
.. the most important social divide today is between a well-educated America that is marked by economic openness, traditional family structures, high social capital and high trust in institutions, and a less-educated America that is marked by economic insecurity, anarchic family structures, fraying community bonds and a pervasive sense of betrayal and distrust.
.. what Ronald Brownstein of The Atlanticdescribed in 2012 as the Coalition of Transformation versus the Coalition of Restoration.
.. The Republican Party is now a coalition of globalization-loving business executives and globalization-hating white workers. That’s untenable.
.. At its molten core, the Republican Party has become the party of the dispossessed, not the party of cosmopolitan business.
.. The Democratic Party is currently a coalition of the upscale urban professionals who make up the ruling class and less-affluent members of minorities who feel betrayed by it.
.. We don’t normally think that politics is divided along trust lines. But this year we’re seeing huge chasms depending upon how much trust you feel toward your neighbors and your national institutions. Disaffected low-trust millennials see things differently than the Hollywood, tech, media and academic professionals who actually run the party.
Can Hillary Manage Her Unruly Coalition?
“What I really took away from this was the fact that in order to get subsidized housing into the suburbs, you have to be sneaky about it,” Robert Strupp, the executive director of Baltimore Neighborhoods Inc., a liberal fair housing advocacy group, told The Sun:
Because if they found out about it in advance, they wouldn’t let it happen. That’s the sign to me that discrimination still exists. It’s classic Nimbyism. That’s today’s reality just as it was in the 1950s and 1960s.
.. There is no way the Clinton campaign wants housing integration to become a central issue of the 2016 campaign. The same is true of the more general issue of poverty.
.. The agenda as stated does not address the fundamental problem that is at the root of the concentration of poverty — the ability of local governments to effectively exclude lower-income people from their communities through zoning and restrictive land use policies.
.. But the Republican Party has been most successful when it has been able to drive a wedge between competing Democratic constituencies,
.. Then, on the other hand, there are the competing goals of black Democrats in the Sandtown-Winchesterneighborhood of Baltimore, home of Freddy Gray — where 51.8 percent of the residents in 2012 were out of work. These Democrats enroll their kids in a public school system where 79.5 percent of the high school students have not met proficiency standards in English, and 90.2 percent have not met those standards in Algebra.
Hillary Clinton has an anger problem
Hillary Clinton has an anger problem — she’s not angry enough at a time when 70 percent of voters think the country is on the wrong track.
.. “Bernie thinks about it backwards — what is the outcome that he wants, right?” he said. “So if it was free tuition of public colleges and universities, that becomes the starting point and then you work backwards from there in terms of how you design the policy to fit the outcome that you want, as opposed to noodling around policy and then seeing what the outcome is.”
.. The best political operatives — even the ones who project buttoned-up efficiency — tend to be a little eccentric, combining aggressiveness and creativity in equal measure.
.. “OK … I’m sure to be standing there in front of the Democratic Convention with a sea of people with Bernie signs, really sort of validated what he has been talking about for the last 15 months in this campaign, but the last 40 years of his life, 50 years.”
.. History is as important to Weaver as it is to Sanders. And his beef, he told me, is less with Hillary Clinton, who has proved to be a progressive and accommodating partner, than with her husband. If anything, he’s committed to ensuring that the wife take a sledgehammer to her husband’s moth-eaten Clintonism, the centrist Third Way vision that spawned NAFTA, welfare reform and the dismantling of Hillary Clinton’s health-care crusade.
“I think we’re back now more into the historic trajectory of the Democratic Party, more towards sort of the social Democratic Party, and I think it’s heading in that direction,” Weaver added, before leaving to watch Clinton’s nomination speech.
“I think the ’90s were really an aberration.”
No Right Turn
But at least some commentators are calling on her to do something very different — to make a right turn, moving the Democratic agenda toward the preferences of those fleeing the sinking Republican ship. The idea, I guess, is to offer to create an American version of a European-style grand coalition of the center-left and the center-right.
.. And no, the program doesn’t need to be more “pro-growth.”
There’s absolutely no evidence that tax cuts for the rich and radical deregulation, which is what right-wingers mean when they talk about pro-growth policies, actually work, or that strengthening the social safety net does any harm.
.. The most important of these things, however, would be to take advantage of very low government borrowing costs to greatly expand public investment — which is something progressives support but conservatives oppose.
.. conservatives decided to harness racial resentment to sell right-wing economic policies to working-class whites, especially in the South.
This strategy brought many electoral victories, but always at the risk that the racial resentment would run out of control, leaving the economic conservatives — whose ideas never had much popular support — stranded. And that is what has just happened... Trumpism is basically a creation of the modern conservative movement, which used coded appeals to prejudice to make political gains, then found itself unable to rein in a candidate who skipped the coding.