Donald Trump promised Friday night that if elected president, he will win 95 percent of the African-American vote in his reelection bid.
.. “Trump going into inner-city Philadelphia and offering a better future could have an amazing result. Because the truth is, no Republican has ever had the courage” to offer African Americans a compelling reason to vote for the GOP, Gingrich said.
.. “We have a divided country. It’s totally divided. The era of division will be replaced with a future of unity, total unity. We will love each other. We will have one country. Everybody will work together,” Trump said. “In my administration, every American will be treated equally, protected equally and honored equally. We will reject bigotry and hatred and oppression in all of its forms and seek a new future built on our common culture and values as one American people.”
Inside The Head Of Trump Voters
If you look back far enough in humankind’s history, you will observe that you don’t see civilizations starting without their building temples first. Haidt, who is a secular liberal, is not making a theistic point, not really. He’s saying that the work of civilization can only be accomplished when a people binds itself together around a shared sense of the sacred. It’s what makes a people a people, and a civilization a civilization. “It doesn’t have to be a god,” says Haidt. Anything that we hold sacred, and hold it together, is enough.
.. But then he tells them that if they believe that they could treat without bias a patient who is an open Trump supporter, they’re lying to themselves. In the America of 2016, political bias is the most powerful bias of all — more polarizing by far than race, even.
.. Haidt makes a point of saying that it’s simply wrong to call Trump a fascist. He’s too individualistic for that. He’s an authoritarian, but that is not a synonym for fascist, no matter how much the Left wants to say it is.
.. He says that in his work as an academic and social psychologist, he sees colleagues constantly demonizing and mocking conservatives. He warns them to knock it off. “We need political diversity,” he says. And: “They are members of our community.”
The discourse and behavior of the Left, says Haidt, is alienating millions of ordinary people all over the West. It’s not just America. We are sliding towards authoritarianism all over the West, and there’s really only one way to stop it.
.. At the 41:37 point in the talk, Haidt says that we can reduce intolerance and defuse the conflict by focusing on sameness. We need unifying rituals, beliefs, institutions, and practices, he says, drawing on Stenner’s research. The romance the Left has long had with multiculturalism and diversity (as the Left defines it) has to end, because it’s helping tear us apart.
This fall, the Democrats are taking Stenner’s advice brilliantly, says Haidt, referring to the convention the Dems just put on, and Hillary’s speech about how we’re all better off standing together. Haidt says this is actually good advice, period. “It’s not just propaganda you wheel out at election time,” he says. If we don’t have a feasible conservative party, we open the way for authoritarianism.
.. Haidt says we don’t need “equality” — that is, an equal number of conservatives and liberals in the academy. We just need to have diversity enough for people to be challenged in their viewpoints, so an academic community can flourish according to its nature.
.. I don’t think the center can hold anymore. It’s too late. The cultural left in this country is very authoritarian, at least as regards orthodox Christians and other social conservatives.
.. We are the people who defile what they consider most sacred: sexual liberty, including abortion rights and gay rights. The liberals in control now (as distinct from all liberals, let me be clear) have made it clear that they will not compromise with what they consider to be evil. We are the Klan to them. Error has no rights in this world they’re building.
.. all I want for my tribe is to be left alone. But the crusading Left won’t let that happen anymore. They don’t even want the Mormons to be allowed to play football foe the Big 12, for heaven’s sake.
How a Quest by Elites Is Driving ‘Brexit’ and Trump
Here is an overarching theory of what we might have missed in the march toward a hyper-efficient global economy: Economic efficiency isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
.. Against that backdrop, support for Mr. Trump and for the British withdrawal known as Brexit are just imperfect vehicles through which someone can yell, “Stop.”
.. But what if those gaps between the economic elite and the general public are created not by differences in expertise but in priorities?
.. In other words, the more evenly the pie was divided, the less pie there was to go around. There was a trade-off between equality and maximizing income, a version of economic efficiency.
Among the general American public, about half of those who played the game favored equality over efficiency.
.. Among the Yale students who played the game, 80 percent preferred efficiency to equality. They were more worried about the size of the pie, apparently, than making sure everyone got a slice.
.. “The people who are destined to fill these elite positions tend to have a strong efficiency orientation,” said Raymond Fisman, a Boston University economist and lead author of the study. “One underlying explanation may be that, if the system has been kind to you, and you find yourself at Yale Law School, you know you’re going to make out O.K. in the end, and so you don’t worry about widening the distribution of outcomes.”
.. But maybe it is really important for people who live in a place to be able to stay there indefinitely. Maybe the idea that things should stay the way they are, without new people moving in and new buildings going up, is not as inherently irrational as Economics 101 would suggest. Yes, rent control is a bad idea if you’re worried about the long-term prospects for economic efficiency. But maybe the people who advocate these policies know exactly what they’re rooting for, and that’s not it.
The rent control debate can be viewed as a microcosm of the debate about globalization and international trade.
.. It projects that the deal will add $131 billion a year to Americans’ incomes by 2030, or 0.5 percent of G.D.P. It will neither create nor destroy jobs, but is projected to add to churn — job changes — in the economy as work moves into higher-paying, more export-centric industries. The authors predict that the trade deal will mean an extra 53,700 job changes a year, but they note that 55.5 million people a year in the United States change jobs for all sorts of reasons, and that this extra churn will barely change those overall numbers.
.. If there is one crucial lesson from the success of Mr. Trump and Brexit, it is that dynamism and efficiency sound a lot better to people who are confident they’ll always end up being winners.
American Anger: It’s Not the Economy. It’s the Other Party.
Data on the nation’s economic recovery, people’s reactions to current economic conditions and their overall sense of satisfaction with life doesn’t suggest Americans are angry.
.. The increasing alignment between party and racial attitudes goes back to the early 1990s. The Pew Values Survey asks people whether they agree that “we should make every effort to improve the position of minorities, even if it means giving them preferential treatment.
.. Democrats are now much more supportive (52 percent) of efforts to improve racial equality than they were a few decades ago, while the views of Republicans have been largely unchanged (12 percent agree).
.. But recent work by Stanford University’s Shanto Iyengar and his co-authors shows something else has been brewing in the electorate: a growing hostilitytoward members of the opposite party. This enmity, they argue, percolates into opinions about everyday life.
.. Partisans, for example, are now more concerned that their son or daughter might marry someone of the opposite party (compared with Britain today and the United States in 1960). They also found that partisans are surprisingly willing to discriminate against people who are not members of their political party.
.. Disagreements between people about nominations for the Academy Awards, for example, may now become emotional as well as political if they involve racial attitudes because of the sorting of these attitudes by party and the contempt people feel for the other side.