Farage, who has declared mission accomplished and quit the leadershipof the anti-immigrant U.K. Independence Party since the Brexit vote in June, is a self-important loudmouth who should be taken seriously. His pomposity masks political guile. His bigotry is attuned to the times.
You can’t have observed Farage over the past couple of years and not think Trump may well win in November. That’s Britain’s lesson to America. There is too much smug Hillary-has-it sentiment swilling around.
.. The thing is, the prosperity was skewed, just as it’s skewed in the United States, leaving wide swathes of the white working class in particular incensed that employment has migrated offshore at the same speed as immigrants have come onshore to take a dwindling number of jobs.
.. Britain, too, has its miniature version of flyover country now. The global citizens of big cities like London and Manchester who voted Remain were aghast that anyone out there in Lincolnshire (let alone a majority nationwide) could think differently, in the same way as the global citizens of New York or Los Angeles can’t see Trump’s appeal to tens of millions of Americans.
.. The uncomfortable truth about the Trump campaign is that, like the Brexit campaign, it is perfectly timed to ride a mood of popular revolt — against neoliberal economics, against the bankers who emerged with impunity from the 2008 financial meltdown, against what Farage called “global corporatism,”
.. Because Hillary Clinton, as a symbol of dynastic entitlement (albeit a female one), is such an easy target for an anti-establishment movement, she is particularly vulnerable to the forces that have produced Trump and Brexit.
.. “One of the reasons why the left has failed to emerge as the leader of the new mood of working-class disillusionment is that most social democratic parties became, in varying degrees, disciples of neoliberalism and uber-globalization.” The most extreme expressions of this, he noted, were New Labour in Britain and the Democratic Party, led respectively by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.
Why Trumpism Will Outlast Donald Trump
Think he doesn’t represent anything besides himself? Turns out a whopping 65 percent of white Americans say they’d consider supporting a nativist third party.
.. Is the Trump campaign about the man or the message? In other words, will Trumpism survive Trump?
.. I solicited white Americans’ support for Donald Trump, but also for a hypothetical third party dedicated to “stopping mass immigration, providing American jobs to American workers, preserving America’s Christian heritage, and stopping the threat of Islam”—essentially the platform of the UK’s right-wing British National Party, adapted to the United States. How many white Americans do you think would consider voting for this type of protectionist, xenophobic party?
65 percent.
Clearly, Trump’s allure is bigger than Trump himself.
.. those who would consider voting for this third party are more likely to be male, of lower socioeconomic status, without a university education and ideologically conservative—in other words, the Republican Party’s longtime base. They are also more likely to be young (under 40 years old)—so this is not a phenomenon likely to pass quickly.
.. if Republicans, in an attempt to appeal to independent voters and the growing minority population, pivot away from Trump’s rhetoric, they could face internal upheaval, and perhaps even widescale defection to a third party from this 65 percent of whites. On the flip side, if Republicans do allow Trumpism to define the party, they risk ushering in an era of unprecedented Democratic dominance. Current polling predicts a Democratic landslide.
.. From six months of fieldwork in post-industrial cities in the British and American Rust Belts, I observed a remarkable sense of loss. Lost wealth in many cases. But more poignantly, I observed a sense of lost status.
.. For Democrats, their challenge is to draw white working class voters into their diverse coalition by convincing them that challenges in the household and workplace are general working class challenges that have very little to do with being white.
Donald Trump and Mike Pence: One Ticket, Two Worldviews
As the fighting continued year after year, Mr. Pence kept up his support, speaking forcefully in favor of the Iraq war even as many Americans turned against it. But his firm stance on that invasion now represents one of the most jarring differences in his abrupt political marriage to Donald J. Trump ..
.. From the use of force to free trade to diplomacy, Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence hold very different views of the United States’ role in the world
.. Mr. Pence has adopted a firmer position, telling a conservative gathering in 2015: “Israel’s enemies are our enemies.”
.. “I believe it is imperative that conservatives again embrace America’s role as leader of the free world and the arsenal of democracy,” he said last year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he called for “dramatically” increasing military spending... Mr. Pence has expressed his approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and voted for trade agreements while a member of the House. During his first successful congressional campaign, in 2000, his opponents criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement, or Nafta, but Mr. Pence expressed support for the trade pact and the idea of free trade... Mr. Trump insists that the United States is losing when it comes to trade. In 2001, Mr. Pence said that when American companies compete globally, “We win, and we win consistently.”
How Trump is changing the Republicans’ 2016 platform
Initial drafts of the platform hold the conservative line on social ideas, but Trump’s economic stances are making a strong mark.
.. While the party platform now bends toward Trump in some areas, other traditional planks of party orthodoxy remain firmly in place. Religious conservatives — without specifically swiping at Trump — rejected efforts by social moderates to soften the party’s stance against same-sex marriage.
.. Although Trump has blamed Bill Clinton, and by extension Hillary Clinton, for the North American Free Trade Agreement, the pact was actually negotiated by the Republican administration of George H.W. Bush and built on the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement that was concluded during the administration of Ronald Reagan.