Trump, in fact, tweets as the Everyman of America’s new politics: Embrace Me!
For Democrats, political identity is by now well-established as a function of one’s race, gender or sexual self-definition. Refined further, a Democrat is a “person of color” or a “woman” or a “transgender” person.
.. We are in the era of selfie politics. In Donald Trump, we have a selfie president. After the Virginia gubernatorial loss, the first nine words of Mr. Trump’s tweet from Asia were: “Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me . . .”
David Axelrod: James Baker (Episode 176)
Worked for Gerry Ford, ran 2 Campaigns against Reagan
Treasury Secretary under Reagan (tax reform)
Chief of Staff for Reagan
Dissolution of Soviet Union under Bush
Campaign operative for George W. Bush, etc
Slogan: Don’t start any fights you can’t win.
Florida Recount
It was a political event with legal elements
The Willy Horton Ad:
I told them to stop running it (after several weeks)
I don’t know if it was Identity politics.Scapegoating
After Reagan did poorly, people were looking for a whipping boy and they wanted to fire __________.
After the Soviet Union, don’t know why the relation soured, but maybe it was good local politics to blame the US.
Donald Trump, our first millennial president
Everybody — but especially the olds — loves to hate on millennials. We’re lazy, entitled, emotionally stunted, spendthrift, narcissistic, promiscuous snowflakes.
.. But if Bill Clinton was once our “first black president,” surely Trump can be our first millennial president.
.. despite the fact that as of Monday — more than a month after Hurricane Maria hit — four-fifths of the island still has no power. A quarter lacks clean drinking water.
.. This is hardly the first time Trump has insisted upon, or even invented, accolades to celebrate his own mediocrity. He claimed to have received environmental awards that never existed. His golf clubs displayed fake Time magazine covers featuring his face.
.. Millennial Trump overshares constantly on social media, sometimes even Instagramming his food. He live-tweets his favorite TV show instead of getting real work done. Although no longer a minor, he still requires constant helicopter parenting from the grown-ups around him, as if he’s in an adult day care.
.. he can’t tolerate speech that hurts his feewings . Words that offend him are “unfair,” “frankly disgusting,” “bad for the country.” He then tries every weapon available to shut down those words.
.. Trump personally demanded that the Senate Intelligence Committee investigate media outlets he dislikes and suggested that networks should have their broadcast licenses revoked. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in subsequent days a Morning Consult poll found that half of Republicans agreed with him.
Huh. It’s almost as if 19-year-olds aren’t actually the country’s greatest threat to the First Amendment.
.. Trump casts himself as a perpetual victim, the uncontested winner of the oppression Olympics.
.. As with millennials, Trump has taken on loads of debt — though to be fair, that seems to bring much more joy to Trump than to 20- and 30-somethings. Maybe because real millennials expect to pay it back.
.. Morally lax, prone to revisionist history and obsessed with identity politics, Trump exemplifies all that is annoying and wrong with my generation — at least according to every Lena-Dunham-despising crank who once walked uphill both ways.
.. Like any true millennial, Trump refused to pay his dues in an industry where he had no experience. Instead, on the strength of his personal brand alone, he declared himself entitled to the top job. Self-promotion leading to immediate professional promotion?
Upswingers and Downswingers
The popular gloom notwithstanding, we’re actually living in an era of astounding progress. We’ve seen the greatest reduction in global poverty in history. As Steven Pinker has documented, we’ve seen a steady decline in wars and armed conflict. The U.S. economy is the best performing major economy in the developed world.
n 1980 the U.S. had a slight edge in G.D.P. per capita over Germany, Japan, France and the U.K. But the U.S. has grown much faster than the other major economies over the past 37 years, so that now it produces about $54,000 of output per capita compared with about $39,000 for Japan and France.
.. During the mid-20th century the West developed a group-oriented culture to deal with the Great Depression and the World Wars. Its motto could have been
- “We’re in this together.” That became too conformist and stultifying.
A new individualistic culture emerged (pivot) whose motto could have been
- “I’m free to be myself.”
That was great for a time, but excessive individualism has left society
- too fragmented, isolated and divided (hatchet). Something new is needed.
.. Politics during the hatchet phase gets nasty. It tends to devolve into a fight between upswingers and downswingers.
- Upswingers believe in progress and feel that society is still fitfully moving upward.
- Downswingers have lost faith in progress and feel everything is broken.
.. Among Republicans the
- upswingers embrace capitalist dynamism, global engagement and the open movement of people and ideas. The
- downswingers embrace ethnic and national cohesion and closed borders.
On the left it’s between those who believe
- the only realistic path is to reform existing structures and
- those who think they are so broken we need to
.. Because of the loss of faith in progress downswingers have a baseline mood of pessimism, protest and anger. They are marked by a deep social distrust and a bent toward conspiracy thinking. They disrespect codes of etiquette that traditionally regulate public life and crack down on opposing speech.
.. downswingers have a tropism toward ethnic and identity politics. If you’ve lost faith in universal progress, if you think everything is a zero-sum scramble for slices of a stagnant or shrinking pie, then of course you are going to see your ethnic identity marker as essential and all defining.
.. You are going to embrace a sense of victimhood