Social discord, frequently inflamed by proliferating versions of identity politics, is becoming more prevalent.
.. what if public discontent is a reasonable response to a misguided and complacent elite consensus?
.. American political theatre stages ever shriller battles over increasingly trivial matters.
.. We believe that recognizing failures and encouraging new ideas are not betrayals of American “optimism” but are instead healthier expressions of it.
.. Today, the celebration of “disruptive” technological innovation is virtually unanimous. Why then is corporate and government investment in basic research in decline? Why is productivity stagnating?
.. we are told that more and more jobs will be lost to automation, and that the “new economy” will be a highly bifurcated service economy. But if “average” is truly over, what does that mean for an American republic predicated on a strong and independent middle class
.. Yet the most conspicuous global phenomenon of the present time would appear to be the resurgence of nationalism
.. Can nationalism be leavened by justice—or even be essential to it—rather than being abandoned to its worst expressions?
.. Was meritocracy fated to produce social stratification? Or are we privileging certain forms of merit while excluding others?
.. Have the permanent campaigns of identity politics on the left and the “culture wars” on the right concealed the true content of our common citizenship?
.. The promise of America is no longer being realized as it once was. Revival and realignment are critically needed.
Who Are We?
In this narrative, which has surged to the fore in response to Trump’s refugee and visa policies, we are a propositional nation bound together by ideas rather than any specific cultural traditions — a nation of immigrants drawn to Ellis Island, a nation of minorities claiming rights too long denied, a universal nation destined to welcome foreigners and defend liberty abroad.
.. saying that’s not who we are is a way of saying that all more particularist understandings of Americanism, all non-universalist forms of patriotic memory, need to be transcended.
.. But the real American past was particularist as well as universalist. Our founders built their a new order atop specifically European intellectual traditions. Our immigrants joined a settler culture, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, that demanded assimilation to its norms.
.. Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.
Godfather of ‘Brexit’ Takes Aim at the British Establishment
Arron Banks ..
Mr. Banks plowed $11 million of his personal fortune into UKIP and the unofficial Leave.EU campaign and raised an additional $5 million. Though a small figure by American standards, it made him the single biggest political donor in British history.
.. The Brexit win thrilled Donald J. Trump, who saw in that blow to elite complacency and hierarchy a model for his presidential campaign. And it was Mr. Banks who exchanged ideas on tactics with Mr. Trump’s team throughout their campaigns, making visits with Mr. Farage to Trump rallies.
.. “Never apologize,” he said he had told Mr. Trump. “Facts are white noise,” and “emotions rule.”
.. “We realized we were up against the same kind of enemy and we had to play dirty, and we did,” he said in the interview at Old Down Manor, a Gloucestershire estate hotel he owns.
.. Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Banks sees himself as an outsider tearing up what he said was a cozy conspiracy between career politicians and big corporations.
.. Mr. Banks is considering starting and funding a new citizens’ movement, tentatively called Patriotic Alliance, based on the model of Italy’s Five Star Movement
.. Mounting frustration against the Tory government and a Labour Party in disarray has created an opportunity for a political movement that, “like Trump, isn’t left or right but that is radical,” Mr. Banks said.
.. Mr. Banks has always fancied himself something of an outsider, having spent much of his childhood in England but frequently visiting his father, who managed sugar estates in Africa.
.. He was expelled from a second school and never went on to college, instead selling everything from vacuum cleaners to houses. He then got into insurance, where he made his fortune ..
.. . Banks now has business interests based in the tax havens of the Isle of Man and the British Virgin Islands.
.. “When it comes down to it, Brexit and Trump were about identity. Who do you identify with?” he asked, before answering his own question: “I don’t want to be part of some French-German coalition.”
.. It was, however, only after paying for a private poll of 50,000 Britons ahead of the referendum that he and his team realized that immigration, not sovereignty, was the defining issue that would push people to vote to leave.
.. Mr. Banks, like Mr. Trump, is married to a Slav — in his case, Ekaterina Paderina, a Russian, whom the tabloids like to consider a spy
.. “It’s not complicated,” he said emphatically. “You don’t need a business plan. This is where you’re wrong. I’ve operated now 25 years without any business plan, and I’ve done pretty well.”
What Does Your Party Want?
Securing the loyalty of the millions of white working-class Americans who lined up behind Trump will require that all three wings of the Republican Party — its business faction, its ideological purists and its cultural traditionalists — abandon any idea of strict adherence to core conservative principles on fiscal and social policy.
“Just as Reagan converted the G.O.P. into a conservative party, with his victory this year, Trump has converted the G.O.P. into a populist, America First party,”
.. Trade and immigration are in my view unambiguously good for the country — but new policies on these issues will have to be done in ways that are supported by the American people, not shoved down their throats by the elites. In this regard, I am a populist. The elites in both parties have not understood Trumpism and have often been contemptuous of the intellect and lifestyle of the Trump loyalists.
.. These voters have shunned Republicans because they disagree with the party’s focus on low taxes, small government, and pro-business policies. They benefit enormously from middle-class entitlement programs; their children get what they consider to be good educations from public schools and state universities. They have no problem with redistribution so long as it is focused on either people who can’t work or people who do.
.. Where movement conservatives see many social programs and the high taxes that fund them as threats to liberty, these voters see them as giving decent, hard-working people a hand up to live decent, dignified lives. Where business conservatives see free trade or immigration as helping people and increasing growth, these voters see those policies as favoring foreigners over themselves and as just another way that their bosses try to pay them less without justification.
.. newly recruited white working-class converts to Trump’s Republican Party do not consider conservative dogma on gay rights, abortion, gender identity, or traditional marriage their priority.=
.. Bannon described the goal of the “entirely new political movement” he believes Trump is leading:
It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.
.. Bannon is explicit in his identification of the enemy:
The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If we deliver, we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years.
.. This ad was part and parcel of an election that has put some of the most vocal House Republicans, including the vaunted Freedom Caucus, on notice that defying Trump’s right-populist orientation could put their political future at risk.
.. “Trump dominated — in the primary and general elections — those districts represented by Congress’s most conservative members,” Tim Alberta wrote in National Review (he is now at Politico):
They once believed they were elected to advance a narrowly ideological agenda, but Trump’s success has given them reason to question that belief.
.. Even if they support Trump nine times of ten, voting against him once could trigger a tweetstorm or the threat of a visit to their district. It’s a chilling thought for members who know that the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the House GOP leadership already want them gone.
Kevin McCarthy, the House majority leader, plans to make full use of Trump’s leverage to keep recalcitrant members of the Freedom Caucus in line.