I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.

Buckley excommunicated the John Birch Society, anti-Semites and supporters of the hyperindividualist Ayn Rand, and his cohort fused the diverse schools of conservative thinking — traditionalist philosophers, militant anti-Communists, libertarian economists — into a coherent ideology, one that eventually came to dominate American politics.

.. Goldwater’s loss, far from dooming the American right, inspired a new generation of conservative activists to redouble their efforts, paving the way for the Reagan revolution.

.. If Donald Trump is the latest chapter of conservatism’s story, might historians have been telling that story wrong?

.. Hofstadter was the leader of the “consensus” school of historians; the “consensus” being Americans’ supposed agreement upon moderate liberalism as the nation’s natural governing philosophy. He didn’t take the self-identified conservatives of his own time at all seriously.

.. He named this attitude “the paranoid style in American politics” and, in an article published a month before Barry Goldwater’s presidential defeat, asked, “When, in all our history, has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever gone so far?”

.. she wrote, in an effort to address political concerns .. “liberal permissiveness” about matters like rising crime rates and the teaching of sex education in public schools.

.. historians of conservatism, like historians in general, tend to be liberal, and are prone to liberalism’s traditions of politesse. It’s no surprise that we are attracted to polite subjects like “colorblind conservatism” or William F. Buckley.

.. have found themselves increasingly uncomfortable, and finally deeply distressed,” watching a “moral breakdown” that was destroying a once-great nation.

.. control of much of our industry and commerce taken over by strangers, who stacked the cards of success and prosperity against us

.. The only thing that would make America great again, as it were, was “a return of power into the hands of everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanized average citizens of old stock.”

.. support for public education, to weaken Catholic parochial schools

.. By reaching back to the reactionary traditions of the 1920s, we might better understand the alliance between the “alt-right” figures that emerged as fervent Trump supporters during last year’s election and the ascendant far-right nativist political parties in Europe.

.. But the Klan remained relevant far beyond the South. In 1936 a group called the Black Legion, active in the industrial Midwest, burst into public consciousness after members assassinated a Works Progress Administration official in Detroit.

The group, which considered itself a Klan enforcement arm

.. Coughlin’s magazine, Social Justice, began reprinting “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” a forged tract about a global Jewish conspiracy

.. Its members were among the most enthusiastic participants in a 1939 pro-Hitler rally that packed Madison Square Garden, where the leader of the German-American Bund spoke in front of an enormous portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas.

.. Young Irish-Catholic men inspired by the Christian Front desecrated nearly every synagogue in Washington Heights.

The New York Catholic hierarchy, the mayor of Boston and the governor of Massachusetts largely looked the other way.

.. no less mainstream an organization than the American Legion, whose “National Commander” Alvin Owsley proclaimed in 1922, “the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States.”

.. In 1927, 1,000 hooded Klansmen fought police in Queens in what The Times reported as a “free for all.” One of those arrested at the scene was the president’s father, Fred Trump.

.. The family settled with the Justice Department in the face of evidence that black applicants were told units were not available even as whites were welcomed with open arms.

.. at Kent State University in Ohio, a Gallup poll found that 58 percent of Americans blamed the students for their own deaths. (“If they didn’t do what the Guards told them, they should have been mowed down,” one parent of Kent State students told an interviewer.)

.. 76 percent of Americans “said they did not support the First Amendment right to assemble and dissent from government policies.”

.. In 1973, the reporter Gail Sheehy joined a group of blue-collar workers watching the Watergate hearings in a bar in Astoria, Queens. “If I was Nixon,” one of them said, “I’d shoot every one of them.”

.. “hard-hat populism” — an attitude, Rosenthal hypothesizes, that Trump learned working alongside the tradesmen in his father’s real estate empire.

.. the case itself also resonates deeply with narratives dating back to the first Ku Klux Klan of white womanhood defiled by dark savages. Trump’s public call for the supposed perpetrators’ hides, no matter the proof of guilt or innocence, mimics the rituals of Southern lynchings.

.. At the beginning of the 20th century, millions of impoverished immigrants, mostly Catholic and Jewish, entered an overwhelmingly Protestant country.

.. It was only when that demographic transformation was suspended by the 1924 Immigration Act that majorities of Americans proved willing to vote for many liberal policies. In 1965, Congress once more allowed large-scale immigration to the United States — and it is no accident that this date coincides with the increasing conservative backlash against liberalism itself, now that its spoils would be more widely distributed among nonwhites.

.. Shortly before announcing his 1980 presidential run, Reagan even boasted of his wish “to create, literally, a common market situation here in the Americas with an open border between ourselves and Mexico.”

.. what are we to make of the fact that he placed so many bankers and billionaires in his cabinet, and has relentlessly pursued so many 1-percent-friendly policies? More to the point, what are we to the make of the fact that his supporters don’t seem to mind?

.. The history of bait-and-switch between conservative electioneering and conservative governance is another rich seam that calls out for fresh scholarly excavation

.. when Reagan was re-elected in 1984, only 35 percent of voters favored significant cuts in social programs to reduce the deficit

.. It was business leaders, not the general public, who moved to the right, and they became increasingly aggressive and skilled in manipulating the political process behind the scenes.

.. the ads created a sense of Reagan as a certain kind of character: the kindly paterfamilias, a trustworthy and nonthreatening guardian of the white middle-class suburban enclave. Years later, the producers of “The Apprentice” carefully crafted a Trump character who was the quintessence of steely resolve and all-knowing mastery.

.. Consider the parallels since the 1970s between conservative activism and the traditional techniques of con men. Direct-mail pioneers like Richard Viguerie created hair-on-fire campaign-fund-raising letters about civilization on the verge of collapse.

.. Recipients of these alarming missives sent checks to battle phony crises, and what they got in return was very real tax cuts for the rich.

.. the more recent connection between Republican politics and “multilevel marketing” operations like Amway (Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, is the wife of Amway’s former president and the daughter-in-law of its co-founder)

.. Mike Huckabee shilling for a “solution kit” to “reverse” diabetes

.. Trump himself taking on a short-lived nutritional-supplements multilevel marketing scheme in 2009

.. Future historians won’t find all that much of a foundation for Trumpism in the grim essays of William F. Buckley, the scrupulous constitutionalist principles of Barry Goldwater or the bright-eyed optimism of Ronald Reagan.

.. They’ll need instead to study conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage.

After Years of Challenges, Foursquare Has Found its Purpose — and Profits

In the spring of 2016, Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck went on CNBC to make a bold prediction: Chipotle comparable sales would fall by 29 percent in its first quarter. The network’s anchor seemed skeptical. The fast-food chain was reacting to some health scares at the time, but no one was predicting nearly as steep a drop in revenue. “What is the technology here? What have you got that enables you to do this?” the anchor asked.

.. Foursquare had reinvented itself as a location intelligence company for business

.. Glueck had been making the rounds for less than a year, seeding the market with all kinds of predictions based on his company’s data — how many new iPhones Apple would sell, or how well McDonald’s all-day breakfast launch was going. The Chipotle forecast was the boldest yet, and it held true.

.. The startup had accumulated mountains of data about where people shopped and traveled but hadn’t figured out how to monetize it. Today, that puzzle seems to have been solved: Foursquare is on the path to $100 million in revenue

.. The reward for sharing? Stickers. Badges. Friendly competition to become the mayor of a favorite bar. And, critically, being part of a community of people sharing recommendations on the best of everything around them.

.. “He initially thought this company would build a local Yellow Pages-type business,”

  1. .. Asset number one: The more than 11 billion check-ins tracking people in real life since 2009.
  2. Asset number two: The four million monthly updates to its Places database — changes in address, phone number, a Japanese restaurant that was now a spaghetti joint.
  3. And then there was the sleeper, asset number three: 100,000 developers tapping into the Foursquare API — its location technology — for free

Enormous companies like Yahoo and Pinterest were using it a billion times a year; for example, when you pin a photo in Pinterest and tag its location, that’s using Foursquare’s data. But Foursquare had never asked these companies to pay.

.. The company needed to think of itself as a location data company. Based on GPS and other location signals, Foursquare could tell what business a user was visiting — something no other company could do as reliably.

.. It asked those big companies to start paying for its API;

.. the developers on the other end of the line basically laughed and said, “Yeah, we were wondering when you were going to start charging.”

.. the flywheel concept, a visual metaphor for business. When first pushed, a flywheel moves slowly and with great effort. With every successive revolution, the pace quickens. To the outsider, it appears the momentum is sudden, but, in fact, it’s the product of a steady grind.

.. investors told him it would take eight to 10 years to make the business work.

.. Ninety-two percent of commerce takes place in real life, not online. That means Google can tell you about only 8 percent of what everyone is doing with their spending habits.

.. Foursquare has signed deals with Snapchat to improve its geo-filtering. More than one million users have agreed to leave location sharing on all the time so Foursquare can track and analyze their movements; through a partnership with Nielsen, that data is then being connected to consumers’ purchasing data, so that marketers can understand how ads people see directly relate to purchases they make.

.. “Three of the top five hedge funds are using Foursquare data to give them an investing edge.”

.. it’s a location intelligence company — something that should be measured the same way as a services-as-a-software or programmatic advertising firm

With Washington’s Blessing, Telecom Giants Can Mine Your Web History

Congress’s repeal of FCC privacy rules could be data boon for Verizon, Comcast, AT&T

What if your telecom company tracked the websites you visit, the apps you use, the TV shows you watch, the stores you shop at and the restaurants you eat at, and then sold that information to advertisers?

In theory, it’s possible, given the stance Washington is taking on online privacy.

.. Undoing the rules, which had been adopted last fall by the Federal Communications Commission but hadn’t gone into effect, is a boon to Verizon Communications Inc.,VZ -0.09% Comcast Corp. CMCSA +0.32% and AT&T Inc., T +0.45% which are all in the process of building data-driven digital ad businesses to complement the broadband, wireless and TV services they offer.

.. The telecom providers had argued the rules put them at a competitive disadvantage to online ad giants Google and Facebook, which generally aren’t regulated by the FCC.

.. But online advertising executives say telecom providers potentially have access to more powerful data than the two tech powerhouses. Their networks — both wired and wireless — could give them a window into nearly everything a user is doing on the web.

.. “ISPs like Verizon can now start building and selling profiles about consumers that include their friends, the news articles they read, where they shop, where they bank, along with their physical location,”

.. If a consumer uses the same telecom provider for wireless, broadband and TV service, the provider could, in theory, track the majority of that consumer’s online behavior and media consumption.

.. &T’s defunct Internet Preferences program collected web-browsing data from some home broadband customers and charged subscribers who wished to opt out of collection an additional $29 a month.

The Republican healthcare plan just failed because Trump is bad at making deals

I wrote on Wednesday that Republicans forced themselves into a corner with seven years of lying and overpromising about healthcare. The fact that nothing they do now will live up to the promises they made before is a big political problem.

  1. Trump doesn’t really care what the bill does, exactly, so long as he can sign it and say that it “repeals and replaces” Obamacare.

.. You don’t walk into a negotiation and tell your counterparty that you’re desperate to make a deal fast and on any terms. But Trump did just that, which is why Freedom Caucus members knew the White House was bluffing when it claimed the bill was closed and wouldn’t be amended further.

.. Trump might be making such promises. But because he has a decades-long reputation for reneging on his promises to counterparties, members are unlikely to trust Trump when he does so.

.. Trump’s assurance that the bill’s limitations — for example, its limited impact on insurance regulations under Obamacare — will be addressed through executive action and future legislation do not seem to be convincing enough of his party’s own representatives to get this bill passed.

.. Trump seems to have been personally unprepared for the interconnected nature of healthcare policy. Moving the wrong piece can cause the healthcare market to crash down like a Jenga tower, and Trump has no idea how to determine which blocks are loose.

.. if you’re going to repeal EHB, you also need to repeal Obamacare’s rule that requires insurers to cover preexisting conditions, as otherwise insurance markets could collapse.

.. If Trump understood health-insurance policy (or asked someone who did), he would have known that EHB rules and preexisting-condition rules go together like peas and carrots, and he shouldn’t offer to repeal one if he’s dead set on keeping the other.

.. Trump shifted the focus of his professional endeavors away from businesses that were heavy on dealmaking and toward businesses that were heavy on marketing, particularly arrangements in which he would rent his name to somebody else who was actually in the business of developing real estate.