Since the Arab Spring, nationalism and authoritarianism have been on the rise in both the largest and the freest countries, some of which have voted for more-autocratic leaders, and also in less democratic countries, where strongmen have strengthened their grips: in Egypt, the United Kingdom, Russia, India, Turkey, the Philippines, and China.
.. In France and Germany, the political center is still in power, but nationalist populism is on the march.
.. According to the Wall Street Journal, a new national ad campaign warns people about foreign agents, and at least one school has introduced a weekly play-acting game called Spot the Spy.
The Post-Familial Election
HOW did we get here? How did it come to this? Not just to the Donald Trump phenomenon, but to the whole choice facing us on Tuesday, in which a managerial liberalism and an authoritarian nationalism — two visions of the president as essentially a Great Protector
.. For a while, conservatives have worried that this revolution is a boon to liberalism, to centralization and bureaucratic control — because as families thin people are more likely to look to politics for community and government for protection.
.. This idea is borne out in voting patterns, where marriage and kids tend to predict Republican affiliation, and the single and divorced are often reliable Democratic partisans.
.. For this reason mass immigration, the technocratic solution to the economic problems created by post-familialism — fewer workers supporting more retirees — is a double-edged sword: It replaces the missing workers but exacerbates intergenerational alienation, because it heightens anxieties about inheritance and loss.
.. In this landscape, the white-identity politics of Trumpism or European nationalism may be a more intuitively attractive form of right-wing politics than a libertarian conservatism. Right-authoritarianism offers some of the same welfare-state protections that liberalism offers to its Julias, it offers tribal solidarity to people whose family bonds have frayed — and then it links the two, public programs and tribal consciousness, in the promise of a welfare state that’s only designed for you and yours.
.. They can hope that with time the racial and ethnic differences between the generations will diminish, and that eventually state programs can more smoothly substitute for thinning families without ethno-cultural anxieties getting in the way.
.. In either case, the demagogues of the future will have ample opportunity to exploit the deep loneliness that a post-familial society threatens to create.
.. A fear of a world in which no one is bound by kinship to take care of you, and where you can go down into death leaving little or nothing of yourself behind.
Why Israel Still Refuses to Choose
Next year it will be a half-century since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank began. More than 370,000 settlers now live there, excluding in East Jerusalem, up from about 249,000 in 2005.
.. The Israeli announcement this month of a new West Bank settlement was the final straw, coming just weeks after the United States concluded a $38 billion, 10-year military aid deal. Israel’s explanation that the settlement was a “satellite” of another did not wash; its actions were viewed as egregious. Seldom has Moshe Dayan’s old dictum — “Our American friends offer us money, arms and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice” — been more vividly illustrated.
.. Within Israel, where Netanyahu has now amassed more than a decade in power, the political and cultural drift is toward ever more assertive and intolerant nationalism. Criticism is increasingly equated with treason.
.. The Messianic religious Zionism that holds all the West Bank to be Israel’s by biblical decree is ascendant. The left is in feeble disarray.
.. It is sobering to note that Netanyahu probably represents the more moderate wing of his government.
.. Two states had become a bad joke. Young people had more faith in nonviolent resistance leading eventually to equal rights within a single state than in yet another aborted international peace initiative or aborted uprising.
.. In a sense, then, Israel has won. David Ben-Gurion was right when he observed in 1949 that, “When the matter is dragged out — it brings us benefits.”
.. “Israel needs to be democratic more than Jewish,” says Reem Younis, an Arab Israeli.
.. It is time for incremental steps instead. Israel could find lots of ways to ease humiliations and economic hardship for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, without compromising its security. It could take down some roadblocks, curtail the formalities for movement in and out of Gaza, and grant more building permits in the West Bank, as it just has in quietly authorizing some Palestinian development plans in West Bank areas under exclusive Israeli control. It could even, without saying so, stop settlement expansion.
.. Netanyahu will one day have to tell Israelis if he wants a big binational state or a smaller Jewish-majority state side by side with a Palestinian state. He is trying his best to avoid making the choice, keeping millions of Palestinians in limbo; the West helps him with a “peace process” that goes nowhere. Abbas also owes his people clarity and accountability — as well as a political destination.
.. “One state or two states? Who cares?” he told me. “What matters is human dignity and equality under the same law. Palestinian kids want to live well. That’s what they want.”
Taking Trump voters’ concerns seriously means listening to what they’re actually saying
There is absolutely no evidence that Trump’s supporters, either in the primary or the general election, are disproportionately poor or working class. Exit polling from the primaries found that Trump voters made about as much as Ted Cruz voters, and significantly more than supporters of either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. Trump voters, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver found, had a median household income of $72,000, a fair bit higher than the $62,000 median household income for non-Hispanic whites in America.
.. Trump support was correlated with higher, not lower, income, both among the population as a whole and among white people. Trump supporters were less likely to be unemployed or to have dropped out of the labor force. Areas with more manufacturing, or higher exposure to imports from China, were less likely to think favorably of Trump.
.. In the primary, though, the story was, as my colleague Zack Beauchamp has explained at length, almost entirely about racial resentment. There’s a wide array of data to back this up.
UCLA’s Michael Tesler has found that support for Trump in the primaries strongly correlated with respondents’ racial resentment, as measured by survey data. Similarly, Republican voters with the lowest opinions of Muslims were the most likely to vote for Trump, and voters who strongly support mass deportation of undocumented immigrants were likelier to support him in the primaries too.
.. The white nationalist wing was gaining in strength, and due for a win. It got one in Trump.
.. Taking Trump supporters seriously means not pretending their concerns are about the economy
.. There’s a parallel temptation among leftists and social democrats who, in their ongoing attempt to show that neoliberal capitalism is failing, attempt to tie that failure to the rise of Trump. If economic suffering among lower-class whites caused Trump, the reasoning goes, then the solution is to address that suffering through a more generous welfare state and better economic policy, achieved through a multiethnic working-class coalition that includes those Trump supporters
.. But we have a good case study we can examine to see if Western European–style welfare states can prevent far-right racist backlashes from popping up. It’s called Western Europe. And Sweden’s justly acclaimed welfare state did not prevent the rise of the viciously anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats, which has its origins in the Swedish neo-fascist and white supremacist movements and is now the third-largest party in Swedish parliament.
.. Nor has Germany’s strong, manufacturing-heavy and export-oriented economy, arguably the strongest in Europe, kept the far-right AfD party from gaining in recent local elections. It’s telling to note that while economically thriving Germany is facing a far-right menace, Spain, where unemployment is 20 percent (similar to the US in the Great Depression), has no far-right movement of much consequence.
.. Comprehensive welfare states are very, very good. They do not solve racism. Whites in both Europe and America have made it very clear that they will not accept becoming a demographic minority without a fight, and will continue to vote for candidates that speak to that concern and promise immigration policies that put off white minority status for as long as possible.
.. If Trump’s supporters are not, in fact, motivated by economic marginalization, then even full Bernie Sanders–style social democracy is not going to prevent a Trump recurrence.
.. What’s needed is an honest reckoning with what it means that a large segment of the US population, large enough to capture one of the two major political parties, is motivated primarily by white nationalism and an anxiety over the fast-changing demographics of the country.