.. historian Richard Hofstadter famously described in 1964 as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”:
In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
The paranoia of the Trump campaign has found expression in the accusation that the Republican establishment in the primaries and now Hillary Clinton and her allies in the general election are committed to rigging the election to prevent Trump’s rightful accession to the White House.
.. Hofstadter describes the paranoid style as
made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary.
.. Trump’s strongest supporters do in fact feel abominably persecuted. They are unlikely to fade away gracefully.
.. Roger Stone, a Trump confidant, shared his own thinking with Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart News on July 29:
I think we have widespread voter fraud, but the first thing that Trump needs to do is begin talking about it constantly.
.. Stone’s advice was that Trump should say,
I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud. If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.
.. The poll found that 56 percent of Trump supporters believed the election would be rigged. Among all voters, 34 percent predicted a rigged election; 60 percent rejected the notion.
.. Part of the reason that our nation has been relatively free of political violence is that losers of contests have nearly always accepted their loss and opposed the victor through legitimate means, such as challenging them in future elections or working against their agenda in Congress. The 2000 election was very close and obviously very controversial, but Al Gore nonetheless conceded after the Supreme Court’s ruling. Were Trump and his supporters to continue to argue that the election had been stolen from them, it would mean that they reject nonviolent solutions to political differences. It could jeopardize future elections, undermine the legitimacy of the federal government, and create an environment in which political violence becomes more likely.
.. the so called alt-right — white nationalists and hard-line opponents of immigration who oppose multiculturalism and defend a particular vision of western values — has become an influential force in politics.
.. He’s certainly creating a movement that will continue independently of him even if he does fold at some point.
.. Hans Noel, a political scientist at Georgetown .. points to the problems a narrow Trump loss could pose for the Republican Party
.. The conviction that Democrats and the Washington establishment will rig the election in Clinton’s favor is by no means limited to the alt-right. Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, and Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, have both promoted the idea.
“There’s a long tradition on the part of Democratic machines of trying to steal elections,” Gingrich told Sean Hannity on Fox News on Aug. 2:
I mean, if you assume that she is a crook, as he says, if you assume that she lies, as he says, why would you expect her to have an honest election?
.. Fifty-two years ago, writing in the year of the Johnson-Goldwater election, Hofstadter proved remarkably prescient: the right wing, he argued,
feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.
.. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest — perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands — are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power — and this through distorting lenses — and have no chance to observe its actual machinery.
Why Democrats and Republicans Literally Speak Different Languages
But the two major parties are now divided by a common language: Democrats discuss “comprehensive health reform,” “estate taxes,” “undocumented workers,” and “tax breaks for the wealthy,” while Republicans insist on a “Washington takeover of health care,” “death taxes,” “illegal aliens,” and “tax reform.” When did the two major political parties create their own vocabularies?
.. Around 1990.
.. Americans have for decades signaled their political clique with specific terms—as when Southerners refer to the Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression,” or Northerners call it the “Great Rebellion.” What is different today, the researchers said, is “the magnitude of the differences, the deliberate strategic choices that seem to underlie them, and the expanding role of consultants, focus groups, and polls” to entrench two separate political lexicons within the same polity.
.. For roughly 120 years, the probability of correctly guessing a speaker’s party by listening to a one-minute speech was about 52 to 55 percent, nearly random. But suddenly, in the early 1990s, rhetorical partisanship exploded.
.. “The 1994 inflection point in our series coincides precisely with the Republican takeover of Congress led by Newt Gingrich” and his Contract With America, they find.
.. In The C-SPAN Revolution, Stephen Frantzich and John Sullivan quote Newt Gingrich as saying he would have never been the Republican leader without C-SPAN. Fox News launched in 1996, and its success covering the conservative movement encouraged MSNBC to shift more and more leftward over the next decade, until finally there were two clear channels for partisan messaging.
.. Coming up with a catchy name for the Iraq War doesn’t change a single substantive fact about its outcome. Despite what you’ve heard, harping on the words “radical,” “Islamic,” and “terrorism” is not a foreign policy. It is the reduction of a complex international crisis into a diction contest.
When politics devolves into a war over word choice, it is probably a sign that all hope for a more substantive debate has already been lost.
Sharia Does Not Mean What Newt Gingrich Thinks It Means
One country that officially endorses the Muslim legal system is one of the politician’s favorites—Israel.
One of the Middle East countries that officially endorses sharia as a legal system is one of Gingrich’s most favored countries, Israel, which is, by his lights—and mine—a crucial component of Western civilization. Israel’s sharia courts, which are supervised by the Ministry of Justice, allow the more than 15 percent of Israel’s population that is Muslim to seek religious recourse for their personal dilemmas. These courts have been in operation since Israel’s founding, and yet the country does not seem to have been fatally undermined by their existence.
.. Should Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, be questioned by American authorities for advancing the cause of sharia? And what about Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, who, in a recent ceremony welcoming the appointment of seven new Muslim court judges
Twitter Facebook Comment Email Republish Donate What Newt Gingrich Really Thinks of Donald Trump
Newt Gingrich, a leading candidate to be Donald Trump’s running mate, told Republicans at a closed-door meeting earlier this year that Trump is not a conservative, speaks to voters “at the lowest level of any candidate in either party,” and could lose in a landslide if he didn’t significantly change his approach to campaigning.
Gingrich suggested Trump’s move from campaigning to governing would be challenging: “How we make the transition from, you know, language for fourth graders to real policy, I don’t know.”
.. “This is not a guy who’s shallow or simple, but he is a guy who knows an immense amount about marketing, which is why he talks at a fourth-grade level. He talks at the lowest level of any candidate in either party, not because he’s stupid,” Gingrich said told the crowd of executive-level political staffers and corporate sponsors. “He does it because he knows if you talk at a fourth-grade level everybody can understand you.”
.. In the February speech, Gingrich said he had no idea what kind of president Trump might be. “I do not believe anybody including Trump can tell you what a Trump presidency would be like,” Gingrich said.
.. Gingrich spoke for just over half an hour to the Republican group’s Feb. 29 meeting in Washington, devoting about 10 minutes to Trump. His comments were a mix of pointed criticism and awe at Trump’s political skills. He likened Trump’s approach to “some weird combination of the Kardashians” soliciting hearty laughs from the audience. “I mean think about it, the whole tweeting, the whole continuous noise.”
Throughout much of the talk, Gingrich praised Trump’s prowess as a politician and negotiator, noting his success on TV, in real estate development and other ventures. He called him a change agent who effectively guts his political rivals: “He’s the grizzly bear in the room. He’s not normal.”
.. Gingrich also agreed with what many Republicans during the primary process feared: “National Review’s right. Donald Trump’s not a conservative.” Instead, Gingrich characterized him as “an American nationalist” who uses a deliberately unpredictable mix of hostility against “stupidity,” liberals and political correctness.
.. In the speech, Gingrich said Trump “has found a formula which is worthy of study. I operate on the premise that when people are doing something really smart, even if I don’t like it or I don’t understand it, it’s my job to figure them out, not their job to figure me out.”