Politics is dividing along crude identity lines — along race and class. Are you a native-born white or are you an outsider? Are you one of the people or one of the elites?
Politics is no longer about argument or discussion; it’s about trying to put your opponents into the box of the untouchables.
.. By his evening immigration speech he’d returned to the class and race tropes that have defined his campaign: that the American government is in the grips of a rich oligarchy that distorts everything for its benefit; that the American people are besieged by foreigners, who take their jobs and threaten their lives.
It’s not that these two ideas are completely wrong. The rich do have more influence. There are indeed some foreigners who seek to harm us. It is just that Trump (like other race and class warriors) takes these kernels of truth and grows them into a lie.
.. Research suggests that the recent surge in immigration has made America’s streets safer. That’s because foreign-born men are very unlikely to commit violent crime.
According to one study, only 2 or 3 percent of Mexican-, Guatemalan- or Salvadoran-born men without a high school degree end up incarcerated, compared with 11 percent of their American-born counterparts.
.. immigration has very little effect on native wage or unemployment levels.
That’s because immigrants flow intodifferent types of unskilled jobs. Unskilled immigrants tend to become maids, cooks and farm workers — jobs that require less English. Unskilled natives tend to become cashiers and drivers. If immigrants are driving down wages, it is mostly those of other immigrants.
.. identity politics is inherently the politics of division.
The Misery of the Mini-Trumps
In his race against Marco Rubio to become the Republican nominee for one of Florida’s two seats in the Senate, the rich, brash homebuilder Carlos Beruff could not be welding himself more tightly to Donald Trump.
A recent television ad of his attacked Rubio for not being as tough as Trump. He affirmed and then one-upped Trump’s past call for a ban on Muslim immigrants, suggesting a prohibition against anyone from the Middle East except Israel.
.. The Miami New Times crowned him “the Cuban-American Donald Trump.”
.. But it turns out that Trump’s magic, if you can call it that, resists cloning.
.. But wrapping it in a package of florid bigotry, provocative propositions, crude insults and callous language doesn’t seem to have much traction beyond Trump.
.. his extreme brand of protectionism, his call to re-examine military alliances, his threat of mass deportations — shows any sign of becoming Republican dogma the way that supply-side economics did in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s evangelism for it.
.. Trump, in contrast, “spent more money on renting arenas for his speeches than he did on payroll.”
His operation, they wrote, is “more concert tour than presidential campaign.”
Why Hasn’t the Republican Party Collapsed?
We shouldn’t be asking whether the GOP is falling apart. We ought to be wondering why it isn’t.
The parties have historically been structured to accommodate racism and racial conflict. Neither one was created with our current norms about racial equality in mind. If a new party were founded today, we might expect that it would have goals like addressing racial inequality or income inequality in a modern economy, or developing a workable immigration system. Both parties have some ideas about these things, but they’re often shoehorned into policy and ideological agendas inherited from years ago. New issues are often foisted onto coalitions
.. Geography and state representation still play a role in the American political system. But when the first conventions were held, New York had a population of about 200,000. A system developed today might do even more to represent Americans by age, gender or ethnic background
.. yoking together seemingly unrelated ideas—gun control, tax reform and health care, for example—in ways that make it impossible for any of them to move forward
.. as the Democratic coalition has become more diverse and reliant on voters who are people of color, Democratic state parties have run into some criticism for celebrating Jefferson-Jackson Day—usually an annual fundraising gala that celebrates two historic, slave-owning Democrats, hosted by a party that now prides itself on embracing racial equality.
.. The Democrats have long been a party of process. The early party included members who disagreed on slavery, westward expansion and tariffs.
.. The Republican Party, meanwhile, has long been a party of ideology, created in the 1850s with a much more specific guiding principle in mind: stopping the expansion of slavery. Ever since, that difference—one party, a pragmatic alliance; the other, an ideological one—has meant that the Republican Party is more prone to ideological fights blowing up into potential existential crises.
.. The Republican Party, meanwhile, has long been a party of ideology, created in the 1850s with a much more specific guiding principle in mind: stopping the expansion of slavery. Ever since, that difference—one party, a pragmatic alliance; the other, an ideological one—has meant that the Republican Party is more prone to ideological fights blowing up into potential existential crises.
.. In the 1890s, the party emerged from a struggle over economic policy with a populist agenda and presidential candidate—William Jennings Bryan, who would win the party’s presidential nomination for the first of three times in 1896.
.. In 1948, Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey (then running for a U.S. Senate seat) and FDR’s own successor, Harry Truman, saw the possibility of bringing together moral principles and electoral gain by making the Democrats the party of civil rights. This didn’t go over well with everyone. Civil rights drove a wedge straight through the party’s North-South coalition.
.. a group of moderate Democrats organized under the banner of the Democratic Leadership Council to promote an approach to governing that was neither liberal nor conservative, but rather a “third way.” This movement culminated with the presidency of Bill Clinton, whose support for traditionally Republican stances like welfare reform led some on the left to question what the Democratic Party stood for at all.
.. the surprise success of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign suggests some pent-up demand for a more ideologically committed Democratic Party devoted to clearer principles of social provision, income equality and a noninterventionist foreign policy.
The Political Philosophy Of Guns
Would America Really Be A Better Society Without Them?
What philosophical analysis can do is offer new perspective and argumentative resources by which a political debate such as this one might be improved from its toxic stalemate.
.. Both sides of the gun control debate know they are right. But only one side recognises it as a fundamentally philosophical dispute. The other has systematically evaded the real debate about values in favour of the faux objectivity of a statistical public health argument ..
.. The advocates of gun control need to take the political philosophy of the gun rights movement seriously and show that a society without guns is a better society not that it is a safer one... Gun control advocates rely excessively on a public health case that is not only much weaker than they believe it to be but also crowds out the kind of arguments that might actually win over their opponents. Their confidence that they are on the right side of history has blinded them to the fact that they have chosen to fight on the wrong ground. They keep harping on about guns killing people. As if guns were like cigarettes, and as if the numbers were big enough to matter... America is not 43rd in the world for life-expectancy because it kills so many people with guns, but, principally, because of the social gradient in health that follows from its shameful levels of socio-economic inequality.. the number of Americans who die in traffic accidents is now about the same as those killed by guns.. But a government cannot have the same confidence that a death removed from the gun statistics represents a life saved... Many murders presently committed with guns would still occur even if all of America’s 300 million civilian held weapons magically disappeared. Likewise for suicide... The mass killings by individual crazies that so dominate the news cycle are actually the very weakest part of the public health argument for gun control. It feels like there are a lot of them – 81 since 1982,.. The reason is that rates of violence have a lot more to do with social conditions and inequality than with particular technologies... mass killings matter not because they present a significant public health risk to our lifespans to be analysed like car accidents or cigarettes, but because they are deliberate attacks on our society to be analysed like terrorism... Mass killings are not interpersonal squabbles but deliberate attacks on the peace itself, and this is something citizens have the right to hold their government responsible for... the legitimacy of any state is its ability to provide its citizens with freedom from fear... In one political philosophy, government is there to help good citizens defend their rights and liberties for themselves. In the other, government is expected to guarantee security directly by removing the sources of fear... This is fundamentally a dispute about how citizens should relate to the state, and especially a dispute between the state as a guarantor of security (after the timid absolutism of Hobbes) or as a guarantor of liberty (after the rebellious Locke)... The gun rights movement seems to me to reflect a heroic vision of citizenship, and hence of society, that taps into an enduring strain of rugged individualism in America’s political psychology... just look at how Americans from all points on the political spectrum responded to 9/11 by demanding the federal government do whatever it took to make them feel safe again... If guns are sometimes used against society that may be a price worth paying to maintain a free society... By making citizens feel less dependent on the institutions of the state to guarantee their freedom and security, guns allow them to believe that they are in a position to bargain with the state rather than to submit, like frightened sheep, to its authority to decide what is best for them... The trouble with pragmatism as a method of politics is that solving real problems is difficult and produces many failures along the way. In contrast, campaigning for a law has a pleasing simplicity, even if it is as much use as a ban on cancer... The law and order approach that began in the 1980s and is now finally being rolled back was predicated on such a theory, a foolish one that divided the world into bad guys and good guys and assumed bad guys could only be controlled by deterrence... Gun rights introduce a new fear and distance between fellow citizens, whether they choose to arm themselves or not... Guns were supposed to protect society from threats, including from its own government. But instead they undermine its health from within, weakening civil society and leaving us unable to relate to each other except via the legalistic forms controlled by the state or else down the barrel of mutual suspicion, as in a spaghetti Western. The great irony of gun rights is that they actually make citizens more dependent on the state and less able to resist it because we lose the sense of solidarity that civilian society so readily supports.. Rather it is the relations between citizens that suffer most in an armed society. This is a harm that at least a large proportion of believers in gun rights could be persuaded to take seriously, since it undermines the very integrity and resilience of society, and thus its independence of government, that is central to their political philosophy.