Trump: Putting Out Fires, or Starting Them?

Republicans don’t face a particularly heavy lift at their national convention this week convincing Americans that when it comes to security, the house is on fire. The harder test may be convincing them that Donald Trump is more fireman than arsonist.

.. “I think they will do a great job [this week] of reinforcing all the scary stuff,” says the long-time GOP strategist Mike Murphy, a frequent Trump critic. “The question is how they make Trump the answer.

.. Trump suggested to O’Reilly that if elected he would direct the attorney general to investigate the BLM movement. “I have seen them marching down the street essentially calling death to the police,” Trump said. “And I think we’re going to have to look into that.”

.. Indeed, analysts in both parties believe one of the principal hurdles Trump faces is the sense among many voters that at a time when the seams appear to be loosening in America, he would intensify racial, ethnic, and cultural divisions.

.. “One of the big fears about Trump is that he will make a divided country even more divided. And that he exacerbates the divisions for his own political benefit.”

 

What, Congressman Steve King Asks, Have Nonwhites Done for Civilization?

“If you’re really optimistic, you can say this was the last time that old white people would command the Republican Party’s attention, its platform, its public face,” Charles P. Pierce, a writer at large at Esquire magazine, said during the panel discussion.

.. In response, Mr. King said: “This whole ‘old white people’ business does get a little tired, Charlie. I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about? Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”

“Than white people?” Mr. Hayes asked.

Mr. King responded: “Than Western civilization itself that’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America, and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That’s all of Western civilization.”

.. Rep. Steve King shouldn’t be allowed to use any inventions created by people who are not white. No elevators, no microphones, no pacemakers.

A Cure for Trumpism

The case for a conservative politics that stresses the national interest abroad and national solidarity at home.

.. We didn’t see Trump’s apotheosis coming. But in our 2008 book, “Grand New Party,” we pointed out that despite its “party of the rich” reputation, the Republican Party increasingly depended on mostly white working-class support, even as its policy agenda was increasingly unresponsive to working-class voters’ problems and concerns.

 .. America’s wars are disproportionately fought by volunteers from downscale Red America
.. So what should the Republican Party offer them instead? The best answer is a conservative politics that stresses the national interest abroad and national solidarity at home.
.. With the exception of Rand Paul and the partial exception of Ted Cruz, the consensus critique of President Obama from not-Trump Republicans often seemed to be that he should have kept more troops in Iraq and kept more troops in Afghanistan and sent more troops to Libya and intervened in Syria andsent more arms to Ukraine and expanded NATO’s presence in the Baltics and been more willing to bomb Iran and …
.. And the ease with which Trump crushed Jeb Bush, in particular, suggests that it will continue to resonate until Republican leaders become more selective in their hawkishness, more comfortable with five simple words: Invading Iraq was a mistake.
.. But when you dig into survey data, immigration skepticism seems to be rooted as much in concerns about how quickly immigrants assimilate, whether they rely on welfare programs and whether they compete for American jobs as it is in racial or cultural anxiety.
.. should explicitly try to attract immigrants who will be in a strong position to provide for their families in a difficult economic environment. It should encourage a market in which employers have to compete more for less-skilled labor, to slow the alarming retreat from paying work among native-born working-class men.
.. Nothing unites elite conservatives more than their support for bringing entitlement spending under control. But by frequently insisting that he’d never cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, and basically endorsing universal health care, Trump has put himself on the side of millions of grass-roots Republicans.
.. The party will still back tax cuts for the middle class and revenue-neutral tax reforms. But there should be no new income tax cuts for households earning $250,000 or more.
.. A politics that stresses national solidarity isn’t just the best way to keep Trump voters from tearing down the party’s tent. It’s also the most plausible path up from white identity politics to a one-nation, pan-ethnic conservatism.
.. Some liberals believe that this kind of shift is basically impossible — that racism and right-wing politics are so deeply intertwined that any Republican populism will just end up defending welfare for white people, that any “immigration in the national interest” proposals will descend into “Mexican rapists” one-liners on the campaign trail.
 Sadly, Donald Trump has offered powerful evidence for the liberals’ perspective. But if the Republican Party hopes to recover from his destructive rise, it has no alternative except to try to prove them wrong.

When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism

And how moral psychology can help explain and reduce tensions between the two.

 .. Globalization and authoritarianism are both essential parts of the story, but in this essay I will put them together in a new way.
..I’ll show how globalization and rising prosperity have changed the values and behavior of the urban elite, leading them to talk and act in ways that unwittingly activate authoritarian tendencies in a subset of the nationalists. I’ll show why immigration has been so central in nearly all right-wing populist movements. It’s not just the spark, it’s the explosive material, and those who dismiss anti-immigrant sentiment as mere racism have missed several important aspects of moral psychology related to the general human need to live in a stable and coherent moral order.
.. first, as they industrialize, they move away from “traditional values” in which religion, ritual, and deference to authorities are important, and toward “secular rational” values that are more open to change, progress, and social engineering based on rational considerations.
.. Second, as they grow wealthier and more citizens move into the service sector, nations move away from “survival values” emphasizing the economic and physical security found in one’s family, tribe, and other parochial groups, toward “self-expression” or “emancipative values” that emphasize individual rights and protections—not just for oneself, but as a matter of principle, for everyone.
.. the existentially stressed state of mind is the source of discrimination and hostility against out-groups.
.. The word “cosmopolitan” comes from Greek roots meaning, literally, “citizen of the world.” Cosmopolitans embrace diversity and welcome immigration, often turning those topics into litmus tests for moral respectability… Monbiot’s claim that patriotism is indistinguishable from racism illustrates the universalism that has characterized elements of the globalist Left in many Western nations for several decades.

.. But as many defenders of patriotism have pointed out, you love your spouse because she or he is yours, not because you think your spouse is superior to all others. Nationalists feel a bond with their country, and they believe that this bond imposes moral obligations both ways

.. The trick, from this point of view, is figuring out how to balance reasonable concerns about the integrity of one’s own community with the obligation to welcome strangers, particularly strangers in dire need.

.. But the globalists are concentrated in the capital cities, commercial hubs, and university towns

.. On closer inspection, racism usually turns out to be deeply bound up with moral concerns. (I use the term “moral” here in a purely descriptive sense to mean concerns that seem—for the people we are discussing—to be matters of good and evil

.. Her core finding is that authoritarianism is not a stable personality trait. It is rather a psychological predisposition to become intolerant when the person perceives a certain kind of threat. It’s as though some people have a button on their foreheads, and when the button is pushed, they suddenly become intensely focused on defending their in-group, kicking out foreigners and non-conformists, and stamping out dissent within the group. At those times they are more attracted to strongmen and the use of force. At other times, when they perceive no such threat, they are not unusually intolerant. So the key is to understand what pushes that button.

.. So authoritarians are not being selfish. They are not trying to protect their wallets or even their families. They are trying to protect their group or society. Some authoritarians see their race or bloodline as the thing to be protected, and these people make up the deeply racist subset of right-wing populist movements

.. But more typically, in modern Europe and America, it is the nation and its culture that nationalists want to preserve.

.. When they read that Americans are changing in ways that make them more similar to each other, authoritarians were no more racist and intolerant than others. But when Stenner gave them a news story suggesting that Americans are becoming more morally diverse, the button got pushed, the “authoritarian dynamic” kicked in, and they became more racist and intolerant.
.. Status quo conservatives are not natural allies of authoritarians, who often favor radical change and are willing to take big risks to implement untested policies.
.. Muslims don’t just observe different customs in their private lives; they often request and receive accommodations in law and policy from their host countries, particularly in matters related to gender.
.. But as soon as you speak up to voice those concerns, globalists will scorn you as a racist and a rube. When the globalists—even those who run the center-right parties in your country—come down on you like that, where can you turn? The answer, increasingly, is to the far right-wing nationalist parties in Europe, and to Donald Trump
.. She contrasts her theory with those who see an unstoppable tide of history moving away from traditions and “toward greater respect for individual freedom and difference,” and who expect people to continue evolving “into more perfect liberal democratic citizens.“ She does not say which theorists she has in mind, but Welzel and his World Values Survey collaborators, as well as Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, seem to be likely candidates.
.. The kind of intolerance that springs from aberrant individual psychology, rather than the disinterested absorption of pervasive cultural norms, is bound to be more passionate and irrational, less predictable, less amenable to persuasion, and more aggravated than educated by the cultural promotion of tolerance [emphasis added].
.. First and foremost: Think carefully about the way your country handles immigration and try to manage it in a way that is less likely to provoke an authoritarian reaction. Pay attention to three key variables: the percentage of foreign-born residents at any given time, the degree of moral difference of each incoming group, and the degree of assimilation being achieved by each group’s children.
.. When immigrants seem eager to embrace the language, values, and customs of their new land, it affirms nationalists’ sense of pride that their nation is good, valuable, and attractive to foreigners.
.. But whenever a country has historically high levels of immigration, from countries with very different moralities, and without a strong and successful assimilationist program, it is virtually certain that there will be an authoritarian counter-reaction, and you can expect many status quo conservatives to support it.
.. we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness…. Ultimately, nothing inspires greater tolerance from the intolerant than an abundance of common and unifying beliefs, practices, rituals, institutions, and processes.
.. nothing is more certain to provoke increased expression of their latent predispositions than the likes of “multicultural education,” bilingual policies, and nonassimilation.
.. globalists could easily speak, act, and legislate in ways that drain passions and votes away from nationalist parties, but this would require some deep rethinking about the value of national identities and cohesive moral communities. It would require abandoning the multicultural approach to immigration and embracing assimilation.