Instead, the demographic transformation of America has given us a Democratic Party more attuned to racial injustice or committed to ethnic patronage (depending on your point of view) than ever, and a Republican Party that has exploited white racism or ridden a white backlash against ethnic patronage (again, depending on your perspective) on its way to control of the House, the Senate and the White House.
.. At the other end you have the fears of those white Trump voters who feel like the new liberalism offers affirmative action for everyone but them, allowing immigrants and minorities to “cut the line” (to borrow an image from Arlie Russell Hochschild’s recent study of working-class Republicans) and claim an American dream that they themselves can no longer reach.
.. Abolish racial preferences in college admissions, phase out preferences in government hiring and contracting, eliminate the disparate-impact standard in the private sector, and allow state-sanctioned discrimination only on the basis of socioeconomic status, if at all. Then at the same time, create a reparations program — the Frederick Douglass Fund, let’s call it — that pays out exclusively, directly and one time only to the proven descendants of American slaves.
Things look bleak for liberals now. But they’ll beat Trump in the end.
He and his movement will fade, and the values and priorities of the left will eventually triumph.
But fears that Trump will set back the left’s agenda dangerously and irreparably are not well founded. Core advances can’t be undone. Although Trump could do some real temporary damage, he and his movement will fade, and the values and priorities of the left will eventually triumph.
.. Take the standard question about whether immigration levels should increase, decrease or stay the same. The 38 percent of people who say “decrease” is about as low as it ever has been since Gallup started tracking the question in the 1960s. The current number represents a massive drop, of about 30 points, since the early 1990s, when Pat Buchanan first raised his pitchfork high at the Republican National Convention. There has also been a considerable change in views about whether immigration is a good or bad thing for America — and it’s positive, not negative, change, even if one confines the data to white Americans. According to Gallup, the “good thing” response by whites was as low as 51 percent in the early 2000s but has been around 70 percent in the past two years...Nor has there been any kind of spike in negative racial attitudes in recent years — in fact, according to the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey , such attitudes were far more prevalent in the early 1990s than they are today, including among white Democrats and Republicans. This is true even as perceptions of the quality of race relations have been dimming, thanks primarily to conflict around police shootings and to a tiny minority of genuine haters whose rhetoric and actions have been widely covered. But the underlying trend toward racial liberalism continues... And he can’t hold back the one true inevitability in demographic change: the replacement of older generations by newer ones... Another locus of disquiet, if not hysteria, on the left is the environment. But consider this: In 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire; in 1979, when Obama was attending college in Los Angeles and remembers constant smog, there were 234 days when the city exceeded federal ozone standards. Our water and air are now orders of magnitude cleaner than they were back then... World investments in clean energy, chiefly wind and solar, have reached levels that are double those for fossil fuel. Renewables now provide half of all new electric capacity around the world. The cost of solar has fallen to 1/150th of its 1970s level, and the amount of installed solar capacity has increased a staggering 115,000 times... Capitalism is certainly capable of performing much better — but Trump is not the man to make that happen. All he’s going to succeed in doing is blowing up one of the main roadblocks to better economic performance: the conservative Republican anti-government, quasi-libertarian consensus around economic policy... The dominant ideology in the United States is one that combines “symbolic conservatism” (honoring tradition, distrusting novelty, embracing the conservative label) with “operational liberalism” (wanting government to take more action in a wide variety of areas)... Most Americans like most government programs. Most of the time, on average, we want government to do more and spend more.. With all due respect, Sir, you’re the man that talked about the death panel. We’re going to create one great big death panel in this country if people can’t afford to get insurance.”.. There will probably be tax cuts for the rich and underfunding of important social programs. There will be more harassment of immigrants and no progress on comprehensive immigration reform. But its ability to remake America in the libertarian image (privatize Social Security! voucherize Medicare!) envisioned by Paul Ryan is distinctly limited
You Don’t Have to Think Trump Is an Authoritarian to Worry about His Presidency
there are three types of conservative at present: “Trumpers,” who believe that “Trump has made good appointments” and is “working to keep campaign promises” and should therefore “be vigorously defended from criticism”; anti-Trumpers, whose “argument is that despite the areas of policy agreement between conservatives and Trump, Trump’s characterological problems present” a sufficiently large peril as to make realistic the prospect that he will “[lose] the republic”; and “anti-anti-Trumpers,” who are “reluctant to criticize Trump, but who aren’t particularly interested in defending him, directly.”
.. there are three types of conservative at present: “Trumpers,” who believe that “Trump has made good appointments” and is “working to keep campaign promises” and should therefore “be vigorously defended from criticism”; anti-Trumpers, whose “argument is that despite the areas of policy agreement between conservatives and Trump, Trump’s characterological problems present” a sufficiently large peril as to make realistic the prospect that he will “[lose] the republic”; and “anti-anti-Trumpers,” who are “reluctant to criticize Trump, but who aren’t particularly interested in defending him, directly.”
.. I was concerned that Trump lacks character and knowledge; that he is a habitual liar; that he has an embarrassing tendency to lash out verbally at anyone he dislikes; and that, on balance, he might end up ruining the party he was conscripted to lead. In describing him, I used the word “authoritarian” on more than one occasion, but my intent in so doing was to warn against Trump’s approach, not to hype the likelihood of his rendering America a tyranny.
I was concerned that Trump lacks character and knowledge; that he is a habitual liar; that he has an embarrassing tendency to lash out verbally at anyone he dislikes; and that, on balance, he might end up ruining the party he was conscripted to lead. In describing him, I used the word “authoritarian” on more than one occasion, but my intent in so doing was to warn against Trump’s approach, not to hype the likelihood of his rendering America a tyranny.
.. Throughout his life, Wilson was openly hostile to the Constitution, had nothing but loathing for the separation of powers, described as “nonsense” the “inalienable rights of the individual,” and submitted that the United States should move “beyond the Declaration of Independence.”
.. As president, he championed the Espionage and Sedition Acts (under which it was a crime to criticize America’s efforts in World War I, to use “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” against the federal government, and to mail opinions critical of the state through the U.S. Postal Service); had tens of thousands of Americans arrested and prosecuted — including after the war (see: Palmer Raids); and, in 1915, uttered these incredible words during his State of the Union address:
I am sorry to say that the gravest threats against our national peace and safety have been uttered within our own borders. There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue. Their number is not great as compared with the whole number of those sturdy hosts by which our nation has been enriched in recent generations out of virile foreign stock; but it is great enough to have brought deep disgrace upon us and to have made it necessary that we should promptly make use of processes of law by which we may be purged of their corrupt distempers.
Wilson also took it upon himself to re-segregate Washington, D.C., thereby reversing one of the few civil-rights victories of the post-bellum world.
.. That much of what Roosevelt did was popular is neither here nor there; properly understood, authoritarianism is structural, not substantive. Indeed, as David Frum warns in the essay Last cites, “many of the worst and most subversive things Trump will do will be highly popular.”
In fact, I concluded that there can be no such list, because many of the worrisome things that an antidemocratic president might do look just like things that other presidents have done. Use presidential power to bully corporations? Truman and Kennedy did that. Distort or exaggerate facts to initiate or escalate a war? Johnson and George W. Bush did that. Lie point-blank to the public? Eisenhower did that. Defy orders from the Supreme Court? Lincoln did that. Suspend habeas corpus? Lincoln did that, too. Spy on American activists? Kennedy and Johnson did that. Start wars at will, without congressional approval? Truman did that. Censor “disloyal” speech and fire “disloyal” civil servants? Wilson did that. Incarcerate U.S. citizens of foreign extraction? Franklin D. Roosevelt did that. Use shady schemes to circumvent congressional strictures? Reagan did that. Preempt Justice Department prosecutors? Obama did that. Assert sweeping powers to lock people up without trial or judicial review? George W. Bush did that. Declare an open-ended national emergency? Bush did that, and Obama continued it. Use regulatory authority aggressively and, according to the courts, sometimes illegally? Obama did that. Kill a U.S. citizen abroad? Obama did that, too. Grant favors to political friends, and make mischief for political enemies? All presidents do that.
.. But whatever one’s preference, we should acknowledge that all of these things happened, and that they all seemed like crises at the time. Moreover, we should try to avoid the worst form of arrogant hindsight, under which we conclude that because we’re okay now we must never have been under threat in the first place. “All’s well that ends well”
University of Chicago: Why Milo Scares Students, and Faculty Even More
Milo professes himself a Catholic and wears a pair of gold crosses around his neck. He speaks about the importance of Christianity for the values of Western civilization. As he put it in one interview: “[Western civilization] has created a religion in which love and self-sacrifice and giving are the highest possible virtues… That’s a good thing… But when you remove discipline and sacrifice from religion you get a cult.”
.. None of these issues, most especially the civilizational roots of culture and virtue in religious faith, are typically addressed in modern college education in America. Rather, they are, for the most part, purposefully avoided.
.. while discussion of Christian theology may no longer be at the center of university education, religion still is—we just don’t call it that anymore.
.. Their minds are already open—and being filled with what they are given in place of religion: multiculturalism; race, class, gender; the purportedly secular ideals of socialism and Marxism. Particularly for those students, and faculty, who have little to no religious education outside of school, these ideals have become their faith. This is why students and faculty find Milo so threatening. He not only challenges them to examine beliefs they have never been taught to question.