Securing the loyalty of the millions of white working-class Americans who lined up behind Trump will require that all three wings of the Republican Party — its business faction, its ideological purists and its cultural traditionalists — abandon any idea of strict adherence to core conservative principles on fiscal and social policy.
“Just as Reagan converted the G.O.P. into a conservative party, with his victory this year, Trump has converted the G.O.P. into a populist, America First party,”
.. Trade and immigration are in my view unambiguously good for the country — but new policies on these issues will have to be done in ways that are supported by the American people, not shoved down their throats by the elites. In this regard, I am a populist. The elites in both parties have not understood Trumpism and have often been contemptuous of the intellect and lifestyle of the Trump loyalists.
.. These voters have shunned Republicans because they disagree with the party’s focus on low taxes, small government, and pro-business policies. They benefit enormously from middle-class entitlement programs; their children get what they consider to be good educations from public schools and state universities. They have no problem with redistribution so long as it is focused on either people who can’t work or people who do.
.. Where movement conservatives see many social programs and the high taxes that fund them as threats to liberty, these voters see them as giving decent, hard-working people a hand up to live decent, dignified lives. Where business conservatives see free trade or immigration as helping people and increasing growth, these voters see those policies as favoring foreigners over themselves and as just another way that their bosses try to pay them less without justification.
.. newly recruited white working-class converts to Trump’s Republican Party do not consider conservative dogma on gay rights, abortion, gender identity, or traditional marriage their priority.=
.. Bannon described the goal of the “entirely new political movement” he believes Trump is leading:
It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.
.. Bannon is explicit in his identification of the enemy:
The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If we deliver, we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years.
.. This ad was part and parcel of an election that has put some of the most vocal House Republicans, including the vaunted Freedom Caucus, on notice that defying Trump’s right-populist orientation could put their political future at risk.
.. “Trump dominated — in the primary and general elections — those districts represented by Congress’s most conservative members,” Tim Alberta wrote in National Review (he is now at Politico):
They once believed they were elected to advance a narrowly ideological agenda, but Trump’s success has given them reason to question that belief.
.. Even if they support Trump nine times of ten, voting against him once could trigger a tweetstorm or the threat of a visit to their district. It’s a chilling thought for members who know that the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the House GOP leadership already want them gone.
Kevin McCarthy, the House majority leader, plans to make full use of Trump’s leverage to keep recalcitrant members of the Freedom Caucus in line.
Trump Voters Are Feeling It
In a survey conducted by Pew after the election, 96 percent of those who cast votes for Trump said they were hopeful; 74 percent said they were “proud.” They were almost unanimous in their expectation that Trump will have a successful first term.
.. “Whether or not Trump can or should attempt to reverse the decline in manufacturing jobs is not the big story here. He can’t,” Tim Duy, a professor of economics at the University of Oregon and a critic of Trump’s policies, wrote on his blog on Sunday:
The real story is that he continues to tap into the anger of his voters about being left behind. That will give him much more power than our criticisms will take away.
Validation of voter grievances, in and of itself, is a powerful political and psychological tool.
.. What Gold and others are less certain of is how long-lasting the beneficial effects of simple recognition will be in addressing the deep reservoir of white estrangement and hopelessness that survey data has revealed.
.. Among the poor, controlling for socio-demographic factors, blacks are by far the most optimistic cohort, and are close to three times more likely to be higher up on the optimism scale than poor whites.
.. Whites whom he studied, Assari reported, were less resilient, had higher suicide rates and reported higher levels of pain in their daily lives than blacks did.
.. An important approach to depression in the psychological and evolutionary literature has been to view it as an evolved response to “involuntary subordination,” to being displaced from dominance. This is exactly what happens when you have to accept a subordinate position on a status ladder because you lost your job and can’t find a comparable one.
.. The loser’s best choice, according to Gilbert’s research, is “aggression suppression” — acquiescence to involuntary subordination.
.. People may recognize that they have to behave submissively to reduce the tensions or threats between themselves and a more dominant and powerful other, and feel relief when they succeed, but they may still harbor desires for later revenge.
.. A loss of a job or other events that lower a person’s rank, status, or capacity to make an adequate living are the most malignant stressors that people experience. Most people internalize the event and hold themselves responsible. They are most prone to depression after such a loss.
.. The results can be psychologically excruciating:
The sense of vulnerability that people who lose rank experience is tremendous. They are often ashamed of the loss. They feel it is their fault. They fear that people will no longer be interested in them and that they will be alone. Loss of self-respect is the most fundamental of losses.
.. The obvious question is what will happen if, over time, Trump disappoints his buoyant supporters and revives their feelings of discontent and estrangement. How will they respond to continued economic marginalization and a failure on Trump’s part to produce sufficient numbers of good jobs at good pay?
.. If rising expectations are thwarted, the radical white nationalism of the alt-right holds the potential to become more broadly attractive. Disheartened voters can quickly become a caldron of resentment and discontent. They may seek out a leader who promises solutions even more sweeping and uncompromising than the ones Trump has proposed. There is no way to predict where anger will lead if the promises Trump made do not materialize, and if the numbers of those marginalized by hyper competition— by automation, offshoring, skill mismatch and the forces of globalization — continue to increase inexorably. Where will the blame fall then?
Global Trade War, Trump Edition
Legions of Trump supporters have legitimate grounds for discontent. As my colleague Peter Goodman wrote last week:
Trade comes with no assurances that the spoils will be shared equitably. Across much of the industrialized world, an outsize share of the winnings has been harvested by people with advanced degrees, stock options and the need for accountants. Ordinary laborers have borne the costs and suffered from joblessness and deepening economic anxiety.
.. The story of Trump’s amazingly successful movement is also the story of how Democrats turned their backs on their working-class roots and sided with the elites on the crucial economic question of our times: Who would win from globalization, and who would lose?
.. Trump’s strategy is essentially one of withdrawal from the world economy. He wants less trade and less outward foreign investment. He offers no plans for how to improve our export performance. This is protectionism, pure and simple.
Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, was more forceful:
No nation can succeed by trying to protect the past from the future. We will succeed by having the confidence to embrace competition, and leveraging our comparative strengths, which are numerous. We have the largest, most productive and most technologically advanced economy that’s ever existed on this planet. The more open the world economy is, the more we have an opportunity to leverage our many strengths.
Looked at this way, Trump’s stance is an implicit admission that he and his followers do not “believe in America” — an argument that the United States cannot compete successfully in the world arena unless protected by the imposition of high tariffs and punitive taxes on foreign production and foreign competitors.
.. Trump’s trade proposals, Reich argues,
assume the U.S. can’t compete and must erect trade barriers lest other countries flood America with better and cheaper products. That’s the opposite of believing in America.
.. Free trade is not surrender, and not something that only suckers do. In fact, just the opposite. Closing our borders would be surrender to a nonexistent enemy. It would make us poorer without bringing back the jobs.
.. Many economists share the view that Trump’s trade proposals would beruinous to the American economy, but in order to retain union support, Hillary Clinton has not been able to directly challenge Trump on these grounds.
.. “Withdrawing from global competition is a particularly terrible idea for the United States right now, since we are on the verge of introducing much more capable robots into the manufacturing process,” Daron Acemoglu, the lead author of the research paper “The Race Between Machine and Machine” and an economist at M.I.T., wrote by email.
Once the advances in robotics are achieved, Acemoglu wrote,
many of the tasks now offshored to China or other low-wage economies can be performed even more economically by robots in the United States. This won’t bring back the semi-skilled jobs that have left (and gone for good whatever Trump says he will do) but might just ensure that a whole slew of non-production jobs and supporting production jobs surrounding these tasks locate back to the United States.
.. Trump has a vastly exaggerated sense of the contribution of trade and trade policy to the decline of manufacturing in the U.S. In terms of real manufacturing output, the U.S. has actually done pretty well.
.. If the United States were to impose a 35 percent tax on Mexican imports, according to Summers, the economies of both countries would suffer:
It would be one of the best things that ever happened for Asian and European competitors.
.. Trump’s trade proposals reflect his bullying style and his technologically uninformed approach to tackling America’s competitive vulnerabilities
God Loves Donald Trump. Right?
Trump has boasted of infidelities, profited off gambling, mocked the handicapped, cheered and offered financial assistance for his supporters who fight protesters, supported abortion (until his fortuitous change of heart before the election), called for war crimes against innocent people,demonized minorities and immigrants, knowingly played upon racist fears, promoted open racists through social media, promoted conspiracy theories, and crudely treated women.
..Among religious groups, white evangelical Protestants stand out as the only one in which a majority, 53 percent, agree that society has become too soft and feminine.
.. 68 percent of Trump supporters agree that society is too soft and feminine, far more than supporters of any other candidate, Republican or Democrat.
.. Among religious groups, white evangelical Protestants voiced the highest levels of distress, 64 percent, when they find themselves around immigrants who speak little or no English,.
.. “Today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”
A solid 57 percent majority of white Americans whom P.R.R.I. surveyed agreed, but two groups stood out: Trump supporters at 81 percent and white evangelical Protestants at 68 percent.
.. Yet another area of commonality between Christian conservatives and the Trump campaign is their shared belief in the duty of the strong to lead the weak — the importance of leadership built on strength, authority and discipline.
.. Dobson’s thinking on the topic of strength and authority is dominated by a single theme:
If the strong-willed child is allowed by indulgence to develop “habits” of defiance and disrespect during his early childhood, those characteristics will haunt him and his parents for the next twenty years.
.. Dobson describes his own method for dealing with a six-year-old pet Dachshund, Siggie, who refused Dobson’s order to go to sleep in “a permanent enclosure.”
The only way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me “reason” with Mr. Freud.
What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!
.. Dobson’s story about Siggie gives us a glimpse of how the views on authority of some on the right match up with Trump’s views on what it takes to be an effective leader.
.. For years, secular progressives have said that evangelical social action in America is not about religious conviction but all about power.
This year, Moore noted, Christian leaders who in the 1990s
gave stem-winding speeches about “character” in office during the Clinton administration now minimize the spewing of profanities in campaign speeches, race-baiting and courting white supremacists, boasting of adulterous affairs, debauching public morality and justice through the casino and pornography industries.
In backing Trump, Moore concluded, “a group of high-profile old-guard evangelicals has proven these critics right.”
.. Rev. Robert Jeffress in Dallas, who has said that if offered a candidate modeled on Jesus:
I would run from that candidate as far as possible, because the Sermon on the Mount was not given as a governing principle for this nation.
In practice, Jeffress said:
Nowhere is government told to forgive those who wrong it, nowhere is government told to turn the other cheek. Government is to be a strongman to protect its citizens against evildoers. When I’m looking for somebody who’s going to deal with ISIS and exterminate ISIS, I don’t care about that candidate’s tone or vocabulary, I want the meanest, toughest, son of a you-know-what I can find, and I believe that’s biblical.
Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Dartmouth, who wrote ..
.. The religious right was never about the advancement of biblical values. The modern, politically conservative evangelical movement we know is a movement rooted in the perpetuation of racial segregation, and its affiliation with the hard-right fringes of the conservative movement in the late 1970s produced a mutant form of evangelicalism inconsistent with the best traditions of evangelicalism itself. Since then, evangelicals have embraced increasingly secular positions divorced from any biblical grounding, and supporting Donald Trump represents the logical conclusion of that tragic aberration.