The Republican nominee’s base is senior citizens, not the testosterone-addled young. How many of them are actually ready to rumble at Roger Stone’s command? If the answer is “not very many,” then you could easily imagine Trump overplaying his hand in an anti-concession speech, and inadvertently revealing that his right-wing populism is more virtual, more reality-television, than the 1930s variety.
How Donald Trump Hacked the Politics of Foreign Policy
Donald J. Trump’s foreign policy proposals, like forcing Mexico to pay for a border wall or withdrawing from NATO, have drawn unprecedented condemnations as incoherent, contradictory and unrealistic.
Yet for all the boos they elicit from experts, they draw frequent cheers at his rallies.
Scholars of American politics say this is because Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is using international issues as a medium to connect with voters’ gut-level fears and desires
.. Studies show that most voters rank foreign issues low on their list of concerns, but they do listen and use those issues as a window through which they judge candidates’ values and ideology.
.. Mr. Trump has exploited this dynamic, offering ideas that experts consider unworkable, but that tap into some voters’ desire for a strong-handed leader.
.. “People tend to choose the candidate they like first,” and then take on that candidate’s views as their own, she added. “This is the way people make sense of a complicated world.”
.. Because foreign policy requires difficult trade-offs, conventional candidates are limited in how emotionally appealing they can make their plans while keeping them workable. They also need to appease the hard-nosed policy experts or party officials those candidates rely on to get elected — and, eventually, to govern. But Mr. Trump was under no such constraints.
The result: Mr. Trump’s foreign policy is not a foreign policy at all, but rather a vessel for reaching voters on a purely ideological level.
.. Mr. Trump’s message: “NATO requires cooperation. Cooperation is something you do if you’re weak. If you’re strong, people go along with you.”
.. Mr. Trump’s worldview demands and offers “a sort of Fortress America, or perhaps a gigantic gated community, separated from transnational dangers of all kinds by a series of walls.”
.. Mr. Trump alarmed those outside his rapidly growing base with proposals to kill the families of terrorists and with praise for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, as well as for China’s 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square.
But for supporters, these and other statements suggested Mr. Trump could be trusted to impose order on the chaos they see in a rapidly changing world.
.. when Mr. Trump promises to force Mexico to pay for a giant border wall or warns that Iranian boats will be “shot out of the water” if their sailors “make gestures” at American sailors, he is communicating that he understands that his supporters feel fearful and humiliated, and that he will punish those responsible.
.. Mr. Trump has tapped into what scholars call conservation values.
People who hold those values prioritize security, conformity and tradition. They also tend to fear physical threats and people they see as outsiders, whether that means foreigners or those of different races or religions. And they often express those values as a particular set of “hawkish” foreign policy views.
.. That hawkishness is very different from that of neoconservatives like President George W. Bush or interventionist Democrats like Mrs. Clinton. It is characterized by a desire to
- shut out the world,
- ruthlessly promote American interests,
- reject cooperation and
- meet threats with overwhelming force.
.. Voters who hold conservation values are drawn to such policies not out of a sudden interest in global affairs, but as a way to express their fear of change and desire for order at home, the researchers found. They desire a strong leader who will protect “us” against an ever-more-menacing “them.”
.. Mr. Trump, by redirecting voters’ anxiety about demographic, cultural and economic changes toward foreign policy, gives his supporters a clearer set of villains
.. Supporters do not primarily hear a policy agenda, but a promise: that Mr. Trump understands their fears and will protect them.
Anti-Semitic Anti-Zionism
The movement of “Corbynistas” — an alliance of young leftist dreamers and old guard Leninists who have demolished Tony Blair’s centrist “New Labour” as comprehensively as Trump has hijacked the Republican Party — embraces an ideology. It’s anti-American and anti-Western and broadly anti-capitalist, much in the mode of Cold War Soviet sympathizers.
Trumpism, by contrast, is an anger-driven, conspiracy-fueled, scapegoat-manipulating, ideology-free movement dedicated to the elevation by any means of one man, portrayed as a savior, to the most powerful office in the world.
.. Corbyn is not really interested in power because power involves compromise and he is a self-regarding purist of the worst kind.
.. But when Corbyn and his extreme left backers engage in what the British political theorist Alan Johnson has called “anti-Semitic anti-Zionism,” something far more coherent and ideological is at work.
A cross-party parliamentary committee concluded this month that Corbyn has created a “safe space” for “those with vile attitudes towards Jewish people,” and that Labour’s passivity before anti-Semitic incidents risked “lending force to allegations that elements of the Labour movement are institutionally anti-Semitic.”
.. He has attended an event organized by a pro-Palestinian group founded by an avowed Holocaust denier, Paul Eisen. He has permitted the word “Zio” — an anti-Semitic term used by the Ku Klux Klan — to become the modish slur in Labour circles on campuses and elsewhere.
Trump’s Fans Have More to Lose Than Trump Himself
If the Republican nominee loses, the millions of Americans supporting him will feel more isolated and disillusioned than ever before.
This is what Trump has done over the last year: He’s whipped up the darkest, angriest demons in the electorate. He has not simply given people permission to indulge any racist, sexist, xenophobic, or religiously intolerant tendencies they may harbor. He has insisted—loudly—that such bigotry is only common sense and mocked anyone who refuses to see the danger presented by “the other” as a blind idiot.
.. “I feel he’s the last chance we have to establish law and order and preserve the culture I grew up in.”