Hillary Clinton’s unexpected loss, particularly in traditionally blue strongholds, has led to lots of rumination about what the Democrats must do to reclaim their political territory. Smarter marketing, smoother organization, greater outreach and fresher faces are among the most commonly cited remedies.
But there seems to be universal agreement, at least among the Democratic politicians and strategists I’ve interviewed, that the party’s actual ideas are the right ones.
- expansion of health-insurance subsidies for low- and middle-income Americans;
- investments in education and retraining;
- middle-class tax cuts; and a higher minimum wage.
.. raising the minimum wage would unfairly narrow the pay gap between diligent folks such as themselves and people who’d made worse life choices.
“That son of a b—- is making $10 an hour! I’m making $13.13. I feel like s— because he’s making almost as much as I am, and I have never been in trouble with the law and I have a clean record, I can pass a drug test,” said one participant... Americans (A) generally associate government spending with undeserving, nonworking, nonwhite people; and (B) are really bad at recognizing when they personally benefit from government programs... it’s no wonder that Trump’s promises — to re-create millions of (technologically displaced) jobs and to punish all those non-self-sufficient moochers — seem much more enticing.No American likes the idea of getting a “handout” — especially if they believe that handout is secretly being rerouted to their layabout neighbor anyway.
John Kasich: 20 Years After Reform, Welfare Is Still Broken
At the root of the challenge is a fundamental disconnect between our worker-training and welfare systems. For example, caseworkers are pushed to focus on finding jobs for those who are easiest to return back to work and to avoid those who need the most help. Those left behind often end up in “make work” jobs that may count for federal work requirements, but do absolutely nothing to help people get ahead by giving them the skills they need for meaningful employment
I Spent 5 Years With Some of Trump’s Biggest Fans. Here’s What They Won’t Tell You.
“Pipe fitters. Ditch diggers. Asphalt layers,” Sharon says. “I can’t find one that’s not for Donald Trump.”
.. 39 percent of white voters nationwide cast a ballot for President Barack Obama. That figure was 28 percent in the South, but about 11 percent in Louisiana.
.. When I asked people what politics meant to them, they often answered by telling me what they believed (“I believe in freedom”) or who they’d vote for (“I was for Ted Cruz, but now I’m voting Trump”). But running beneath such beliefs like an underwater spring was what I’ve come to think of as a deep story.
.. The deep story was a feels-as-if-it’s-true story, stripped of facts and judgments, that reflected the feelings underpinning opinions and votes. It was a story of unfairness and anxiety, stagnation and slippage—a story in which shame was the companion to need.
.. When she’d asked a boy her son’s age about his plans for the future, he answered, “I’m just going to get a [disability] check, like my mama.”
.. “If you have seizures, that’s almost a surefire way to get disability without proving an ailment,” she said.
.. Her renters, she said, had been a hard-living lot. A jealous boyfriend had murdered his girlfriend. Some men drank and beat their wives. One man had married his son’s ex-wife.
.. Ambition was good. Earning money was good. The more money you earned, the more you could give to others. Giving was good. So ambition was the key to goodness, which was the basis for pride.
.. “I got told we don’t need an assistant fire chief. A lot of people around here don’t like any public employees, apart from the police.”
.. tea party enthusiasts lived in a roaring rumor-sphere that offered answers to deep, abiding anxieties. Why did President Obama take off his wristwatch during Ramadan? Why did Walmart run out of ammunition on the third Tuesday in March? Did you know drones can detect how much money you have?
.. Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side. In fact, isn’t he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs.
.. And it points to rescue: The tea party for some, and Donald Trump for others.
.. That was totally an age discrimination thing.” At last he found a job at $10 an hour, the same wage he had earned at a summer factory union job as a college student 40 years ago. Age brought no dignity. Nor had the privilege linked to being white and male trickled down to him.
.. the one thing America needed, she felt, was a steady set of values that rewarded the good and punished the bad.
.. The rich deserve honor as makers and givers and should be rewarded with the proud fruits of their earnings, on which taxes should be drastically cut. Such cuts would require an end to many government benefits that were supporting the likes of Sharon’s trailer park renters. For her, the deep story ended there, with welfare cuts.
.. Many blue-collar white men now face the same grim economic fate long endured by blacks.
.. conservative political scientist Charles Murray traces the fate of working-age whites between 1960 and 2010. He compares the top 20 percent of them—those who have at least a bachelor’s degree and are employed as managers or professionals—with the bottom 30 percent, those who never graduated from college and are employed in blue-collar or low-level white-collar jobs.
.. While more than 90 percent of children of blue-collar families lived with both parents in 1960, by 2010, 22 percent did not.
.. How wary should a little-bit-higher-up-the-ladder white person now feel about applying for the same benefits that the little-bit-lower-down-the-ladder people had? Shaming the “takers” below had been a precious mark of higher status.
.. Trump, the King of Shame, has covertly come to the rescue. He has shamed virtually every line-cutting group in the Deep Story—women, people of color,the disabled, immigrants, refugees. But he’s hardly uttered a single bad word about unemployment insurance, food stamps, or Medicaid, or what the tea party calls “big government handouts,” for anyone—including blue-collar white men.
.. But in another stroke, Trump adds a key proviso: restrict government help to real Americans.
.. he’s created a movement much like the anti-immigrant but pro-welfare-state right-wing populism on the rise in Europe
How Roger Ailes Created Modern Conservatism
Toppled by a cascade of sexual harassment charges and said to be nearing the exits at Fox, Ailes will be remembered for undermining the dominant 20th-century model of objective journalism with his defiantly right-wing news channel. But he was equally important in transforming politics itself. Not only did he tutor presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush in the ways of media politics, but he was largely responsible for two of the signal changes in American political culture since the 1960s: the rise of television as a national force and the emergence of cultural populism as a key feature of the Republican Party.
.. In fact, apart from the presidents he served, he was arguably the single most important figure in the creation of modern conservatism. By fusing television’s power to conjure feelings of anger and resentment to an ideology of cultural populism that demonized liberal elites, Ailes set forth the methods and the message that would help conservative politicians win and maintain power for decades. That is, until Trump, who, this week in Cleveland, officially closed his hostile takeover of the party that Ailes helped build, using the very tactics Ailes had pioneered.
.. Ailes also encouraged Nixon to practice the politics of resentment that came naturally to him, creating the basic formula used by Reagan, both Bushes and countless lesser conservative politicians: playing on the public’s sense that powerful liberal were getting ahead at the expense of Middle America.
.. An emerging wisdom held that television watchers absorbed their knowledge about public affairs at a gut level, more visceral than newspaper readers, making them especially susceptible to emotional appeals, particularly of the conservative kind.
.. Ads and other forms of messaging would emphasize how spineless or elitists liberal politicians were betraying these voters on a host of values-laden issues—often racially charged ones—including crime, drugs, busing, welfare, affirmative action and national security.
.. The pinnacle of Ailes’ direct political influence came in the 1988 campaign of Vice President George Bush. When
.. Ailes, serving as Bush’s media adviser and unofficial strategist, injected anger and fight into Bush’s message and persona by prodding the candidate to go on the attack. After a weak showing in the Iowa caucuses, the effete Bush viciously assailed his main rival, Bob Dole, in the ensuing primaries, and in the fall he shamelessly smeared the cerebral Michael Dukakis, painting the Democratic nominee as soft on crime, unpatriotic and even un-American. An Ailes protégé, Larry McCarthy, developed the infamous Willie Horton ad that highlighted the case of a black inmate
.. Ailes convened focus groups to test which messages would most effectively make the case for using military force to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.
.. In 1992, while assuming no formal position in the reelection campaign, Ailes persuaded Bush to deride Bill Clinton’s patriotism, which the president did by making baseless insinuations about a trip Clinton had taken as a young man to Russia.
.. Early on, he appreciated the emotive power and influence of talk radio, including rising stars like Rush Limbaugh. In 1992, Ailes created and produced a TV show for Limbaugh—it ran until 1996
.. Limbaugh and a bevy of similar radio and TV hosts operated very much in the Ailesian vein: militant in their ideology, aggrieved in their attitudes, provocative in their rhetoric.
.. He led CNBC for a while
.. Kelly made her name by embarrassing Karl Rove on election night 2012, when he insisted, against the evidence, that Mitt Romney might yet win Ohio and that calling the election for Barack Obama was premature. Later, Kelly surprised Dick Cheney by telling him, “History has proved that you got it wrong in Iraq, sir.” Her willingness to confront Donald Trump over his record of sexist rhetoric in last summer’s Republican debate launched her to new heights of fame, embodying Fox’s bid for broader respectability
.. Given changing attitudes about women and sex, the macho and often anti-feminist conservative populism in which Ailes believed so deeply had become increasingly hard to tolerate or justify. The women accusing Ailes aren’t, for the most part, liberal, but their charges are made possible by the triumph of liberal ideas on gender equality.
.. If Republican regulars opposed Trump for his centrist deviancies, he owes his success in the primaries to the fact that he ran to the right of his rivals on the most salient issues of the campaign—immigration and terrorism. In short, he espoused a variety of the very same brand of politics that Ailes has successfully promoted, and the GOP has prospered with, since Nixon’s day:If Republican regulars opposed Trump for his centrist deviancies, he owes his success in the primaries to the fact that he ran to the right of his rivals on the most salient issues of the campaign—immigration and terrorism. In short, he espoused a variety of the very same brand of politics that Ailes has successfully promoted, and the GOP has prospered with, since Nixon’s day: the substitution of bluster for reason, the angry scapegoating of others, the blind hatred and exaggerated fear of liberals in power,
.. Trump used his own celebrity to circumvent the rules of television altogether—gaining free media by capitalizing on the endless appetite for debate, argument and talk that Ailes had done so much to popularize.
In a way, Donald Trump beat Roger Ailes at his own game. Like so many other revolutions, the conservative revolution now eats its own.