Trump’s Cult of Animosity Shows No Sign of Letting Up

In 2016, Donald Trump recruited voters with the highest levels of animosity toward African Americans, assembling a “schadenfreude” electorate — voters who take pleasure in making the opposition suffer — that continues to dominate the Republican Party, even in the aftermath of the Trump presidency. With all his histrionics and […] Read more »

The Cruel Logic of the Republican Party, Before and After Trump

Donald Trump has claimed credit for any number of things he benefited from but did not create, and the Republican Party’s reigning ideology is one of them: a politics of cruelty and exclusion that strategically exploits vulnerable Americans by portraying them as an existential threat, against whom acts of barbarism […] Read more »

Senate’s Riot Report Inadequate

It definitely qualifies as a riot although there is a big partisan split over whether you can call it an insurrection. But few say what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th was a legitimate protest, according to the Monmouth University Poll. The poll also finds there is not […] Read more »

Trumpism Without Borders

America is embedded in a world that is troubled by insidious parallel variants of the same structural problems — anti-immigrant fervor, political tribalism, racism, ethnic tension, authoritarianism and inequality — that led to a right-wing takeover of the federal government by Donald Trump. The peculiarly American characteristics of the Trump […] Read more »

In explaining the rise of populism, it’s not economic anxiety vs. identity politics – it’s both

Deindustrialization has decimated the blue-collar workforce in the US. … Our research examines the effects of deindustrialization on electoral politics. Specifically, we explore how deindustrialization affected voting in three US presidential elections (2008-2016), using county-level data which captures localized manufacturing job losses. Our argument is that responses to what we […] Read more »

The racist ‘replacement theory’ has it all backward

Far right White supremacist groups, conservative media personalities and now Republicans in Congress are trying to inflame nativist feelings among conservative Whites by warning that liberals want immigrants to “replace” native-born Americans in the nation’s culture and electorate. But that racist “replacement theory” inverts the real consequence of immigration for […] Read more »