The election of President Trump has coincided with a reaction among Republican voters against open-mindedness, open borders and an open society in general — not to mention a growing hostility to cognitive elites. … Countless analyses have demonstrated that Trump won the election by combining support from traditional Republican voters […] Read more »
Aversion to difference
Last week, I examined two of the three strands of conservative thinking — aversion to government and aversion to change — which Donald Trump melded together in his successful effort to capture the White House. Here I’ll focus on the third — aversion to difference — which mostly lay dormant […] Read more »
Trump’s core voters could suffer most under GOP health bill, but they may not punish him for it
The Senate health-care bill has sharpened the central political question surrounding the 2017 Republican agenda: Will the voters who made Donald Trump president rebel? Like the House health-care bill, the Senate version would roll back Obamacare’s expansion of insurance coverage under Medicaid. While cutting Obamacare’s taxes on the rich, it […] Read more »
The End of the Left and the Right as We Knew Them
By now it has become quite clear that conservative parties in Europe and the United States have been gaining strength from white voters who have been mobilized around issues related to nationalism — resistance to open borders and to third-world immigration. In the United States, this development has been exacerbated […] Read more »
The ‘wave’ of right-wing populist sentiment is a myth
Last year’s Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump and electoral gains by right-wing populist parties in countries as diverse as Hungary, Switzerland and Denmark seem to demonstrate that right-wing populist sentiment is on the rise in affluent democracies. But in Europe, at least, that’s simply not the case. In […] Read more »
Varieties of Trumpism
… Much of Trump’s support came from voters who were reacting to value-laden cultural themes. Democrats should not, and need not, compromise our values to bring back some of these voters, but we do need to be conscious of what we say and how we say it. Understanding how to […] Read more »