… Turnout, fake news, voter suppression, emails and a hundred other things also mattered. But Donald Trump succeeded in eliciting support from a large minority of Americans, and it’s worth understanding why. … To say this election was just about the economy or culture though is to miss its broader […] Read more »
Richard Rorty’s 1998 Book Suggested Election 2016 Was Coming
Three days after the presidential election, an astute law professor tweeted a picture of three paragraphs, very slightly condensed, from Richard Rorty’s “Achieving Our Country,” published in 1998. It was retweeted thousands of times, generating a run on the book — its ranking soared on Amazon and by day’s end […] Read more »
The educational rift in the 2016 election
A political cleavage created by disparities in educational attainment has emerged among voters across the democratic West. In this year’s presidential election, Donald Trump attracted a large share of the vote from whites without a college degree, receiving 72 percent of the white non-college male vote and 62 percent of […] Read more »
Is the Slide Into Tribal Politics Inevitable?
Donald J. Trump’s victory could well push the American party system toward a clash between an overwhelmingly white ethnic party and a cosmopolitan coalition of minority groups and college-educated whites. … Mr. Trump’s campaign may set in motion a process that reorients American politics toward the cosmopolitanism versus nationalism divide […] Read more »
Trump’s coalition won the demographic battle. It’ll still lose the war.
Here’s one way to think about the 2016 election. We are witnessing a great race in this country between demographic and economic change that’s driving a new America, and reaction to those changes. On November 8, with a tremendous burst of speed, reaction to change caught up with change and […] Read more »
Trump and Brexit: why it’s again NOT the economy, stupid
For months, commentators have flocked to diagnose the ills that have supposedly propelled Trump’s support, from the Republican primaries until now. As in Britain, many have settled on a ‘left behind’ narrative – that it is the poor white working-class losers from globalization that have put Trump over the top. […] Read more »